Commerce

Top five Christmas 2014 digital marketing stats

The festive season is perhaps the most challenging and rewarding time in multichannel commerce.

Last month, the internet was awash once more with statistics and trends that dig right down into understanding how consumers are shopping at Christmas, and how merchants are striving for their engagement and cash.

As always, our Internet Statistics Compendium collects the best digital stats from around the globe and across the online and mobile landscape.

Today, I have collected the top five that really piqued my interest over the Christmas period and thought I’d try and sum up why these data points might be valuable to marketers and digital types going on into 2015.

How Japan’s Rakuten plans to become a global ecommerce giant

Rakuten is one of Japan’s biggest tech companies, yet it’s still relatively unknown in Europe.

It began as an ecommerce marketplace but has since diversified into areas such as instant messaging and banking.

CEO Hiroshi Mikitani aims to raise Rakuten’s profile outside of Japan with expansion plans driven by further acquisitions.

KLM: We make €25m per year from social media

When trying to improve your digital marketing skills it’s advisable to learn from the best in the business.

In social media that means taking a lesson from KLM, an airline that can achieves €25m in social sales each year.

At Econsultancy’s Festival of Marketing today KLM’s social media manager Karlijn Vogel-Meijer gave an insight into the company’s strategy, which is built around a laser focus on the customer experience.

The talk kicked off with a reminder of a very important rule for social marketers: you’re a guest at someone else’s party.