Is Your Website Ready for Cyber Monday?
Since its origins in early 2005 when Shop.org first coined the term, Cyber Monday has become the unofficial launch of the online holiday shopping season. Traditionally, "Cyber Monday" has been an e-commerce term referring to the Monday following the U.S. Thanksgiving weekend. Just as brick and mortar stores do with Black Friday, online retailers offer special promotions, discounts, and sales on this day. In 2018, Cyber Monday set a new record with an estimated $7.8 billion dollars in sales, surpassing Black Friday in sales. Over the past few years, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have begun to merge into a four-day sale period, largely due to brick and mortar stores launching online sales on Black Friday to counter Cyber Monday.
This year, Black Friday falls on 11/29/19 and Cyber Monday will be on 12/2/19, followed by Giving Tuesday (for charitable organizations) on 12/3/19.
Top Cyber Monday Retailers:
1. Amazon
2. Walmart
3. Target
4. Best Buy
5. JC Penney
6. Macy’s
So how do you claim your piece of over $8 billion in consumer sales this Cyber Monday? We’ve prepared a list of the Top 5 Things you can do to prepare for a Cyber Monday sale, and if your website is on our Logic Business Cloud, it's even easier as much of this functionality is already built in!
1. Come Up with a Show Stopper Deal!
Shoppers are looking for the best deal and special limited offers on Cyber Monday. Get creative by finding a few anchor products to deep discount or consider a loss leader on surplus inventory to attract shoppers that will buy more if a few signature items draw their attention. We've seen our clients have success by using some of these strategies:
- Deep Discount on All Items - ex: 30% off everything if this is a freestanding promotion
- Deep Discount on Select Items - ex. 40% to 60% off a specific segment of items that can be grouped together on a Cyber Monday landing page.
- Free Shipping - This may be used in combination with other offers and typically can be limited to the lowest cost shipping method with ability to pay for priority shipping.
- BOGO - Buy one item - Get one item of equal or lesser value free. This is popular option is a bit more complicated as it requires specific rules to be implemented in your shopping cart logic.
- Limited Offers - Sale on a collectible or special edition item that is only available between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Free Gift with Purchase - Do you have any accessories or excess inventory that could be paired with other sale items? Maybe it’s a poster, a t-shirt, or hat. Bundle a gift with a purchase.
- Advent Calendar - Just as the name implies, surprise and delight customers by revealing a new deal each day starting on Black Friday and run through Cyber Monday and beyond. Once again, a landing page is a great way to create a single location where new items or offers are revealed each day. Set up an email list to gather names to alert to each day’s new offer.
- Sales Extravaganza - Make your sale a real event by combining different levels of all of the above ideas. Offer tiered discounts 10% and up to 80% off with free shipping on select items. Throw in a gift and promote deals with a landing page.
2. Give your Website a Cyber Monday Make Over.
Brick and mortar outlets go to elaborate lengths to make holiday sales a visually stimulating event, and your website should be no different. We recommend making fun and festive updates to your home page and promotional emails starting on November 1st to promote the upcoming event. Here are some ideas we have implemented on our website and client websites.
- Announcement Bar - If your website is on our Logic Business Cloud, you can easily add an announcement bar that appears at the top of your home page or all pages. This bar is a subtle way to let customers know about your upcoming Cyber Monday sale and can link to a landing page with additional details.
- Promotional Pop-Ups - We call them modals! They are useful message windows that pop up over your web pages, typically on a delay, and can be a more direct way to announce your upcoming sales event. These can easily be added from your Logic CMS.
- Banners and Wrappers - Use the Logic CMS to add promotional banners or alter your page templates with a “wrapper” that will alert clients to the upcoming sale while creating a festive holiday environment.
- Decorate Your Home Page - At Cyber-NY, we change our main home page hero panel video (typically a spiraling arial view of New York City) to a seasonal video and make the background images into animated panels to get into the holiday spirit! If you look now you may see ghosts and goblins, but soon we’ll switch to gobbling turkeys for November.
- Create a Holiday Landing Page - Shoppers enjoy the thrill of the hunt, but once they’re on your website, the hunting and searching should stop. Consider a landing page and/or promotional trays on the home page that clearly explain the offers and aggregates all products on sale.
3. Get the Word Out!
Don’t expect shoppers to beat a path to your doorstep if they’re not aware of your sale. Large retailers such as Amazon, Target, and Best Buy are sure to have strong offerings making competition tough. Cut through the clutter and frenzy with a clear communication strategy that includes:
- Blog - Make sure to post on your blog as content that promotes the upcoming sale.
- Paid Campaign - Consider launching paid search campaigns on Google and Bing as your best, direct option to target new customers. Search keyword, display, and remarketing are all good options but your basic keyword search campaign will be the quickest to set up and if you’re pressed for time or budget, Google would be the best option to start with.
- SEO - Search engine optimization is not the fastest method to get the word out but it should not be ignored. Using a landing page that is properly optimized as well as making sure your site has been optimized is a best practice that will pay off for the remainder of the holiday season.
- Post Announcements - Look for sales listings website such as TheBlackFriday.com that allow you to post your sale on a website with members seeking specific sales.
- Niche Promotion - Start an outreach campaign by finding receptive blogs, message boards, or groups of interest that are well targeted for your offerings. Some great client examples are SuspensionMaxx - they manufacture high performance suspension products for off road vehicles. SuspensionMaxx has become adept at reaching out to message boards, social media accounts, and blogs where fans of motorsports congregate. Similarly, Shout! Factory targets fans of horror movies on social media, message boards, and blogs to announce sales and special offers on DVD and Blu-ray horror titles. Kino Lorber takes this approach with their classic and independent films as well.
- Get Social - Leverage all your social channels starting the first week of November by crafting campaigns with consistent messaging and design. Link back to landing pages and holiday email lists. Sprinkle with offer codes.
- Email Campaigns - Create a new email list where shoppers can sign up for daily deals. Leverage your house list to promote your sales event in advance by scheduling 2 to 4 emails in November.
4. Try a Digital Freemium.
Offer a low cost or no cost digital download with purchase or for visiting the website on Cyber Monday.
- Interactive or AR Experience - Create a branded AR (augmented reality) experience that can be shared on Facebook and Instagram
- Offer a free movie or video screening - If you are not one of our entertainment distribution clients, maybe you should team up with one to use a promo code to view a free movie with a purchase.
- Digital gift card with purchase - For example,Spend $50 or more and get a $10 gift card to spend on your next order.
- Offer an Ebook - Or other valuable content as. Downloadable PDF with each purchase
- Ecards - Create a unique experience such as a holiday card system that allows a branded greeting with offer. Our client World Connect is a non-profit organization that raises funds for projects through individual donations. They are developing a a holiday greeting card system to release in November as a seasonal offering to encourage donations… while this may not be a Cyber Monday specific offering, it works well for Giving Tuesday, the philanthropic alternative to Cyber Monday.
- Trial Subscriptions - For subscription based services or business models that do not include physical products, consider offering a special Cyber Monday trial subscription or limited offering (example, get three months free service when you sign up on Cyber Monday only)
5. Prepare For Increased Traffic.
Make sure to let us know about upcoming promotions that may significantly increase site traffic and slow server performance. Cyber-NY can apply additional resources to your server to maintain peak performance during the sale. We have seen huge traffic spikes that slow servers to a crawl due to a promotion kicking off with an appearance on NBC’s Today Show, or an editorial reference in the New York Times or other media outlet. We had a client win an academy award and t-shirt sales for an artist that designed the shirt worn when accepting the award, went through the roof! Those are extreme examples but even a great promotion launched via social media or an email campaign can challenge server performance. Let’s plan big events together to make sure shoppers have the best possible experience.
We hope these ideas help with your holiday sales preparation and build on what you may already have in progress. As always, please feel free to reach out to us and schedule a consultation on any of these ideas so we can help with implementation and make this one of your best holiday seasons ever! See you online.
