We have been consistently reminded of the fact that Christmas is upon us since well before even Halloween (at least it feels that way). Retailers and those who market for them seem to push forward the “start date” of the holiday season every year. For those of who don’t want to celebrate Christmas for a quarter of the year, the holiday shopping season typically begins the Friday after Thanksgiving on “Black Friday”.
Most retailers open extremely early and offer huge discounts for those who arrive in store. The day is typically marked by frantic attempts on the part of shoppers to snag the items they really want, which are finite in number and available at a deep discount. The term has been around for almost half a century and has been used to describe the shopping rush that kicks off retailers’ Christmas season.
For the last six years or so (according to Mashable), the Monday after Black Friday has become known as Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is the busiest shopping day of the year for online retailers, with consumers taking part in the massive discounts offered online. The term was only coined in 2005 when a slew of retailers noticed that their sales increased exponentially through their online storefronts, specifically on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Last year actually saw the first ever billion-dollar online shopping day in the United States. What are some of the reasons for this huge surge in online retail activity on this specific Monday?
According to Shop.org, the massive increase in online sales could be explained by the fact that those participating in online shopping have much faster and more secure Internet connections at work. Shoppers also might not have had the opportunity to get their shopping done over the extended holiday weekend and want to finish promptly.
In 2010, 88% of online merchants offered Cyber Monday discounts to customers, 63% had special email campaigns and 22% offered free shipping. People also purchase products from fairly specific retailers on Cyber Monday, with jewelry, consumer electronics, food & beverage, and furniture retailers seeing the largest percentage increase in their sales.
In just six short years after the term was first used, everyone is attempting to capitalize on the phenomena with retailers getting extremely creative in their marketing campaigns. Some retailers started Cyber Monday early, with what they titled Merry Monday (the Monday before Thanksgiving, Sofa Sunday (the Sunday after Thanksgiving meant for people laying on their couch to access online stores via their tablet), and Mobile Sunday (the highest grossing day of the holiday retail reason for consumers making purchases on their mobile).
Regardless of what you think about the oversaturation of Christmas-themed marketing, there is surely a deal out there for everyone. But how about people who can’t access the Internet at home or work, those who don’t sit in front of a computer all day, and those who have slower Internet than bandwidth shopping sites require to complete a transaction?
Perhaps the IVR providers of the world should unite to set up a new marketing holiday—IVR Tuesday—where everyone calls in from their landline, mobile, work phone or pay phone (if you can actually find one) to place their orders. This would not only make purchasing available to an even larger demographic of people but would offer a more personal experience, one-on-one with a retail associate,
While phone ordering is certainly not the new thing, retailers would do well to acknowledge that a vast majority of the population has access to phone lines, even more so than those with Internet connections.
