RETAIL MATTERS
Retail matters
This month, Online4Baby’s Managing Director Christy Foster discusses the economic turbulence this year has seen so far and how she and her team plan to build on the success of 2021 to continue their exciting growth trajectory. At the start of 2022 consumers are facing rising living costs and retailers are seeing increasing staff and warehousing costs, therefore businesses need to work smarter and harder than ever before to drive growth and performance across the board.
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Christy Foster, Managing Director, cmf@online4baby.com
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t’s the start of spring and what a welcome it is! It’s been a tumultuous start to the year for everyone with spiralling costs, but there is hopefully some light at the end of the tunnel. As we move into warmer months and with Covid restrictions eased, it’s time to look forward; O4B certainly has some exciting things in the pipeline for Q2! Q1 is nearly over and with that, a host of learnings to take with us into Q2 and the rest of the year. January and February have been strong trading months for us as a business and we’ve seen some incredible performance across our channels, despite current market conditions. People have less money now than this time last year, due to rising interest rates and increased fuel and living costs, which all in all leads to a tough market for the retail industry. Now that the country is back open again with Covid restrictions having eased, customers are slowly returning to the workplace and now have commuting and childcare costs, which means less expenditure for shopping. It’s such an important time now to make your eComm store stand out from the crowd and really listen to your customers’ needs and wants. By listening to the data and letting it guide your onsite content and product selection, you can drive the best results possible. The overall ecommerce market was down -21%, in January 2022 (IRMG The UK’s eCommerce Association, 2022) and unfortunately business costs are up across the board, which has the potential to cause business challenges for both
eComm and bricks and mortar stores. For me and my team, it’s all about tightening those overhead costs and making sure we strategically invest in the right marketing channels to drive the best performance for the business. This means continually adapting our trading strategy to not get left behind during these testing times. With Google costs up in the nursery sector as omni-channel brands like John Lewis return to the AdWords auction, it’s a great time to look at developing and improving free marketing channels like organic, direct and social. By focussing on your SEO and brand strategies, you can see some brilliant wins for your business. We are soon re-launching our brand and new website and it couldn’t have come at a better time! Keep your eyes peeled, as you’re going to see Online4Baby everywhere this year! Social has been at the forefront of our minds this year. We have invested time in developing our video strategy to make it easier for customers to learn more about products and how to use them. Our aim is and has always been, to give our customers the best possible shopping experience and we feel that video content is one of the best ways to deliver this. Our Facebook Live videos have been performing well, we have increased our YouTube presence and have gone live on Tik Tok! In fact, one of our Tik Tok videos has had over 200k views, which is incredible! Our social and video team are constantly on the lookout for new and exciting ways to engage with our
