Golf brands and retailers take note for 2010 holiday season. There's growing online holiday business.
Holiday shoppers headed in droves to retail online sites in November 2009. Free shipping, price cuts and discounts attracted consumers to retail, online coupon and incentive sites as they sought money saving opportunities.
These results are from the beginning of the holiday season in November, and Comscore, the digital world measurement leader reports 4/5 of Americans visiting a retail site in November.
Growth leaders include toys, consumer electronics and department stores, each growing more than 30% versus October. Highlights:
o Toy sites attracted 27.4 M American shoppers, a 33% increase from October. ToyrRus led this category with 14.8M visitors (up 82%).
o Consumer electronic sites grew to 52.8M visitors, a 32% increase, led by Best Buy.com (25M visitors) and Walmart (9.9M visitors, up 139%). Radio Shack, eBay and Buy.com followed.
o Online department stores saw a 33% gain reaching nearly 81M unique visitors, led by Walmart.com with 46.2M visitors (up 62%), Target 38.8M (up 43%). Sears, JC Penney and Macy's followed with increases from 34 to 38%.
o Traffic to incentive sites jumped 76%, attracting 27.6M visitors, making it the top gaining category.
o Coupon sites grew 33% to 37.M visitors.
Sports and outdoor retailers' unique visitors were 31.2 M, up 15%. While this is respectable, it's frustrating as I would hope sports and outdoors equipment to be a more important and appealing holiday purchase like my first football uniform and ABA basketball were.
I would suggest these brands do the following to capitalize on 2010 holiday season:
1. Plan a fully integrated, comprehensive Internet and social media campaign now for 2010. These brands apparently benefited from their exciting and relevant Sm efforts.
2. Add in incentives and coupons early into your holiday sales plans.
3. Launch an industry "Put sports under your tree!" campaign and leverage the heck out of it.
4. Link these efforts to initiatives like Get Golf Ready, PEforLife and even NFLPlay60.
So, let's get excited about this news and get ready with Internet and social media campaigns to build 2010 holiday business.
