Next time I bring you this weekly round-up, Black Friday will be nothing but a suppressed traumatic memory and most of you will have reduced your productivity levels by at least 75% in the run-up to Christmas. But before we kick off the month of boozy work parties in which inappropriate things inevitably happen between colleagues, let’s give November one last bit of love with these brilliant digital marketing stats.

This week we’re covering everything from basket abandonment to digital skills, and we’ve even snuck in one last Black Friday stat just because you’ll have ceased to give a crap about it in seven days time.

Basket abandonment has risen 15% since 2010

A new infographic from Salecycle highlights some interesting and concerning stats around ecommerce basket abandonment.

Travel has the highest abandonment rate, while Christmas is the time when the least amount of people walk away from online purchases.

Check out the infographic below for more stats (click to expand). It’s hand-drawn, so bonus points for effort.

Digital skills investment could yield £14.3bn for UK economy

If the UK invested £1.65bn into skills provision and digital devices over the next 10 years the economy would save £14.3bn, according to a report by Go ON UK.

That is a return of almost £10 for every £1 invested.

Other key findings include:

Universal basic digital skills would give Government a direct cash return of £1.9bn in increased tax receipts, lower job seeker allowance payments and NHS primary care savings.

This investment would massively increase productivity for the UK and boost net earnings by £358m for the 926,000 strong workforce currently lacking digital skills.

Insider fraud on the rise in technology, media and telecoms industry

Nearly four out of five (77%) technology, media and telecoms (TMT) companies have experienced a fraud incident in the past year, according to the 2015 Kroll Global Fraud Report.

The most common type of fraud experienced in the sector was information theft, loss or attack, experienced by 32% of TMT companies.

This was followed by management conflict of interest (15%) and theft of physical assets or stock (15%).

Mobile accounts for 73% of all email opens

Despite a dip in Q2 2015, mobile email opens are at their all-time highest, according to a new report by Movable Ink.

Other key findings include:

Email opens on tablets continue to decline.

Email conversions on smartphones have decreased 6% since the start of 2015, having started the year with 25% of conversions and dropped to 19%.

Android users read emails for longer than those on Apple devices.

68% of Brits stop engaging with poorly designed content

Brits are becoming more selective about the content they view, according to a new study by Adobe.

Other key findings include:

People in the UK are using an average of five devices every day.

Tailoring of content to devices is growing in importance, with 72% more likely to engage with content that displays well on the specific device they are using.

50% of Brits are distracted by the volume of content they are faced with on a daily basis.

Three in five marketers aren’t currently targeting Instagram users

The majority of marketers are not targeting Instagram users, according to a new survey by Greenlight, despite almost one in three Instagram users having bought a product after seeing it on the photo sharing app.

Other key findings include:

Over half (53%) of marketers plan to make use of Instagram in 2016 to boost their sales.

29% plan to use Instagram’s recently launched advertising service, while less than a quarter (23%) plan to target consumers via a branded account.

Most marketers plan to use Instagram to increase brand awareness (50%), for brand storytelling (30%), and to drive sales and or loyalty (30%) to their brand.

Almost one in five (18%) marketers plan to run influencer engagement programmes aimed at Instagram ‘celebrities’ next year due to the influence of celebrities on consumer spending.

Almost one in ten (8%) are exploring how they can make greater use of user-generated photos or video.

Four in five shoppers purchase products after reading a positive review

77% of shoppers would be persuaded to buy something after reading a positive review and 61% would consider pulling out of a purchase if the reviews weren’t good, according to a recent survey by Censuswide.

Despite this, the majority of shoppers have not been approached to leave a review by brands and retailers, with just 13% offered loyalty points and even fewer (9%) offered a financial incentive to do so.

25% of consumers begin Christmas shopping before Halloween

A new infographic from Outbrain highlights some of the key consumer trends around the festive period.

Apparently a quarter of people actually start their Christmas shopping before the Halloween celebrations have even begun.

Check out the infographic below for more stats (click to expand):

Retailers recognise the need to cut annoying offers

91% of retailers predict that over the next two years data analytics will bring even closer engagement with customers in the retail and consumer space, according to a new report by Xerox.

Other key findings include:

43% of retail and consumer organisations intend to use data intelligence to build real-time, contextual and targeted marketing offers.

53% will incorporate more customer data into the call centre in the next 12 months.

51% want to use data for better matching of merchandise across all channels.

70% of Black Friday shoppers never return to same store

Is Black Friday a false economy? 70% of consumers never return to retailers through which they made Black Friday purchases for the remainder of the festive season, according to research by Worldpay.

Other key findings include:

40% of Black Friday shoppers get carried away with self-gifting and then rein in their overall spending by 10% in the run-up to Christmas.

Moreover, negative experiences appear to be turning away consumers, with one in five saying they think less of brands that take part in Black Friday.

Timely and vaguely relevant stat of the week…

On this day in 1953, a proposal to simplify English spelling passed its second reading in parliament.

It was cleverly titled the ‘Simplified Spelling Bill’.

For lots more up-to-date statistics…

Download Econsultancy’s Internet Statistics Compendium, a collection of the most recent statistics and market data publicly available on online marketing, ecommerce, the internet and related digital media.

It’s updated monthly and covers 11 different topics from advertising, content, customer experience, mobile, ecommerce and social.