Cyber What Day?

On Tuesday, MediaPost ran an article about whether or not using terms like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are really effective marketing strategies. Coincidentally, I had been wondering the same thing, and had done an informal survey of some friends who are not in the retail or marketing fields to see what they thought.

The results weren’t that surprising to me. Basically, Black Friday and Cyber Monday were seen as advertising fluff. They didn’t increase motivation for shopping, and no one really knew the origin of the terms. The main motivator was whether or not an item was on sale for a good price.

Having said that, Black Friday and Cyber Monday were pretty successful for retailers this year. GSI Commerce said that on the more than 100 retailer sites they operate, at the peak operating time, consumers placed 789 orders per minute, up 60% from last year. Cyber Monday saw the highest traffic, with the busiest time being between 9 and 10pm, rather than during the lunch hour, followed by Black Friday, which saw activity starting earlier than ever, with shoppers going online between midnight and 6am.

Retailers relied heavily on e-mail to get both online and in-store traffic over the holiday weekend. According to the Retail Email Blog, e-mail volume was at an all time high, with retailer participation on Black Friday tracking 10% higher than 2008, Cyber Sunday up 9% (making it the highest volume Sunday ever) and Cyber Monday up 1% over 2008 levels. You can download a report of their findings from Smith Harmon’s Web site.

I would be interested to see if any retailers did subject line testing for their Thanksgiving holiday e-mails to see if using percent or dollar off language got more opens, clicks and conversions than using Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Let me know if you hear of any!