Valentine’s Day: French Grocery Shoppers Prefer Romantic Meals Over Flowers

In the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, we decided to take a closer look at digital grocery sales in one of the most romantic countries in the world: France. As it turns out, the way to the hearts of the French is through fine cuisine, as romantic dinners for two both dominated in click rates and drove the highest revenue.

We analyzed how visitors behaved when browsing common Valentine’s Day products including flowers, chocolates, champagne and dinners for two.

Leading the pack, the romantic dinner category yielded a click rate of 5.7% (versus only 1.96% for flowers), suggesting many couples across France are planning to stay in on Valentine’s Day and celebrate with a home-cooked feast.

A close second was the Champagne category, which drove at 4.18% click rate. And yet despite driving more clicks than the chocolates category, bubbles generated 60% less revenue than sweet treats, suggesting lovers across the country will be skipping straight to dessert and perhaps avoiding a hangover this year.

If you’re interested in all things Valentine, check out our gifting report.

France’s Answer To Black Friday Drives Increase In Mobile Traffic

In spring 2018, six French eCommerce brands launched their own riposte to Black Friday — the one-day retail extravaganza that kicks off the US holiday shopping season. More than 200 brands took part in the first ever Les French Days, a five-day event designed to boost sales during the post-winter/pre-summer sales lull. Building on the success of the first event, retailers decided to repeat the operation this fall, slashing prices on thousands of items between September 28 and October 1.

ContentSquare analyzed 68 million user sessions before and during this latest round of Les French Days, to understand the impact of the event on digital consumer behavior. We also compared these findings to our analysis of 29 million user sessions captured just before and during Black Friday 2017 — a record-breaking day for US eCommerce.

Impact of eCommerce sales events on mobile traffic

The majority of retail traffic during this latest iteration of Les French Days came from mobile, with the device accounting for 48% of all digital traffic from 09/28 to 10/01 — a 6% increase from the period immediately preceding the sales. This pushed desktop into second place, with traffic from the device dropping from 48% to 45%. Tablet traffic remained constant at 6% throughout the event.

While the increase to mobile traffic during Black Friday 2017 was noticeably smaller (only 2.44%), the trend does support the argument that sales campaigns encourage more on-the-go shopping. By streamlining their mobile UX, brands can capitalize on the sense of urgency generated by major seasonal sales campaigns.

Conversion rates spike during Black Friday sales events

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Black Friday and its new French sister event are a tonic for conversion rates. In 2017, Black Friday triggered an impressive 28.57% increase in mobile conversion rates and a 44.44% CVR increase on desktop. Not to be completely outdone, Les French Days led to a 19.15% conversion rate increase on desktop and more timid 6.5% boost to mobile CVR.

Seasonal sales events attract a more committed consumer, with reduced bounce rates observed across all devices. The biggest drop is attributed to Les French Days, which result in 9.56% fewer bounces on desktop.

Les French Days also get the medal for the highest increase in page views, with desktop users viewing on average 16.54% more pages than before the event. Mobile visitors view 12.56% more pages during the same period, proving that consumers on all devices are keen to engage with the new sales content. Black Friday saw its biggest page view increase on mobile, with users viewing 9.37% more pages during the weekend event. In fact, the only decrease observed when it comes to content consumption is a 4.09% drop in the average session time of mobile shoppers browsing les French deals.

Data shows that seasonal sales increase thrifty consumers’ willingness to engage with promotional content while on the go. During the sales periods, retailers have their customers’ attention — analyzing navigation patterns to pinpoint where users hesitate, or abandon their navigation is key to developing successful buyer journeys. Intuitive paths that get customers from point A to B in fewer screens, shorter forms and streamlined checkouts — there is much retailers can do to keep mobile users engaged all the way to conversion.

Look out for our Black Friday coverage!

Celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day with a Lot More than Just Beer – gb

Saint Patrick’s Day is a holiday known for indulging and sharing alcohol among friends. Knowing this, we set out to capture what the age of the internet meant for Americans celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day this year, and how digital experiences would be influenced by it. Our assumption was that online shoppers would be purchasing a lot more than just beer and Irish whiskey. The actual analysis did not disappoint. Here are the nuggets of data we found:

Curious to see who are making these purchases and for who? Check out these data-packed charts below!

Men vs Women:

Men are 38% more likely to make an intoxicated online purchase this year than women.

Age Group Breakdown

Millennials (21-34) are more likely to make an online drunk purchase this Saint Patrick’s Day.

Who will people shop for in this Saint Patrick’s Day?

People are most likely to shop for themselves during Saint Patrick’s Day.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Which country is the most romantic: US, UK or France?

Love is in the air and on the shelves of every drugstore across the US. Online retailers are also poised for a little customer love this week, as lovers everywhere rush to order flowers, chocolates and other gifts for their significant other.

Curious to find out which country leads the way when it comes to romance, our data experts in France, the UK and the USA analyzed the digital behavior of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen to settle the debate once and for all.

If you think you know who spends the most on their sweetheart and who converts the most for love, take our Valentine’s Faceoff quiz!

 

Equipping Businesses for the Age of Digital Shopping – es

The decline of brick-and-mortar stores in favor of digital shopping platforms is inspiring businesses everywhere to improve their customers’ online experience.

Credit Suisse estimates that there could be more than 8,640 store closures this year, breaking the 2008 record of approximately 6,200 store closures. Meanwhile, the US Census Bureau has recorded a 0.8% increase in consumer spending in November 2017 (a 5.8% hike from the previous year), showing that spending is not the factor.

According to McKinsey & Company, “digital’s share of total retail sales in the United States has been growing by about 15% annually over the past 5-years.” For mobile channels, the growth is +25% in 2017 alone. Today, 60% of Americans have smartphones, and 80% of them shop with their device.

Companies that want to capitalize on this shift need to consider the following 4 trends as they prepare for the future:

1: Changing Face of the Consumer

Meet Generation Z, the first generation of digital natives. Born into a world of smartphones and streaming, they have very different needs than their forebears.

2: New Patterns of Personal Consumption

Customer expectations are changing fast and often. Today’s shoppers are looking to fit shopping around their busy lives – not the other way round.

3: Technological Advancements

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and increasingly sophisticated analytics solutions are revolutionizing the landscape of online business.

4: Structural Industry Shifts

The recent Amazon takeover of Whole Foods is just one example of how businesses are embracing the digital revolution, and shifting their focus to online.

DIGITAL USER EXPERIENCE (UX) PLAYS A KEY ROLE IN THE ONGOING CHANGES TO THE CULTURE OF HOW PEOPLE SHOP.

All pointing to the same conclusion: that digital User Experience (UX) plays a key role in the ongoing changes to the culture of how people shop.

In fact, it has widely been reported that UX is the new salesperson. In the past, the consumer would enter a store, and be greeted and advised by a sales assistant. Based on this interaction, the salesperson would assess the customer’s needs and goals, and adapt the experience accordingly. Today’s online customer expects that same level of experience, hence the development of AI and bots to achieve personalized, more human customer journeys.

But personalizing journeys implies knowing your customer inside out. Enter digital experience analytics. These allow you to measure and compare traffic and engagement from one country to another, one device to another, taking into account factors like time of day, mood, reason for visiting your site, and source of origin (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc), to name a few. With behavioral data in their arsenal, digital teams are now able to understand why and how prospects use their platforms, and can optimize their sites accordingly.

And with data-driven insights into the real behavior of their digital customers, companies can identify pain points on their platforms, prioritize optimization efforts, and in turn achieve real conversion growth.

Marcus Magarian is a Business Developer in ContentSquare. Reach out to talk about how behavioral data can help your business prepare for the future of digital commerce: marcus@contentsquare.com

UX Spotlight: Visualizing shopping progress – Leading customers through the browsing jungle

In the UX Spotlight series, I post weekly on UX features that impressed me online, and are great examples and inspiration for anyone looking to enhance their digital user experience.

Shopping fatigue. We’ve all had it, whether scrounging through bargain basement bins, hitting one more main street shop or clicking on page 17 of blue sweater search results, seemingly endless choices can be a tiring prospect even as it is a freeing one.

As increasingly savvy online shoppers’ tastes evolve, eCommerce merchants must expand their selections to meet every need. How can they also keep customers focused and help them not feel overwhelmed by the sea of options?

This week, I spotlight Ann Taylor for their simple but seamless, genius solution!

The UX element:

Once a category is selected on the Ann Taylor homepage and a customer is browsing products, a meter appears on the right side of the screen with a number of total items available for those search or category parameters and a circle shaded in with the portion of those items already viewed.

As a customer scrolls through the items, the circle fills more, easily giving customers a frame of reference for how many of the available products they’ve already seen.

 

The Impact:

Ann Taylor enables endless scroll while still giving customers a sense of their progress through the items. This knowledge also gives shoppers the feeling that they’re in control of their experience, rather than just blindly trying to get to the end.

Most commonly, online clothing retailers offer multiple pages of results (sometimes dozens or more), which users must load individually when they work through a page. This requires multiple reloads of the screen and can frustrate users, especially when they are on mobile, or when it is easy to forget what page they are on – and sadly, many retailers do not make a customer’s current page clear at all!

The Takeaway:

With endless scroll, new items load as soon as all the current items are viewed, and with a decent internet connection this can be seamless indeed. The dark side of the endless scroll is that typically, customers lose all sense of how far along they are in the search results. Sometimes, customers are even left wondering if their search could go on forever, or how many hours they’d have to keep going to see all the options. A progress indicator like this allows shoppers to enjoy the benefits of endless scroll while still safe in the knowledge that it will not, in fact, be endless. Customers are now in control of their own shopping experience, rather than feeling that they are being led along indefinitely.

 

SINCE JANUARY 2017, MOBILE TRAFFIC TO ECOMMERCE SITES HAS INCREASEDBY 11%,BUT SALES FROM MOBILE HAVE ONLY SEEN A 3% BOOST.

This could be especially important for mobile users, who already make up 50% of US digital commerce revenues, and who are twice as likely to scroll down an entire page than desktop users. Give these scrollers a road map! Since January 2017, mobile traffic to eCommerce sites has increased by 11%, but sales from mobile have only seen a 3% boost. This means there is enormous opportunity here to tap into this traffic by perfecting the mobile customer journey with UX elements that empower mobile shoppers to be more productive.

For many shoppers, there is a desire to see all the possibilities before honing in on a few promising finalists. Such a progress bar can ease shoppers like this through the customer journey by letting them know how far along they are, helping them rest at ease knowing that they’ve done a thorough survey of their choices first.

Besides, everybody loves that feeling of competitive achievement when you finish a progress bar, right? Give your shoppers a pat on the back for seeing all there is to see!

It’s amazing how something so small can have such an important impact on your customer journey. Have you found other ways of setting up signposts for your shoppers?

I am always on the lookout for UX innovation. If you come across a digital experience that stands out, please send it over to pola.zen@contentsquare.com