eCommerce in the first year of COVID-19: free insight report

Uniqodo is an expert in promotions, working with some of the world’s biggest brands to deliver amazing experiences for their customers. We just launched our first ever Annual Promotion Insight Report for 2020 to tell the story of how eCommerce businesses survived and thrived in the first year of COVID-19.

Why 2020?

In a year when much that we all took for granted got flipped on its head, we wanted to make sure we gathered learnings to help marketers plan for the continued uncertainty at the beginning of 2021, and also as a crystal ball for what an increase in online shopping would look like for promotions.

While COVID-19 was a polar extreme for eCommerce, in many ways it was just an acceleration of an already growing trend. It felt like a poignant moment to uncover where the opportunities were to be found for advertisers in what was an exceptional and often fraught period, and how businesses can take those learnings forward as we continue to navigate our way out of the pandemic.

Although lots of people will be excited that retail stores have opened their doors again this week, new habits have been forged, and we expect eCommerce to continue on it’s growth trajectory in a heightened way.

What does the report tell us?

This report highlights how promotional performance directly aligned to events that unfolded, across both industry and channel performance. It sounds obvious, but the way people are feeling and the broader economic landscape has a direct impact on spending confidence. You can literally plot each lockdown and easing by the peaks and troughs of promotional performance, which in itself should be a cue to marketers on the importance of relevance in the moment.

We take a look at how promotions performed overall, looking at times of day, days of the week, and peaks throughout the year, as well as taking a lens to different industry and marketing channel performance. We also call out the type of promotions that resonated with customers, and looked at some of the growing trends in the space compared to previous years.

If you’re in the business of creating and issuing promotions, whether to drive customer acquisition, or to engage with existing customers, there’s a wealth of insights to be found in this report to help you shape your strategies for 2021 and beyond.

What’s the big takeaway from the report?

If there’s one resounding story that rings true for promotional performance now, it’s that uniting controlled, targeted campaigns with brilliant UX (what Uniqodo calls PromotionX) gives the greatest results.

While discounts and voucher sites will always have their place, driving the business objectives harder necessitates a more creative and more sophisticated approach to designing and delivering promotions. That doesn’t mean it needs to be more difficult, but it does call for marketers to be brave and try something new. It is our hope that the hard and fast facts we present here are at least justification that fortune favours the bold, certainly in the promotion space.

If you’d like to grab a copy, you can download it for free from the Uniqodo site.