Cyber Monday Background

Today is Black Friday in the U.S. Shoppers searching for bargains lined up at stores earlier than ever before. Major chains such as J.C. Penney were open at 4 o’clock this morning. I can’t think of a discount that makes me get up at 3:15 to arrive at the mall by 4 a.m. when the temperature is below freezing. Maybe free laptops would do the trick for me, but maybe not.

Many shoppers apparently feel the same way, and the companion phrase “Cyber Monday” was born. Wikipedia sources association Shop.org with coining the phrase, and that group’s latest press release proudly accepts the credit. The trade association says that its survey of 7,800 adults showed that 54 percent would shop for holiday gifts from the office, up from 50 percent last year and 44 percent the year before.

Much like the old political saw, a billion [search queries] here and a billion [search queries] there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

You may likely taken most of these steps already. If you missed one, however, consider this checklist and cherry-pick the items appropriate for your business.

Cyber Monday Prep

If you are running an ecommerce shop, you’ve locked down your campaign for days. You are hopefully even running the sale today. If you’re waiting until Monday, here is a short checklist for you that involves the whole organization.

1. Begin with the premise that this involves the whole organization. As the marketer, you’re simply coordinating their efforts, but you need to be in charge.
2. Give a “sneak peek” to the coupon and free sites like FatWallet.com on Sunday. They will quickly find the hole in your terms and conditions. I know a tech guy who has taken multiple campaigns for hundreds of dollars each because they forgot to exclude gift certificates or their terms and conditions were too loose. Beta with this group of early adopters who are smart before Monday.
3. If you ramped up your PPC, make sure that you or someone who understands PPC is standing by the server logs to see where your traffic is coming from. If something goes viral (and you’ll quickly see that with traffic to your landing page originating from email and forums), try briefly dialing down your PPC briefly, especially CPM buys. You can always ramp it right back up, but don’t cannibalize your viral and organic traffic with paid traffic)
4. Make sure your IT folks are standing by and have a backup for bandwidth and order processing. How many orders are you projecting, and more importantly, can your systems handle X orders simultaneously? What is the backup? Can IT hotswap clean up a development server and make it your backup production server?
5. Do the customer facing employees know any special offers up and down? What about the contingencies? Ask your customer service leader to take the three best reps and role play every far-fetched question they can think of. Better to document issues like stacking coupons, order sizes, shipping to APO/FPO boxes or U.S. territories and so forth now.
6. Do you have backup creative and offers ready to be patched in if your initial creative falls flat? This is a biggie. If you’re advertising widgets for $X plus free shipping and a national chain rolls out $X-Y plus free shipping, the best keyword list in the world won’t save you.
7. Assuming your front-end works, how does the back-end look? Is distribution or fulfillment ready and staffed? What about the folks who handle your email queues?
8. Many special offers have special return and cancellation policies. Do yours? If they do, does Accounting understand them, and more importantly, do Accounting’s systems support them? The conversation you don’t want to have is with the CFO on December 6after the books didn’t close on December 5 because the Accounting staff is manually processing orders for your campaign.
9. For a nice complete list and a cool headline, this list should have 10 items. I missed one too. I may have missed more than one and obviously didn’t address industry specific issues. Be ready, be flexible, wear a smile and bring doughnuts for breakfast and pizza for lunch.
   

Hanukkah starts in 12 days, and Christmas is in 32 days. Make that 11 1/2 and 31 1/2. I love this time of year when the rollercoaster spins into an upside down loop. I hope you do and have a great season if this time of year is your big season to sell.