Opportunity from disruption: Holiday Shipping Edition

• Now:Many retailers already started their holiday offers throughout October and are pulling sales and promotions up to early November (post-election).  This allows companies to alleviate some financial pressure from the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas – which helps level out package delivery and allows for more predictive financial modeling.  Brands that can couple this with more thoughtful, impactful messaging and offerings (e.g. promoting gift wrapping, sending gifts directly to the recipient from the retailer with a heartfelt message, and overcommunicating shipping expectations) have a chance to materially move customer sentiment. They also need to acknowledge in their organizations now that if they are counting on Free Shipping offers to move the needle in the home stretch to the holidays, they are going to have to move those dates up, or risk disappointed customers and gift recipients.
• Near Future. Ensuring that there is a very clear line of communication between client teams and agency teams for shipping cut-off for Hanukkah, Christmas or other key holidays is critical. For Christmas cut off, there is a very good chance that it will be much earlier than the 19th-21^st of years’ past – with most assuming it is going to be more in the range of December 14th to be guaranteed delivery. With this in mind, being aligned with your team on shipping dates, adjusting budgets, knowing when to push harder, aligning site experience with marketing, reporting to be based on shipped revenue, etc. are all key to being successful.

Be abundantly clear with your customers about shipping timeframes throughout the site and across post-purchase touchpoints. Banner the homepage. Include it in cart messaging and confirmation emails. There will always the caution of messaging that could potentially discourage a conversion, but this year when shipping hold-ups are an expectation rather than an exception, clarity of delivery expectations must be prioritized to avoid longer-term impact from a PR, customer service and loyalty perspective. Amazon is already out with shop now, ship now language directly to customers. Encouraging an earlier shopping mindset and making very clear the expected time frame for shipping can inspire customer conversions earlier and mitigate risk.

• After holidays. This also means there is an opportunity to drive sales past the point of ecommerce shipping cut off, since there will be a longer period of time between that date and the date a customer needs to present a gift. In the past, this would been a drive-to-store moment for brands with physical distribution. That will be more difficult this year with many stores still having limited shopper capacity, or with the potential of decreased capacity due to COVID spikes. So, when drive-to-store isn’t possible, look for other ways to allow your customers to give the gift of your products.