Cyber Monday: Hype or Holiday Opportunity?

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Marc Kline

Laptop and Gifts If you’ve spent a few days now away from your computer (and your inbox), you might now open email only to find a flood of messages from businesses you’ve purchased promoting specials, with many of them arriving just this morning.

If so, that might have struck you as a coincidence, but it may not have been.

Cyber Monday, a term coined in 2005 by Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, is ostensibly the day when many consumers return to work after the Black Friday weekend, only to surf online for more holiday deals.

This year, more businesses are jumping on the bandwagon to take advantage of this potential rush. So, should we join them and send out messages to our own subscribers?

Which Came First: The Traffic or the Email?

When I first heard of Cyber Monday, I couldn’t help but wonder the “chicken of the egg” question:

Is this truly a day where traffic is higher based on a natural inclination by consumers to shop online?

Is this truly a day where traffic is higher based on a natural inclination by consumers to shop online? Or, has this event been manufactured by an influential organization to build profitable hype and mimic the offline Black Friday event?

Truthfully, after quite a bit of reading on the topic, I’m not convinced either way, and now I’m not so sure that it really is even an either/or question.

If you have some insight, please share in the comments, but even without really knowing this, I think I can make a brief but strong case on why small to medium size businesses should not target this day specifically.

Why I’m Writing About Cyber Monday on Cyber Monday

I originally considered typing up a quick post on this subject on Friday a little while before leaving for the week. And here I am on Monday posting it on the day of the supposed event.

Procrastination? Hardly. I just don’t think that this day/phenomenon is particularly useful for our users and readers and thought the topic would be most urgent today. Consider this:

Our subscribers have a finite amount of time they can and attention they want to dedicate to reading email, and when we send email, we’re competing with other parties for it.

Compared to those of the “find all your holiday needs at the lowest possible price” superstores, our marketing tends to focus on one to several products with a stronger emphasis on the quality aspect of value. This prioritizes gradual trust building over time over the concentrated single day sales pitch.

As much as we’d like to kick start our campaigns for the holidays ASAP, there are plenty of other days and ways we can use to make sure our subscribers consider us this season.

This Is My Take. What Is Yours?

Our subscribers probably have plenty of email to read for the day, and since there is such a thing as “too much email”, it might not be smart to send email just because we can and it sounds that lots of others are doing it, even if there is a slight, natural up tick in traffic without a targeted email.

In fact for these reasons, I think perhaps we should not send a special Cyber Monday email. What do you think?

Tags: holiday marketing, scheduling

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11 Responses

Cheryl
November 26th, 2007 at 1:53 pm

I checked my mail last night, as I usually do. This morning I had 10 new messages, 9 promoting sales. As a result, I deleted at least half of them unread. Faced with a flooded inbox, I suspect quite a few people take similar action.
Marc Kline
November 26th, 2007 at 2:10 pm

Cheryl,

Thanks for the great insight. It’s important sometimes to remember that while we are email marketers, we are also email recipients as well, and reflecting on what we think and feel as we open our own email can be telling about how our subscribers might.

A little while back, Justin wrote a very telling article on the concept of "Email Bankruptcy" that discusses a more extreme form of "giving up" on reading through a boatload of new messages.

We certainly don’t want our messages to be lumped in with several others — the results usually aren’t positive.

As a side note: although I did send a message out along with Friday’s article, I waited until 2:00 PM ET with hopes that a majority of readers would have already cleared out their messages from this morning.
Will
November 26th, 2007 at 5:47 pm

I agree with Cheryl, I often find myself spending hours of my time reading email that won’t help my business at all. Even though you may learn from some of them and even get ideas of use, it is still a lot of time wasted. I think the mail you send should be for a productive reason!
Julie Malley
November 26th, 2007 at 11:36 pm

I believe it would be wise not to send out email just because you can or it’s what everybody’s doing. We have to prioritize so many things in our life that not having one more email to deal with would be great.
Carol Bentley
November 27th, 2007 at 7:21 am

Most of my email messages going out are to let people know about new postings on my business copywriting blog.

A survey of my readers established they were happy with regular, daily posts and announcement emails.

However I decided to set the publishing time for the Monday post to be in the afternoon to make sure the announcement email DID NOT arrive with all the weekend’s accumulated messages and Monday morning email rush and so get overlooked.

I took my experience of offline marketing into account when making this decision. Letters are sent out to reach the prospect at a time they are most likely to have less competing mail and, perhaps, a slight lull in the week’s activities.

For example, I’d avoid Mondays and Fridays for most businesses but, if I’m sending a mailing to restaurants, then Monday is often a quieter time of the week for them and it increases the chances of the letter being read. That’s where testing comes into play.

Incidentally my blog readership stats all days of the week, including Mondays, is pretty stable so I think my tactic is working OK. Except when a post slipped through one early Monday morning by accident and my readership dropped by 38%! Of course, it might just have been a glitch but…

I think the timings of any email marketing activity, like offline marketing, needs to be tested to see what gains the highest response from your target market.
Marc Kline
November 27th, 2007 at 9:25 am

Carol,

It looks like we were on the same page on the timing of our messages yesterday. Ours went out at about 2:00 PM ET for the same reason as you — with hopes that we would avoid the initial flood and deletion of messages upon the first opening of the inbox for the day (since many of our subscribers undoubtedly check their email throughout the day).

Thanks for chiming in so relevantly about split testing. We can give general rules based on our experiences and research for email marketing, but everyone’s business and subscribers is at least slightly different, so once we start with our best impression, testing helps us to make sure it’s showing the results we’d like.

Here are a couple of helpful testing resources:

Knowledge Base Article - How Do I Create a Broadcast Split Test?

Blog Article - Why Split Test Your Messages?
Marc Kline
November 27th, 2007 at 3:33 pm

Was just reading over the news and happened to catch this:

Yahoo’s Cyber Monday mess finally fixed

Apparently, according to Yahoo! a spike in traffic on yesterday caused technical issues that took down their customers’ shopping carts.

It goes to show how while in one light having lots of people doing the same thing at the same time can seem to be a good problem to have, the sometimes resulting problems can be simply bad.

I can say that I feel the pain of the thousands of people affected and would like to assure our customers that these types of issues will not happen with our service, as we’re constantly scaling our systems beyond our growth to make sure our service remains reliable.

Were any of our readers affected by this outage?
Lori Titus
November 28th, 2007 at 3:51 am

Shoot, Cyber Monday worked for me! I have a double opt-in system. I sent out my emails late Sunday night. I used a split broadcast - same mesasge, two different headers. One said - (first name), The Bee Folks has a unique deal for you. The other - (first name), here are your Cyber Monday Deals from The Bee Folks.

By Monday night, the cyber monday email was opened 10% more often than the other. I was getting orders faster as I could fill them.

Now (almost 4AM Wednesday), orders have finally slowed down. The cyber monday email is opened slightly more often than the other (I’m not certain statistically so), and the unique deals email has slightly more clickthroughs (again, I’m not certain it is statistically significant, but it is there).

I think my Cyber Monday email served its purpose. Now, I have an open house to advertise to my local list, two recipes to send out, a general newsletter, and the "last days of christmas" email to send out. Then a break until just after the holidays, when I remind my customers that they earned points at my store, and isn’t this a good time to redeem them for merchandise?

I do quite well, online, all the way from November through the end of January.
Marc Kline
November 28th, 2007 at 9:31 am

Lori,

I won’t argue with results! And just this morning I heard on the radio that Cyber Monday sales were up 20% over last years according to comScore.

But the same report highlighted the fact that it is hasn’t traditionally been the most busy or profitable online shopping day of the season. I think they mentioned December 13th as last year’s.

Because we have only a limited number of messages we can send without risking the integrity and effectiveness of our campaigns, my inclination would be to target this busy period that might tend more to slip under the radar of the other marketers we’re competing with for inbox real estate.

Again, this is simply my take on the event and the season, and it’s quite evident that other marketers are taking different approaches with success. Here’s wishing you the best this season!
Lori Titus
November 28th, 2007 at 6:55 pm

December 13 would be around the last day to place an order online and have it shipped parcel post with the possibility of the gift arriving by christmas. That is about the time I send out my last pre-christmas email, offering a free upgrade to priority mail up through christmas, as well as a reminder of the last day to purchase something, have it shipped priority or express, and still have it arrive on time…..

I think it completely depends upon your market, too. I believe my online clientle is typically young and very computer savvy, particularly since I’m using a double-opt-in system - the type of crowd that would be looking for an online cybermonday sale. If you just have a sign-up form, you are casting a wider net, and maybe you don’t get as much return on your emails as you would like to see. Or, if you are selling a service (like Carol’s business copywriting), you might not see the same peaks that the retail market does.

Ask me on December 20 what my most profitable day was, and I might have a different story to tell. I just think the season started off with a bang for me. (And as I wrote this, six more orders came in!)
Marc Kline
November 29th, 2007 at 10:32 am

Lori,

Yes, it’s important to acknowledge that not all businesses and markets see a peak in sales around the holiday season. Some even see a lull around this time.

And yet, since the holidays are on many of our minds, we feel inclined to send holiday themed messages nonetheless. I mean, in a way, it makes sense. One of the main goals of our email campaigns is to connect with the lives and thoughts of our subscribers.

But as Justin points out in his recent post, we should always be thinking of the primary value of the messages we’re sending. Sending holiday messages just because it’s that time of the year can actually *hurt* our campaigns.

Outside of our holiday greetings, anything we send this time of year should have value related to the subject matter of our campaigns. If this is the case, whether we’re in the retail business or not, we can connect with our readers with well thought out references to the holidays.

Thanks again for sharing your impressions and results from this season.