DeeperCalling Media, LLC, reported a network-wide sales increase of 180% over the same sales figures last year across all their stores for CyberMonday. A CBA-member store with a brick-and-mortar location along with an online store saw a 344% increase in their online sales. Some brick-and-mortar stores far exceeded the 180% average sales increase by seeing online sales increases of as much as 4,672% over last year’s figures.
Bill Goodyear, VP of product development at DeeperCalling, believes that there are still plenty of opportunities for retailers to find new markets and multi-channel selling is one of the best ways to attract those new customers. “Our figures are showing that we are attracting new customers at a rate that equals that of last year,” Goodyear said. “There are a large number of gaps in the market that are available to those that actively search and seek them out.”
DeeperCalling reported sales increases in some unlikely categories as well this year. Online sales increased by more than 200% over last year for categories such as apparel, home décor, software, and collectibles. “As we expanded lines and bought in a number of new Christian designed products—we have also attracted more general buyers who are looking for beautiful products regardless of how or who makes them. They are, of course, all designed by Christians,” Goodyear said.
Contributing to these retailers’ multi-channel selling success was their approach to search engine optimization (SEO), a process for improving the volume and quality of traffic to a Web site from search engines via natural search results. Goodyear noted that a few retailers took this practice seriously, going as far as hiring an SEO consultant, and saw a 1,555% increase in sales on CyberMonday alone. “That’s the beautiful thing about the Internet—there are entire virtual communities of buyers out there whose spending power is just waiting to be tapped,” Goodyear said.
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