If you have some measure of experience in online marketing, you’ll realize that at times, consumer behaviour can be quite predictable. A lot of shopping behaviours are most times determined by seasonality as well as peak times when every good marketer knows that a lot more people are going to be shopping online. Seasonal marketing spikes like Black Friday or Boxing Day are always in the calendars of serious marketers. For some others, depending on the industry, they know that January is historically the most popular month for booking summer holidays. Marketers particularly travel companies who know this always like to take full advantage of the month of January to make the most of travel bookings.
Many marketers also know from their various experiences of consumer behaviours that some products characteristically have higher demands within certain months of the year. For example, winter clothing and summer clothing sell better within winter and summer seasons. It is always expected then that consumers will demand more of these products depending on the season of the year. Because of the current pandemic, many marketers are more concerned about the safety of warehouse staff and the logistics of receiving deliveries during this crisis. For this reason, a lot of consumers are mostly shopping for bare essentials to carry on with their lives as best they could. In normal times outside pandemic seasons, many changes in consumer behaviour can arise for a host of reasons. Smart marketers who know this can always take advantage to make good sales. What they need do is to be ready to quickly change their marketing strategies one way or another as the need arises.
Even if seasonality and peak times affect your chosen industry in a similar way, it’s also important that you understand your typical customers’ shopping behaviours more specifically. For this, you need to gather diligently as much copious information as you can get on your online customers. This is because, the more information you are able to collect about them, the better it is for you to accurately predict their shopping behaviours. Such vital information will easily put at your disposal, exactly who visits your website 24/7 and where they visited from. You can also determine how long it takes your website visitors to convert once they’ve clicked through to the website. Knowing where your website visitors are coming from is of paramount importance for traffic analysis purposes. Traffic from influencers’ Instagram stories, Twitter and Facebook blogs, voucher sites and or more traditional online media, needs to be well identified because it can help provide vital information which the marketer greatly needs to target potential customers through the various seasons all year round.
