Who shops online in specialty retail?
Meet the six segments of shoppers who make up the specialty retail category.
CONTENTS
In a brick-and-mortar store, a retailer’s ability to respond to the unique needs of each shopper can be the difference between someone making a purchase or leaving the store empty-handed. The same is true online. While the specialty retail category makes up a fairly small subset of online retailers, the behaviors of its shoppers are far from uniform. Understanding these shoppers, and their actions and motivations, can have big impact on specialty retailers’ bottom lines.
Through our research, we identified six segments, which exhibited wide-ranging sentiment about shopping.1
Meet the segments2
Click below to learn more about our next segment, Informed Mobilizers.
Click below to learn more about our next segment, Fashion Enthusiasts.
Click below to learn more about our next segment, Social Savvies.
Click below to learn more about our next segment, Opportunistic Shoppers.
Click below to learn more about our next segment, Online Reluctants.
Relatively neutral about shopping, Online Reluctants are the least likely of the segments to be brand loyal. Quality matters to them, so they prefer shopping in store locations, where they feel they can better assess items in person for quality. Compared to other segments, more Online Reluctants are male. They’re also fairly evenly split between mobile and desktop usage.
Since online retailers and direct response (DR) marketers value their own unique data sets, these segments are not suggested for ad targeting, as they are based on category-level data and are not specific to brands or products.
We surveyed shoppers across all six segments to compare each segment's attitudes to those of the combined average across the specialty retail category. Those surveyed among Fashion Enthusiasts were 1.2X more likely to say a brand says a lot about them. Opportunistic Shoppers, on the other hand, were only 0.7X as likely to have a brand they strongly preferred. These attitudes suggest different levers marketers can use, such as highlighting style messaging to appeal to Fashion Enthusiasts, or price to appeal to Opportunistic Shoppers.
Defining characteristics of specialty retail category shoppers3
Index against the combined average of all six segments across the specialty retail category.
Shoppers' behaviors were as different as their expressed shopping habits. We saw a wide range in the length of the shopper journey across segments. Within 30 days of observed behaviors, Shopping Mavens' first visit to the brand site was, on average, 22 days before making a final purchase. In contrast, Online Reluctuants visited the brand site, on average, only 4 days before making a final purchase. As we'll see in part two, length of shopping time can indicate shoppers' passion and willingness to buy more.
Shoppers also varied in their preference for where to buy. In February, Informed Mobilizers researched and purchased almost entirely on mobile. On average, 98% of their online shopping actions and purchases visible to Facebook were on mobile. On the other hand, Opportunistic Shoppers made, on average, only 11% of their online shopping actions and just 4% of their online purchases visible to Facebook on mobile. It's important for retailers to know where to drive conversion for each segment.
Just as in a brick-and-mortar store, an online retailer needs to assess whether a shopper prefers to browse, grab one item and head to checkout, or only look at the sales rack. Even at checkout, online retailers need to react to shopper signals. Online retailers wouldn’t want to push a promotion onto someone ready to buy full price, nor would they want to take someone straight to checkout who was looking to shop more.
What it means for marketers
Use signals to better understand shoppers.
Shoppers in the specialty retail category are hardly one-size-fits-all. The landscape is messy. Shoppers feel just as differently about shopping as they behave when shopping. By applying the Facebook pixel, marketers can use tools like Facebook Analytics to derive more insights into current and potential shoppers, including how often they visit and the channels they use to engage and buy.
Use signals to better engage shoppers.
Shopper journeys vary widely, from how long they to take to buy to where they choose to buy. It's important for marketers to respond to the unique needs of their shoppers. For example, retailers can use signals from the pixel to retarget shoppers with items they've viewed, or complementary items they might be interested in. They can also build custom audiences based on actions people take on their site (such as time spent on the site, or frequency of visits within a certain time) to deliver more relevant content to those people.
Source unless otherwise specified: Based on Facebook internal data, a segmentation of ~1.6M shoppers captured by the Facebook pixel across the specialty retail vertical; US only; 18+; Feb, 2017. Survey data: “Facebook Pixel Segmentation” survey by Ipsos Connect on 1,216 Facebook users out of the above segmentation; US only; 18+; Feb, 2017.