Is your ecommerce site ready for cyber monday?
TIMELINE
Start in advance – produce content and designs for promotional e-mail blasts, product uploads, and configuration.
– Content and design approval take time, as well as development.
– Everything should be in place a full week before Thanksgiving.
“Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it.” – Miguel De Cervantes
METRICS
Prepare for the spike by analyzing last yea’r traffic vs. this year’s traffic and by testing your server’s capacity.
How many concurrent users can you handle?
– Cyber Monday 2013 web sales hit $2.29 billion, up 16% over 2012. (cmo.com)
– Conversion rates were up 12.6% on Cyber Monday than Black Friday. (IBM)
– Sales peaked at 9 pm EST, with sales in that hour totaling $150 million. (IBM)
– $150 million in revenue came from social media referrals. (cmo.com)
“Deal with the difficult while it is yet easy; deal with the great while it is yet small.” – Tao Te Ching
PERSUASION
Attract an audience.
– Design Banners and promotions that speak to consumers in a Cyber-Monday state of mind.
How can you increase revenue?
– Newsletters sign-ups, free shipping, coupon codes, rewards, and discounts.
– Retailers sent 77% more push notifications during the five-day holiday shopping period in 2013 when compared to daily averages over the previous two months. (IBM)
“Success is reliant on standing out, no fitting in.” – Don Draper
TRAFFIC
Balance the system load.
To avoid all of your traffic to your store on Monday
To mitigate risk of too much traffic impacting your up-time.
1. Most conversion for mobile commerce actually extends through the entire 5 days of Thanksgiving-Monday.
2. Tablet ad mobile grew 31.7% of online traffic in 2013. (IBM)
3. Tablet and mobile conversions exceeded 17% of sales, but tablets drove more than double that of smartphones. (IBM)
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” – Winston Churchill
