January is usually a pretty bleak month for shopping as people tend to be tightening belts after the excesses of Christmas. True to form, most shopping websites saw a decline in online visits in January 2012 compared to December 2011. But then there was Morrisons, which doubled its visits in January 2012 to reach a trend-bucking 5 million UK Internet visits.

As a result Morrisons became the second most visited Grocery and Alcohol website in the UK for January 2012, second only to Tesco. The supermarket increased its market share within the grocery sector from 5.5% of all visits to 13.4%, a feat all the more remarkable given that customers can’t actually buy goods through the Morrisons website as they can with the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s and ASDA.

So what was it that was encouraging people to visit the Morrisons website if it wasn’t to purchase products? The answer is the company’s promotional January campaign, which offered prizes including free shopping to customers who entered their shopping receipt details into the website.

The campaign was so successful that ‘morrisons free shopping’ was the second biggest search term driving traffic to the website after ‘morrisons’, and 7.5% of all search terms driving traffic to the website in January contained the words ‘free shopping’. Many commentators suspect that this is a way for Morrisons to accumulate data on the type of people that visit its stores and website in anticipation of the website going fully transactional in the future.
Using our own demographics data we can see the Experian Mosaic groups which started to visit the Morrisons website in January but were not visiting in December. The biggest groups by volume were Suburban Mindsets, Professional Rewards and Small Town Diversity. Interestingly, the groups which saw the greatest increase in January were older demographics, including Active Retirement, Industrial Heritage and Elderly Needs. These three groups are typically in their 60s and 70s who are careful with money and live in small affordable homes.

Comparing the two monthly figures, Active Retirement were 17% more likely to visit the Morrisons website in January than December whilst Industrial Heritage were 10% more likely. Morrisons also started attracting customers online from more rural areas in the UK, namely from the Rural Solitude and the Small Town Diversity groups.
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