Key Lessons From Black Friday 2015

Love it or loathe it, Black Friday is fast becoming a fixture in the UK's retail calendar. We've rounded up the most interesting articles about the size, impact and changing perceptions of Black Friday. Here are our top takeaways from the news in the last week: Retail sales dropped 10% but online sales grew by 36% on the biggest ever day for Ecommerce in the UK. Mobile ecommerce continues to grow: 35% of purchases on Black Friday were from Mobile devices. Some ecommerce sites weren’t ready for the rush - Argos and John Lewis both had outages during the day. Although that didn’t stop John Lewis from reporting it’s biggest ever sales week with a turnover of £187.7m. Email marketing drove more sales than any other sales channel - 25% of all online Black Friday sales were the result of an Email offer. Black Friday has an image problem - it's still a divisive marketing strategy; there were even national campaigns against it's consumerist message (see http://www.buynothingday.co.uk).  Here’s our round up of our top five Black Friday articles from around the web: Tesco got their strategy wrong here (CityAM) John Lewis had their strongest sales week, despite site outages here (Telegraph)  Some retailers don't like Black Friday, but lots of consumers definitely do here (Retail-Week) Key stats from Econsultancy here (Econsultancy) A good overview of trends from IMRG here (IMRG)