The Cyber Five (Thanksgiving - Cyber Monday) this year broke all kinds of records and was an interesting departure from years past in several ways.  In this episode I welcome back to the podcast my business partner, Chris Brewer. We look at this holiday shopping season from a few different perspectives.  We talk in general terms about how our clients who are mostly in the $5 to $50 Million per year in sales did during the Cyber 5 and after. We also looked at trends and data from the largest ecomm companies.  

By the numbers….a Look at the Industry as a Whole.  

Here are just a few of the highlights we look at in this episode.

• Thanksgiving weekend was up 23% - total spend was $24.2 billion.  Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.
• Mobile spend was $10 billion of that (approaching half) and that’s up 44% from last year.  So doubling the growth rate of the holiday trend as a whole.
• Main Drivers of online sales
• • Email at 26% - up 2% YoY
  • Paid Search at 22% - up 6% YoY
  • Social - minimal impact 1.3% of sales….(remember this stat is from the big guys, not mid-sized companies).
  
  

Surprises from our clients:

• Black Friday was our clients biggest day by a long shot with Cyber Monday finishing 2nd.
• Social continues to be a big investment for our clients but getting the same results as last year has been difficult mainly due to rising ad costs.
• YouTube big as well - one of the top 3 channels for several of our clients.

Winning Formula:

We talk about what our most successful clients did well so you can properly plan for next year.  We look at several winning tactics including:

• Email - build, cultivate and prime your email list for Cyber 5.  Multiple email reminders - often 3 per day.
• Start early - Wednesday even.  We found our most successful clients started sales or at least started promoting sales early. Consumers have finite dollars to spend, get their attention early and you’ll have a better chance to grab your share of wallet.
• Build your retargeting audiences early - our clients who had the most success had large lists of people who’ve visited their site in the past or viewed a YouTube video who we could then retarget.