So another Cyber weekend has been and gone. The 4-day shopping extravaganza is drawing more and more hotels each year to take advantage of the money-making event. But as we have found this year, it’s not just about showing up, you have to take part with a genuinely valuable offer.
Since the shopping event made its way across the pond to Europe in 2010, thanks to eCommerce Giant, Amazon, the online shopping landscape has seen massive adoption among consumers, keen to bag a bargain.
Year on year its popularity has grown and Sales have skyrocketed for those willing to give the discounts. However, it’s not as easy as it looks to capture conversions, even on Cyber Weekend.
“Those hotels who did see a good return this year gave a truly great offer. It’s up to the hotel to decide whether rate is more important than filling the rooms and building strong relationships with new and existing customers.” Niall Lenihan, Net Affinity Account Manager.
This year the general feeling for hotels was that sales had slowed down significantly compared to previous years when shoppers were perhaps more excited by the novelty of Black Friday, they’re now wary of ‘fake offers’ and pressure-selling. True value is the way to the shopper’s heart.
This blog post will give our expert opinion on how to tackle Sales and special discount events such as Cyber Weekend. When is it right to give discounts and when to push your hotel rate.
What Did Cyber Weekend Tell Us About Rates?
Our Account Managers and Marketing Specialists at Net Affinity have been looking back at their client hotels, Niall said:
“Black Friday has definitely grown from strength to strength in the Irish Hotel Market – Customers are in search of the best deals available. With the prominence of Social Marketing, this year it was the hotels with the greatest percentage discount gathering the biggest audiences and bookings.”
We saw more hotels participate in Cyber Weekend in 2017, which explains why it appeared to be more competitive to capture those conversions compared to last year.
The key takeaway from this year is to set your rate as low as you can, then create a really clear marketing campaign around it to push out across all channels.
So, What Key Findings Did Our Data Show?
E-commerce Trends
Cyber Monday was the biggest day for revenue over the 4-day event, with Black Friday a close second.
Amongst our client data-set, there was a 39% increase in conversion rates. Perhaps unsurprisingly reflecting the nature of the holiday and the psychological pressure of time running out on a one-time offer.
Device Trends
Over 50% of transactions happened on mobile on Saturday and Sunday. Whilst 43% of mobile transactions were on Black Friday itself, dropping to 34% on Cyber Monday – presumably because people are at work shopping on desktops during their breaks.
We generally saw desktop decline steeply over the weekends with mobile picking up the slack, which is in line with normal consumer behavior throughout the rest of the year.
How Did Marketing Channels Perform?
- Social
Social revenue was significantly lower than last year, however, it did deliver 5% of transactions. By comparison, 10% of revenue and 6% of transactions came directly from social channels in 2016.
A healthy 25% of the month’s social revenue happened over Cyber Weekend. However, compared to 33% of the month’s social revenue on Black Friday ONLY in 2016, this year’s figure seems less impressive.
As seen last year, email performed very strongly, delivering 7% of overall transactions and 6% of revenue.
- Paid Search
Compared to last year paid search made a huge jump seeing revenue increase by 52%.
Conclusion
To conclude, on the whole, revenue throughout Cyber Weekend was up 15% on last year for our client hotels which is a success however, it’s not an extraordinary feat. A small proportion of hotels performed extremely well, whilst the rest were probably waiting for a surge in bookings that never came.
All of us at Net Affinity will be watching closely again next year, and are intrigued to see how this American trend will evolve and whether hotels will be willing to drop their rates to truly benefit from Cyber Weekend sales.
