Happy Monday: The Importance of Mondays This Holiday

Happy Monday! Does it really grind your gears when someone arrives in the office Monday morning bright-eyed and bushy tailed and greets you with a resounding “Happy Monday!”? If so, please give this person a break because he/she is right. During the holiday season we have a lot to be happy about on Mondays.

Mondays seem to bring out the shopper in all of us - especially online. According to ComScore, during the last holiday season two of the top three days for purchases from Retail websites were Mondays, including Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving, which will be November 30th this year).
But why limit ourselves to Mondays? Fridays are pretty happy too. Last year, conversion rates for Retail websites were higher on Black Friday than Cyber Monday [1] (although total e-commerce sales were higher on Cyber Monday according to Comscore). It’s interesting that the day best known for the image of ravenous shoppers stampeding through the doors at the local mall was actually a banner day online as well.

So where do I focus my marketing efforts this holiday season? Online or in-store? How about the place our good friend Avinash calls the nonline world (he got the term from David Hughes). This is the place where consumers live, aka the real world, where purchase decisions are not linear and certainly not channel exclusive. In the nonline world customers move back and forth between channels and each stop influences the final purchase. In the nonline world web and store are not mutually exclusive. To the customer all channels coexist and commingle peacefully. The consumer lives in the nonline world and therefore the retailer must also live in the nonline world with an integrated strategy free from the curse of “organizational silos”.

The most important thing to do is to prepare for everyday from Black Friday through to the shipping cut off to be happy online, offline and nonline.

[1] Source: Google/Compete Daily Search Barometer, 11/2009. Based on visits to top 450 Retail websites.

Posted by Emma Weisberg, the Google Retail Team