Holiday Shoppers Spend 130% More in This Month Than Any Other

You know the old saying "the early bird catches the worm?" Of course you do, what am I saying. Well when it comes to holiday shoppers it appears, based on research, that "the early retailer catches the revenue."

Ok that's a horrible play on words, forgive me - but the fact still remains that according to research conducted by Edison Research, in partnership with the Oracle Marketing Cloud, revealed that the early retailer does indeed catch the revenue. We gift-wrapped all the key findings of the research in an eBook entitled Turning 2014's Holiday Trends into 2015 Revenue.

As the title implies we surveyed and studied how holiday shoppers behaved last year including looking at what they said they would do vs. what they actually did.

Money Matters:The Early Retailer Catches the Revenue

The chart below clearly indicates that the time of the year affects the amount of money consumers spend on their holiday shopping— in a big way. For our research we broke shoppers down into three distinct categories:

1. Those who had the bulk of their shopping completed by October.
2. Those who had the bulk of shopping completed by November—which includes Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
3. Those who did the bulk of their shopping in December.

As you can see those completed the bulk of their shopping done in October, they spent significantly more money than those who waited 'til November or December.

The lesson here for retailers: It’s never too early to start holiday planning—be it planning or execution. Your holiday planning should already be underway at this point and you should be ready to execute by September - AKA next month. In other words if you're a retail marketer you better be primed and ready to execute your holiday marketing plans in less than one month.

There's More Where That Came From

The above is just one finding from our research, which consisted of both qualitative AND quantitative aspects. We have lots more to gift you. Download Turning 2014's Holiday Trends into 2015 Revenue today. It's no fruitcake or ugly sweater but we think you'll like it just the same.