Salesforce: Holiday Insights

Each year, Salesforce releases important insights reports to help retail businesses plan for the holiday season. In 2019, shoppers—and retailers—lost almost an entire week of holiday shopping thanks to a U.S. Thanksgiving Day that was six days later than in 2018. This presented a unique challenge for retailers seeking more revenue gains in less time.

With many people asking how this would affect the year’s biggest buying season, Salesforce decided to crunch the numbers and craft predictions about the unique holiday shopping season. Using shopping data from more than half a billion global shoppers, a proprietary study of e-commerce sites, and a survey of more than 10,000 consumers, Launch worked with Salesforce to create a multi-phased interactive holiday insights website to help retailers power their future planning.

The first phase, focused solely on predictions, launched in October of 2019. From Black Friday to Cyber Week, the site shared predictions for everything from e-commerce spending trends to discount rate strategies and AI-powered shopping products. The second phase launched in January with key takeaways from the 2019 season.

The 2019 Holiday Insights microsite is a big evolution from previous years—turning static reports into an interactive data story dedicated to helping holiday retailers build strong strategies based on global insights. The work was well-received at the highest level internally at Salesforce, with leadership referring to it as the “gold standard” for holiday activations.