Brick & Mortar Sleighs

Let’s face it: while much has been said this year about the Retailpocalypse – or the numerous stores and malls shuttering around the country—in-store is still bringing in substantial sales. This brings us to Cardlytics’ third holiday spend trend for marketers:Online channels continue to grow share, but in-store sales still dominate holiday spend​Purely eCommerce retailers like Amazon may make up the fastest growing channel, but they’re far from being the largest channel in terms of share. Last year, the vast majority of all holiday spend—over 78%—still happened in physical stores.

While convenient, Online Only retailers grew by 1.3 share points at the expense of in-store spend, traditional Brick & Mortars were able to offset some of their share loss by driving customers to their online and mobile properties. These Brick&Mortar.coms saw a 0.2 increase in share points year-over-year and made up 8.4% of overall holiday spend.Actionable Tips:

1. Brick & Mortar retailers: be sure to emphasize the unique convenience factors of in-store shopping in your holiday marketing. For instance, knowledgeable staff, verifiable quality, easy gift returns, and the ability to shop 11^th hour deals after shipping deadlines have passed.
2. Online Only retailers: Strengthen your online and mobile channels with price matching, shoppable gift guides, and free shipping to attract more digital customers.
3. Brick&Mortar.coms: Promote in-store pickup options to help customers flow more easily between your online and in-store channels. This flexibility will help foster valuable omnichannel shopping behavior (more on that next week).

Want more Holiday insights? Check out Cardlytics’ other holiday spend trends and stay tuned for next week’s post. We’ll be detailing the massive upside of driving omnichannel shopping behavior during the holidays.