If you thought the most mouthwatering pie you’d see this holiday was your aunt’s pecan, wait ‘til you glimpse the estimated $40 billion one up for grabs between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Yet again, consumers are set to eclipse the previous year’s spending spree over Thanksgiving weekend, which at one point peaked at an incredible $15.7 million per minute in 2023.
Unfortunately, it’s going to take more than sneaking off during the football game to get a slice of this one. For brands, the competition has never been fiercer. Between 2019 and 2023, e-commerce sites nearly tripled from 9.2 million to 26.5 million. Though consumer holiday spending continues on an upward trend, it’s being far outpaced by the number of new businesses vying for a portion of that $40 billion.
In other words, the pie is growing but there are more mouths to feed than ever. And when consumer loyalty is at an all-time low, you’ll need more than a great product to stake a claim to this year’s holiday riches. Here’s what you can do to improve your odds of winning the season’s ultimate prize.
Last year, 15% of all holiday purchases and 17% of e-commerce holiday purchases were returned. When the average return costs a retailer around $30 – excluding the refund associated with the return – it’s easy to see why 89% of retailers see returns as a moderate to severe problem for their business.
To curb the issue, brands have adopted strategies like shortening their return window, charging fees, and even going so far as to implement a “keep it” policy – but these don’t address the root of the problem: The customer isn’t happy with their purchase. Why?
A Cloudinary shopper survey reveals some insight. About one-third of respondents say they returned products because they didn’t look as expected on the website. If this wasn’t concerning enough, another 46% report abandoning carts of clothing/shoes because they weren’t sure the items would fit.
Both issues can be solved with more accurate, top-quality images and video. On product pages, visuals play a key role in breaking down the barrier between the online and offline world, helping users understand how the product will look, work, and fit into their lives once it arrives.
When product imagery is of the highest quality, visitors are better able to determine if a product suits them. When they’re not, shoppers have to guess – and when shoppers guess, they make poor buying decisions that lead to abandoned carts and costly returns.
Five ways to deliver better product imagery that reduces returns:
- Create more product images to give viewers a better understanding of what it looks like. Show every angle, feature, and zoom. Do this for every product and variation of that product. If you sell a cardigan in 10 different patterns, or a style with pockets and one without, viewers should be able to see all relevant images of all 10 patterns, styles, etc.
- Show the product in real-world environments so visitors have an idea of what it will look like in use. How, for example, will their new cardigan look at the office Christmas party? Bonus if your visual makes them the hero. Think surrounding the cardigan-wearer in your image with chatty, smiling coworkers. If you don’t have the time to take new photos or photoshop all your product images, use AI to transform them to images featuring your products in captivating real-world environments.
- Create immersive experiences with 360 spinsets and 3D images on your product pages. These allow visitors to explore your product’s every feature and detail by rotating, flipping, and zooming. Video is also a great way to showcase your product in action. Though it allows for less user control than a 360 spinset or 3D image, it’s much better for storytelling.
- Include reviews with user generated content (UGC). Reviews containing images and videos are seen as more realistic depictions of the product. Not only do these offer prospects another source of visual information, but they can enhance user trust – showing visitors that you’re not afraid to let your customers speak for you.
- Use high-quality images so that viewers aren’t left with a blurry perspective of an important feature. JPEG is the most popular file type but there are other modern formats that can showcase high-quality imagery at small file sizes.
The effects of speed on conversion rate are well-documented, and the results are indisputable: Fast sites generate more sales than slow sites.
The most unsettling issue about this is that the difference between a fast and slow site can be just a few seconds. Research shows that a B2C site that loads in one second will generate 250% more conversions than one that loads in five seconds.
So, what can you do to speed up your website ahead of the holiday season? Optimizing Core Web Vitals is a great place to start. These are three metrics Google uses to measure the overall performance of a site. They include:
- Interaction to Next Paint. How quickly a webpage responds when a user initiates an interaction, like clicking a link.
- Largest Contentful Paint. How quickly the largest element on a page becomes visible to the user.
- Cumulative Layout Shift. How much and how far elements shift when a page loads due to poorly formatted content.
Though comprehensive optimization in all three areas can take significant time and resources, there are a few quick ways you can optimize the speed of your website before the holiday hordes descend..
- Implement lazy loading to signal to the browser to load elements only when they’re in the user’s viewport.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) to serve content from a location that is closer to the user.
- Enable caching to store page content in the user’s browser after they visit the first time.
- Convert images to more efficient formats like AVIF, WebP, and JPEG XL.
Anyone who knows the tricks advertisers use to make food look delicious can understand why user-generated content is so valuable to consumers: It’s real.
It’s not created in a studio with a professional cameraman, model, lighting, and a post-production team following a very specific set of brand guidelines. It’s made by someone like them – a discerning consumer with nothing to gain by creating product-focused content.
According to the Cloudinary shopper survey:
- 47% of consumers who bought products from brands they didn’t know credited their decision to user reviews that had images included.
- 37% of consumers consider viewing user-generated videos showing the product in use as a top priority before making a purchase.
- 50% of consumers say they are more likely to buy if they have access to user-generated videos.
While reviews alone are helpful to customers, it’s clear that when combined with UGC, they have the potential to be a more powerful driver of sales. On product pages especially, visitors are looking for information to help them evaluate before they buy and reviews with media provide far more genuine information than text alone.
If you have the resources to moderate inappropriate and off-brand content, including UGC on your product pages can be a great optimization for Thanksgiving weekend. One study showed as much as a 161% increase in conversions when shoppers interacted with UGC along the path to purchase. Bonus: UGC can even improve your SEO.
J. Crew lost $775,000 in five minutes when its website went down on Thanksgiving weekend, and Costco’s 16-hour downtime cost it nearly $11 million. They’re not the only ones who have suffered lost revenue and brand reputation as a result of not rigorously testing their infrastructure before Black Friday.
Your campaigns are only as good as the infrastructure they rely on. Save yourself frustration, angry customers, and lost revenue by QA’ing the tools central to your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns. Make sure your
- Analytics are reporting accurately.
- Advertising pixels are active and firing.
- Products display the same across devices and browsers.
- Product catalog is updated to show items in and out of stock.
- Checkout experience is frictionless, with features like auto-populating forms for returning customers and the option to mark shipping and billing addresses as the same.
- Payment processor can handle all available payment methods and that discount codes are working correctly.
- Mobile app can handle traffic under different conditions, such as performance across various screen sizes, with other apps running in the background, and on different networks.
- Servers can handle traffic spikes, and consider using a CDN to free up bandwidth on your servers.
- Website isn’t vulnerable to security threats.
More than seven in 10 marketers believe that AI will change marketing strategies and personalization. For many, it already has.
Businesses now rely on AI to make better strategic decisions, predict trends, personalize to audiences, scale content creation, and automate time-consuming tasks.
As the technology develops rapidly and more use cases emerge, the question isn’t, “Will AI fit into my business strategy,” it’s, “How will AI fit into my business strategy?”
Cloudinary customers use its AI to:
- Automate bulk edits and revisions to branded visuals.
- Centralize visual media workflows.
- Automatically enhance visual content.
- Improve site speed with the help of a CDN and automated file optimization.
- Create immersive 3D content from 2D images.
- Auto-moderate UGC.
- Optimize and serve visual content based on device and platform.
Using these AI capabilities, Neiman Marcus achieved 3x faster load times and a 50% reduction in photoshoot-to-web time and Paul Smith saw a 45% boost in video-enabled sales.
No matter what you use it for, AI is your most powerful ally during a time like the lead-up to Black Friday when teams and resources are already stretched thin. It’s not too late to adopt AI-enabled tools that can help you accomplish some, or all of the action items in the above strategies before Thanksgiving weekend.
This Black Friday, don’t settle for a sliver of the $40 billion pie. Make it a chunk.
By speeding up your site, improving your visual media, and using AI to prepare for the holiday shopping deluge, you can put your business in position to win customers, profits, and loyalty.
Find out how Cloudinary can play a part in your Black Friday success. Claim your complimentary demo to learn how to centralize asset management, optimize visual media, automate time-consuming workflows, and deliver personalized visual experiences at scale.
