At NetElixir, we seek to humanize every click. To do that, it helps to have a face to put to your customers, to better understand their unique motivations, preferences, and interests that influence their shopping decisions. Enter FACES, our annual customer insights report that introduces you to your industry’s high-value customers. We chart the customer journeys of high-value customers across key retail industries to learn more about how their online shopping behavior changes throughout the year.
Are you ready to face your high-value customers?
Download your copy of FACES 2022 now and read on below for our top learnings from this past year.
How High-Value Customers’ Online Shopping Behavior Has Changed
After diving into the data and comparing FACES 2022 to last year’s edition, we noticed some interesting trends.
Role of Mobile
The role of mobile is gaining significance YoY, especially in the customer’s initial search. Mobile holds the most significance in the purchase journeys for Fashion and Apparel, Baby Care, and Beauty and Cosmetics high-value customers. The high-value customer for these three categories is a woman between the ages of 25 and 34.
Fashion and Apparel’s high-value customer had the greatest YoY increase in mobile adoption: during the 2020 pre-holiday timeframe (Mar. 16 to Nov. 15), she used mobile for 24% of her initial visits; in 2021, she used mobile 67% of the time. During the 2020 holiday season, mobile accounted for 28% of her first website visits; that jumped to 71% during the 2021 holiday season.
Home Furnishing’s high-value customer had the second-highest YoY increase of mobile.
Day Of The Week
Across all categories this year, high-value customers were most likely to make their holiday purchases on a Monday. During the pre-holiday season, customers’ top day of purchase across categories varied, though none were likely to purchase on a Friday or Sunday.
The Holiday Season Drives A Sense of Urgency
While this trend comes as no surprise considering the holiday rush, let’s dive into the data.
Across categories, the latency period (time between first website visit and purchase) and website visits prior to purchasing dropped during the holiday season compared to the pre-holiday season. B2B’s high-value customer was the only exception — while he took 18 fewer hours between first website visit and purchase during the holiday season compared to pre-holiday, he took marginally more website visits. Latency decreased most dramatically for Fashion and Apparels’s high-value customer; she took about 3 days and 2 hours less to purchase during the holidays compared to pre-holiday.
The holiday season also prompted more mobile searches and visits compared to the pre-holiday season. We have seen this trend almost consistently throughout our FACES research. However, Baby Care’s high-value customers alone used mobile to search less during the holiday season compared to the pre-holiday season.
E-Commerce Spending
The high-value customers in the Beauty and Cosmetics, Gifting, and Tactical Gear categories were more willing to spend money on big-ticket items during the holidays. Their AOV increased during the holiday season, but the items per order dropped compared to the pre-holiday season.
E-Commerce spending is increasing during the non-holiday times compared to last year’s pre-holiday pandemic times. People are getting more comfortable in their spending and budget compared to the onset of the pandemic. This is, partly, attributed to rising prices: the majority of high-value customers purchased fewer items per order in non-holiday 2021 compared to pre-pandemic times of 2020. Conversely, AOV (average order value) rose YoY. However, priorities are shifting. 2021 high-value customers are spending more in B2B, Baby Care, Beauty and Cosmetics, Gifting, Tactical Gear, and Tools compared to pre-pandemic times.
How Can FACES Help You?
The fundamental flaw in modern digital marketing is settling for attracting only average customers. By understanding the unique shopping habits of your high-value customers, you’ll reframe your marketing efforts to engage friends, not strangers. FACES is a high-value customer benchmark report; use these insights as a directional guide and compare your own high-value customer journey with our industry benchmarks. Identify any overlaps or areas where you can implement tests to learn more about your customers’ preferences. Use these insights to create more responsible and effective campaigns.
So say no to average and use FACES to empower your customer acquisition and engagement strategy.
Methodology
We use our proprietary customer analytics platform, LXRInsights, to collect and aggregate the customer data to create FACES. LXRInsights relies exclusively on first-party data. We aggregate the daily data of the holiday and pre-holiday season to learn how online buying behavior changes during the holidays. FACES 2022 marks our fourth edition of the book.
We turned our focus onto high-value customers after noticing that a small percentage of shoppers account for a large portion of e-commerce revenue. High-value customers can generate as much as 3-5X more revenue than the average customer! Their unique shopping experience within your industry reflects their unique value.
FACES exists as a benchmark to show you our industry’s high-value customer. It encourages you to think about the customer journey of all your customers and how you can better meet your high-value customers’ needs and expectations.