But does Cyber Monday live up to its hyper? What’s the deal with Cyber Monday? We’ve collected over 50 stats about 2011’s most anticipated online shopping day.

Consumer Behavior

Cyber Monday turnout

Source: PriceGrabber

Sales are projected by ComScore to hit a record $1.2 Billion.

Top reasons US adults will shop online for holiday gifts

Source: Ebates

Holiday shoppers believe online shopping beats in-store, with:

Source: Ebates

Some dread in-store holiday shopping so much, they find themselves releasing their angst with some pretty bad behavior, such as:

Source: Ebates

Price trumps brand this year. Specific store names are not as important as pricing and promotions. The following reflects what percentage of holiday shoppers rated decision-making factors as at least “somewhat important:”

Source: Ebates

How does the economy impact holiday shopping plans this year?

Source: Ipsos Research and DaliyDeals.com / Offers.com

The importance of comparison shopping:

Source: Ipsos Research and DaliyDeals.com / Offers.com

When will Cyber Monday shopping hit its peak?

Source: PriceGrabber

Cyber Monday in Canada

Though Black Friday is really an American thing (Canadians celebrate their turkey day in October — another reason why geographic segmentation for holiday emails is a good idea), awareness about Cyber Monday is growing north of the border. According to PayPal Canada, 52% of Canadians are aware of Cyber Monday, an increase of 24% over last year. This is good news for US e-tailers, as research shows average order values tend to be higher for Canadian orders (perhaps because of duties, taxes and shipping charges, smaller ticket items may not justify additional expense). FiftyOne reports 2010’s AOV for Canadian baskets was US $186.

Aside from Cyber Monday madness, 35% of Canadians aged 18-34 plan to do some or all of their shopping online. A major motivator is saving time. The average Canadian believes online shopping with shave an 8 hour gift hunt down to 4.3. Considering the average Canadian values his or her time at $32.10 ($9 more than the average hourly wage), that’s a savings of ~$100.

Source: Ipsos Reid / PayPal Canada

Does social media matter?

Source: Deloitte LP

Retailer Behavior

Source: Shop.org

Tips for post-Cyber Monday

1. Plan for Green Monday. The Monday after Cyber Monday has historically been the second highest sales day of the year, some years it even edged out Cyber Monday. http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/online-holiday-spend-nears-22b-15341/comscore-holiday-spend-10-heaviest-days-dec-2010jpg/ “Green Monday” is definitely an industry insider term, so don’t confuse customers with Green Monday deals, but think of other ways to capitalize on the consumer trend.
2. Review your site search data to sniff out what products are in demand, and consider merchandising home pages with these products more often.
3. Have a plan for OOS (out of stock) products. Whether that’s merchandising the page with product suggestions, pausing PPC ads or cleaning your shopping engine feed.

Here’s wishing you a record holiday season!

Here are 7 eleventh hour tactics you can use to squeeze the most dollars out of your holiday traffic this year.

1. Optimize for speed

Site performance matters. Fix the little things. Google has a new tool that will give you an itemized, quantified and prioritized to-do list that can help you speed up your page loads. This is especially important when your servers are hit hard by traffic spikes, and can reduce your bounce rates (which ultimately impacts conversion rate) and improve customer experience.

2. Check your calls to action

Review your email campaigns, make sure each creative has a clear call to action. Yes, I blogged about this last week. Have you started?

3. Run a quick A/B test

Quick means 2 things: the test does not require heavy development or design resources, (and layers of approvals), and can be completed quickly (uncomplicated A/B test with no more than 3 or 4 test versions).

You may have heard advice against testing when external bias (such as the holiday shopping season) can be introduced mid-test, which is why I suggest testing at the beginning of your traffic spike. This may be Black Friday or even earlier. You know it’s holiday traffic, so there is no bias if you start at the beginning of the rush. The volume will also help your test reach statistical significance faster than in the off-season.

What should you test? Why not the call to action button? It requires very little design and development help. Here are 3 ideas:

If your button matches your site theme, try a contrasting color to make it stand out. (Remember your color wheel: red/green, yellow/purple, blue/orange).

Or, try an unusual shape.

How about doing double duty with your call to action? Include it at the top and bottom of your cart summary box.

4. Overcommunicate shipping offers

Time and time again, consumer surveys show customers crave free shipping. If you offer it, flaunt it. Everywhere. But especially in your header area.

Too discreet?

Bold!

5. Show alternative payment options on your product page

Is it enough to plaster PayPal icons on shopping cart pages? Knowing if you accept PayPal, Bill Me Later or Google Checkout on product pages could push more shoppers to click that shiny Add to Cart button.

6. Participate in Google Adwords Remarketing

Last week we looked at email remarketing programs. Remarketing with Google Adwords is slightly different — rather than send a follow up email, you follow your site abandoner to websites that participate in Google’s display advertising program.

Sure, it’s a bit creepy. But behavioral targeting is the wave of the future, and you can’t get any more relevant advertising than targeting someone who’s already visited your site and taken some action. This topic deserves its own post, so stay tuned, next post we’ll dive deeper into remarketing strategies. (Don’t worry, we won’t follow you to Facebook).

1. Make it Clear, Make it Quick People are more rushed than usual during the holidays. If you don’t already have the most important features/benefits of your products outlined in bullet points, do it now. This will allow your shoppers to make quick work of gift-giving decisions and let you rack up more sales.

2. Remind Shoppers of Gift Potential While you might be tired of writing the phrase “makes a great gift,” shoppers need to be reminded. The purchase of one collegiate replica football could quickly turn into two if your customer suddenly remembers that her nephew is also a big sports fan. Alternate verbiage you can use includes “perfect for gift giving,” “a unique holiday/Christmas gift,” “great Christmas/holiday gift idea,” or “they’ll love finding this under the tree.”

3. Highlight Popular Holiday Benefits Easy returns, no assembly required, one size fits all and free shipping (to and/or from the recipient) top the charts this time of year. Any benefits your ecommerce site (or the individual products you carry) offers that will help ensure gift satisfaction and easy exchanges/refunds should be made obvious.

4. Offer Gift Cards or Certificates – According to The Washington Post, 2010 saw gift card sales totaling $91 billion. That number is predicted to reach $100 billion by 2012. In addition to being a quick gift solution for shoppers, you benefit when the recipient comes back to redeem his/her card. Chances are, they’ll spend more than the face value of the voucher.

5. Leverage Customer Reviews

Real owners of products often have insights that manufacturers, marketers and retailers don’t about the product’s pros and cons, unexpected uses (remember Shania Twain’s udder cream skin regime?) and complementary products (e.g. “the included sponge is great for heavy application, but you can wear it sheer if you apply it lightly with a fluffy brush like Mac 129″). Mine your own reviews, head to Amazon or check out review aggregators like Buzzillions if you’re short on customer reviews.

6. Romance Your Website

Your product description romances the product, but each product page is a potential entry page to your site. Don’t just put your brand value props on the home page, but feature them on every product, search, category and shopping cart page.

7. Test 404 Pages

Don’t lose customers on 404s! Testing 404 page copy can have a major impact on conversion lift and revenue per visitor, as Mountain Equipment Co-op discovered when it added friendly, apologetic messaging to it’s Not Found page.

8. Post-Purchase Thank You

Don’t just take customers to a generic “thank you” page after purchase. Say something! Ask to keep in touch through email sign up or social media, encourage them to keep browsing with product suggestions, offer a coupon for re-purchase within X days, or ask them to rate their customer experience with a short survey.

This post is a collaboration, tips 1-4 were contributed by the fabulous Karon Thackston, SEO copywriting expert and author of Wordtracker’s Ecommerce Copywriting: Proven Strategies for Boosting Sales & Search Rankings. Thank you Karon!

Looking for help with ecommerce site optimization? Contact the Elastic Path consulting team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our conversion optimization services can improve your business results.

1. Do all your holiday emails have a clear call to action?

“Seasons Greetings” may give customers the warm fuzzies, but unless there’s some action for your recipient to take, you send your email in vain. Inboxes are flooded with promotional and personal email this time of year, always offer something of value.

Contextual links and image links are fine, but they should be designed in a way that they clearly direct readers to the desired action to take. In doubt? Run your creative through Five Second Test and see if test users understand what to click.

Even if your email is non-transactional (rather, informational), there should be a big, juicy, clickable element that takes the customer to your website.

2. Are calls to action prioritized?

Every link is a potential call to action, including social sharing buttons. But they shouldn’t steal the spotlight. Make sure the CTAs (calls to action) that take subscribers to your site are featured more prominently.

3. Does every featured product photo contain context?

Many retail emails merchandise product with images, without a clue of what lies behind them. What product categories lay behind these photos? Are they selling chairs or blankets? Cutting boards or kitchenware?

Images need to look clickable and visually describe the landing pages they point to.

Giggle’s headline describes the overall theme (holiday travel), and the products are romanced with a bit of persuasive, descriptive text.

4. Do gift finder emails target gift recipient “personas”?

For her, for him, for kids 7-9, for your boss, for the girl who has everything – focus your gift suggestions around recipients to help solve your shopper’s problem – what to get {fill in the blank}.

This isn’t a die-hard must-have, but it adds value to your merchandising, further giving context to your suggestions.

5. Do you have a value proposition or free shipping offer?

Value propositions are key to persuasion. You’re competing against a lot of other retailers (in both search engines and inboxes), so reminding why shopping with you is the best choice is as important as showcasing products and offers – if not more.

If you have a good UVP (unique value proposition), milk that thing for all it’s worth. Don’t let your customer forget it. Other value props like free shipping, overnight shipping options, generous return policies and guarantees are also important. Use whatever you’ve got. And get creative. Chocomize boasts of its booster the Today Show.

6. Do you have a link to your holiday shipping cutoff tool?

Some retailers send a dedicated email that explains shipping updates (no merchandising). I recommend at least some offer or featured product (remember always have a clickable CTA) if you’re going to send such an email. But these emails are unnecessary if you simply include a banner that spells out your shipping options and cutoff dates.

An advanced move is to dynamically update the banner as cutoff draws nearer. The number of days remaining or available options can update as cutoff days expire.

7. Are you leveraging social proof?

Ratings! Reviews! Likes! Sales data! People want to know what’s hot, and Uncommon Goods is an uncommonly creative example of merchandising with social proof.

8. Have you considered “shop for yourself” messaging?

It’s better to give than to receive, but we still shop for ourselves during the holidays. Encourage both types of purchase intent during your campaign. Sometimes you can sneak them into one email.

9. Do you have a last-minute gift plan?

It’s common practice to push online gift certificates after the shipping cutoff date. They come with instant delivery and free shipping (naturally). Not to mention, gift card holders typically spend more or less than face value, you can’t lose.

10. Have you tested on mobile devices?

Ready or not, a good chunk of your emails are read on mobile devices. Many get smartphones primarily for the perk of reading emails on the go. Keep up. Design for and test email rendering on major mobile devices.

11. Have you cleaned your list?

Your list should be scrubbed regularly to remove hard bounces and inactive subscribers who have not responded to win-back/reactivation campaigns. Your list hygiene factors in your sender reputation and your delivery rate, so make sure you’re squeaky.

Also make sure you honor unsubscribes. Opt-outs may increase over the holidays as your email frequency increases or the content of your email changes. A preference center for unsubscribers can help save those who simply want to opt-out of your holiday campaigns or reduce frequency.

12. Have you planned a “get what you really wanted” or “New Year’s Resolution” campaign?

*Example emails are sourced from 2 great, free resources on retail email design if you’re looking for inspiration: Aweber’s Email Marketing Christmas Lookbook and Responsys’ Email Design Look Book. Check ‘em out!

Looking for help with ecommerce site optimization? Contact the Elastic Path consulting team at consulting@elasticpath.com to learn how our conversion optimization services can improve your business results.