Not since 2008 has Cyber Monday fallen into December, and in 2013 it occurs a mere 23 days prior to Christmas versus the more expansive 29 days last year. Those six lost days actually represent over 20% of that selling season which has vanished into the crisp holiday season air and marketers simply have to work harder in order to keep their critical year-end sales from taking a dive as compared to last year.

Expand to a Cyber Week

The answer seems to be found in the ever increasing adoption of Cyber Week to drastically extend the Black Friday to Cyber Monday cycle. By focusing on an entire week to propel your technology sales, you face the prospect of being able to expand your sales in this critical period. A longer campaign won’t necessarily translate to automatically greater sales as you’ll have to take a good long hard look at your entire Cyber Week marketing strategy to ensure that it is as efficient as you can make it.

Check off the 7 key boxes

Your Cyber Week campaign will stand a greater chance of success if it checks off all these top seven key boxes:

  1. Bundle ‘em up. Not only do bundles provide “turn-key gifts” but the discounts on each individual item can be totaled up to impress the customer with an even greater total amount of savings than if they were to shop for the items individually.
  2. Don’t stop at free shipping. Cyber Week shoppers are taking the concept of not paying for shipping as a given, so you have to come up with an innovative way of attracting their attention. Look at the possibility of faster shipping also being provided free of charge, or a courier method which provides the product delivery earlier in the day.
  3. Extend service & support. Many Cyber Week buys are impulsive so if you are able to reassure your customers that you will not only support their purchase through outstanding customer service but that you will also provide extended or premium support or warranty at no extra charge, you’ll automatically eliminate a stumbling block to purchasing.
  4. Focus on loss leaders. Clearance, discontinued, and open box items will tend to draw in the Cyber Week shopper and once on your site they very often gravitate to your conventional new offers with full warranties and the assurance that they haven’t already been wrecked by some crazy kid.
  5. Multiple deals for multiple segments. Review every aspect of your email list segments for all pertinent factors, including demographic and behavior. The older buyer of the $2,000 home theatre will not have much use for your pre-teen targeted $9.99 mp3 player offer.
  6. Random specials. There are very few “tricks of the trade” which will grab your customers’ attention than having specials that pop up at random throughout the site at all times of the day during Cyber Week. The prospect of getting a “killer deal” on a particular item will lead to increased dwell times on your site, and we all know that translates into more checkouts.
  7. Specific exclusive social media offers. Give your followers and fans a justification for their loyalty to you through their social networks by providing special offers which are only available through Facebook, Twitter, and the other locations where you engage them.

As an online marketer you will certainly be aware that Thanksgiving is well on the way to becoming a massive technology shopping day on its own. On the 2012 Thanksgiving sales were up by a staggering 32 percent from the previous year and a similar boost is expected this year. In order to gobble up as many of those Turkey Day and adjoining date sales as you can, you must take a good long look at the tyranny of the 2013 calendar as it presents these troubling variances from most other years. However, not all is lost as you can increase the density of your Cyber Week campaign in order to maximize your sales volumes per day. Do it right and you’ll exceed even last year’s stellar sales results!