Cyber Monday: industry reaction

This year’s Black Friday was huge for retailers with an estimated £555.5 million of online sales, and Cyber Monday looks set to be even bigger. For me, the winning retailers will be those who provide customers with a great online user experience and particularly, who have taken a mobile-first approach.

For example, they are the sites that have removed the clutter, provided clear signposting, shortened the user journey and given users a sense of control over the experience. They are the ones who offer multi-channel support, provide clear price comparison and guest check out giving users confidence in their purchasing decision.

It’s widely accepted that users abandon poorly designed websites within the first 10 seconds of landing, so it’s clear to see how a clunky online customer experience will drive people away.

Another point to consider is that online spend via mobile devices reached over £196 million on Black Friday and it’s been predicted that smartphones and tablets will account for over half of all traffic to retail websites during the festive season. So retailers lacking a mobile-optimised website are likely to miss a huge opportunity.

There’s so much competition for online retailers particularly around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so gaining cut through by engaging users from the outset becomes even more important.

Cyber Monday is set to be bigger than ever before, and internet connected devices the top sellers this Christmas. There are big implications for marketers; the previous few years’ sales have made it imperative for publishers to move to a mobile first strategy for their titles.

Likewise, we will need to be agile in interpreting what the biggest sellers this year will mean for media consumption. Indeed, Christmases might become a seasonal kink, determining where the smart money goes and in some cases demanding a change of plans.

Cyber Monday and Black Friday offer online retailers the opportunity to extend their reach and acquire new customers. Like all new customers there is a cost (in this case sizeable discounts) to acquire them. The competitive advantage will come to those brands who can transform these new one off bargain hunters into long term loyal customers. That poses several challenges to marketing teams.

At one level it requires an integrated and seamless customer experience across all channels, especially as more customers turn to mobile to carry out transactions. But to create long term and sustainable growth brands need to turn an initial commodity relationship into a brand led active engagement.

This can be as simple as delivering high-quality and relevant real-time content through social channels or by creating a sequential transactional journey and expanding their offers to prolong the shopping period.

Cyber Monday is an interesting phenomenon – a trend that manifested years ago in the US to encourage people to shop online post-Thanksgiving, and has since become routine.

In 2005, the trend made its debut in the UK, and even though Thanksgiving is not celebrated here, Cyber Monday still happens.

Marketers have named the phenomenon well, and promoted it heavily, turning it into some kind of social norm that even people outside the US want to be part of – a perfect example of the herd instinct.

Cyber Monday, like Black Friday, has become part of marketers’ toolkits and indeed any other “invented” marker in the calendar. It takes on a self-fulfilling prophecy in that everyone expects this to be the busiest shopping day online, and so it becomes, only adding to the trend established in the US.

Creating this “event” in the calendar to promote additional spending is immensely powerful for retailers.

Setting false prices so you can discount is something the general public is becoming used to – it happens to me every Saturday in Sainsbury’s. But sooner or later the buying public will grasp the game of ‘discount chicken’ that days like Cyber Monday and Black Friday create and just keep its purse shut until the next cut-price period; just look at the furniture industry and the impact of the ever-present DFS sale.

This raises two questions. One, what brand value does delivering short-term advantage to a consumer actually bring? And two, does this mean the modern brand will learn to speak with a forked tongue – one language for the full-price paying elite and one for the discounted masses?