IBM Coremetrics has just added Cyber Monday 2011 data to their benchmark report I blogged about yesterday.

Here are the things that have caught my eye:

Cyber Monday 2011 — 5 Noteworthy Facts

1. Overall spending increase — Online sales were up 33% over 2010, 29.3% up over Black Friday 2011, and AOV (avergage order value) also went up from $193.24 to $198.26
2. Conversion rate — Overall conversion rate went up from 5.6% in 2010 to 5.71%, mobile seeing the best improvement (from 2.24% to 2.99%)
3. Mobile sales growth — Nearly 11% of people used a mobile device to visit e-tailers’ websites (up from some 4% last year), resulting in a nearly threefold growth in mobile sales (6.6% in 2011 vs 2.3% in 2010)
4. Social media part — While “discussions leading up to Cyber Monday increased in volume by 115% compared to 2010″, resuling in 0.93% of site traffic, only 0.56% of Cyber Monday shoppers were referred directly from social networks.
5. Facebook vs Twitter — Facebook referral traffic accounted for 0.8% of all e-tailers’ Cyber Monday traffic (up from 0.73% in 2010), while Twitter referred only 0.02% (down from 0.07% in 2010)

Important: All of the above reflects U.S. data.

To see what people have been buying (good data both for affiliates, and for merchants to review), especially in electronics — a niche that registered the highest growth – 26% over 2010 — see these lists by Larry Magid.

Make sure you also download IBM’s full 10-page Cyber Monday Report 2011 here [PDF file], which among other things also contains detailed information and 2011-vs-2010 comparisons of sales data in such categories as Apparel (one of the best in one-page bounce rates – 25.5%), Department Stores (champion in average session length – 8:18), Health and Beauty (best in conversion – 5.4%), and Home Goods (best 2011-over-2010 improvement – 68.4%, and largest AOV – $290.11).

According to the calculations of the National Retail Federation last year over 200 million consumers spent some $45 Billion on Black Friday. This year, eMarketer predicts that $47 Billion to be spent online during the holiday season in the U.S. alone. And historically, it so happens that holiday-related sales growth picks up right around the Black Friday, or the first Friday after Thanksgiving (yes, tomorrow!)

Over the past few days several interesting infographics — related to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Holiday Shopping — have been posted on/by various websites. Below you may find the five that have caught my digital marketer’s eye:

Black Friday & Cyber Monday
by SEO.com [source]

Consumer Fact Sheet
by Mashwork, Inc. and Hall & Partners [source]

Black Friday & Holiday Season Guide
by Skimlinks [source]

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Hacks & Scams
by Veracode [source]

Shop Safe on Black Friday & Cyber Monday
by Identity Hawk [source]

If you feel I’ve missed an important infographic that must be mentioned here, please add a URL to it through the “Comments” area below.

Happy  Thanksgiving, and here’s to a great Christmas shopping season!!

The History Channel defines Valentine’s Day as “a holiday that celebrates love observed by exchanging candy & gifts” [source]. And this morning — three weeks before the holiday — newsletters from a number of flowers- gifts- and chocolate-related merchants have landed in affiliate inboxes.

In their newsletters merchants are informing their affiliates of various sales and discounts, coupons and other offers to market to lovers this Valentine’s Day. But do they really know what their affiliates most want to know/have (to be able to market their products and promos effectively) before each holiday? Let me list the things that I believe to be especially important, and after that you can ask yourself: “am I showing love for my affiliates by supplying them with all of these?”

Before any holiday (not just Valentine’s Day), you want your affiliates to have 100% clarity on the following 5 things:

1. Holiday shipping schedule — It is integral that both your target audience and your affiliates know the exact cut off dates to get a gift in time for the holiday.

2. Promo dates — If you cannot let them know the exact promo details well in advance (for them not to start marketing it too early), make sure you equip them with the information on when exactly to expect the promo information.

3. Promo landing pages — Don’t ruin your good promo ideas by failing to put together dedicated promo landing pages, but having your affiliates send their targeted traffic just to your homepage. Learn about the 5 important elements of a promo landing page here, and make sure you each promo has its own landing page.

4. Good creatives — Each promo must have at least 3 creatives for affiliates to use: (i) a small size image (e.g. 88×31 px button), (ii) a larger size image (e.g. 125×125 px square banner), and (iii) a text link. If you want to offer other banner sizes, see what sizes are popular among affiliates here.

5. Clear descriptions — Finally, each promo must have two good descriptions: one — for the consumers (the information your affiliates will use to market the promo), and another one — for the affiliate (the information on any restrictions or special terms [e.g.: some merchants pay low or no commission on some promos -- a practice I don't support, and especially if it's not properly disclosed] your affiliates must be aware of).

If you’re reading this as an affiliate, and have something to add, I’d love to hear from you. Please use the “Comments” area below to add any thoughts. Many thanks in advance.

Earlier this morning ForeSee Results has released their 6th annual Holiday Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index, a ranking of the top 40 largest online retailers by revenue, scored on customer satisfaction by nearly 10,000 survey respondents. The “holiday” period is defined here as “the holiday shopping season from Thanksgiving through the last day of free shipping”.

Based on the survey results the top 7 performers of 2010 are:

• Amazon and Neflix (86 points each)
• QVC (84 points)
• Avon and LL Bean (83 points each)
• Newegg and Apple (82 points each)

The bottom of the list looks as follows:

• HomeDepot.com, Macys.com & OfficeMax.com (75 points each)
• Sears.com (74 points)
• TigerDirect.com (73 points)

Here are some other points I personally have found of interest in the ForeSeeResults’ report:

Customer Satisfaction with US Online Retailers: 2005-2010

What Are Satisfied US Customers More Likely to Do?

Amazon versus Walmart

Netflix versus Blockbuster

You may download the full 21-page Holiday Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index report here.

According to a ForeSee Results‘ holiday benchmark of shopper satisfaction with online retailers (released last week), the customer satisfaction has gone down since Cyber Monday 2010 (an expected tendency with Cyber Monday shopping incentives going away), but it is higher than it was a year ago during the post-Thanksgiving week:

Additionally, online shoppers are more satisfied with 2010 holiday prices than at they were in 2009:

Regardless of obvious improvements since last year, consumer “satisfaction with price still remains far below pre-recession levels, which was as high as 75.1 the week of Thanksgiving, 2007″ [source].

It is no secret that the difficult financial climate contributes a lot to the above figures. Online merchants have to adapt or lose sales. Those that do adapt smartly, take their bite off a better-than-last-year’s pie (not too long ago comScore reported that in the US alone holiday spending is already 12% up since last year, approaching $22 billion). Are you?

Yesterday from Shawn Collins post I’ve found out that the newest Coremetrics’ report on Black Friday 2010 online sales is out. This third annual “analysis of the online retail sector” outlined the trends in 2010 (as compared to Black Friday 2009), including the following bird’s-eye look at the state of online sales:

Online sales were up a healthy 15.9 percent, with consumers pushing the average order value (AOV) up from $170.19 to $190.80  for an increase of 12.1 percent. [more here]

16 percent consumer spending increase is a very healthy growth — well in tact with the 17% traffic growth (to Black Friday websites, in particular) that Experian Hitwise has reported a few days ago:

Looking at a retail affiliate program I manage, and comparing the actual affiliate-referred daily sale volumes we have noticed as much as a sixfold increase in sales starting as early as Tuesday (November 23, 2010), and the performance is still improving:

Comparing the Black Friday 2010 sales volumes to those in 2009 we have registered some 22% sales increase (from the same affiliates as in 2009) this year.

What are you registering in your affiliate marketing campaigns?

Now that the whole world is doing their holiday shopping, I thought it would be good to put together a collection of links to lists of 2010 holiday gifts that many online marketers (and affiliates, in particular) may find of help.

So, without further ado, here are the links to the list of the most wanted gifts this Christmas:

Holiday 2010 Gift Wish Lists

• The Most Wanted 2010 Holiday Gadgets — The top 3 for adults: notebook, iPad, eReader, while the top 3 for teens are: portable MP3 player, iPod, and video game console. See also the Top Tech Gifts Under $100 from ZDnet.

• 2010 Top Toys for Boys & Girls — Iron Man, Toy Story, and Zhu Zhu pets are among the new favorites

• Top 2010 Gifts for Men from LATimes.com — Interesting list of pretty unique gifts for men put together by Los Angeles Times.

• Holiday Gifts for Women from BaltimoreSun.com — A good collection of gifts for women put together by the Baltimore Sun.

• 2010 Holiday Gift Guide from New York Times — Multiple lists of books, DVDs, video games, netbooks and notebooks, and much more

• 20+ “Top 10 Holiday Gifts” lists from Yahoo — Multiple categories (fashion, electronics, computers, home & garden, toys, personal care, and much more)

• Holiday Gift Guide 2010 by CNET — Electronics gifts for the whole family segmented by categories.

If I have missed a list that must be here, please do post about it below (in the “Comments” area).

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner, and consumer interest (which started increasing as early as Summer this year) in both of these days and everything that’s connected with them is quickly growing.

Not sure if you know about it or not, but Google has an awesome tool for all of us who are interested in successful marketing during the holiday shopping season. It’s called ThinkHoliday:

If you’re not using it yet, I would highly recommend checking it out: both the real-time search trends shown above the fold, and the holiday shopping articles and webinars they have listed under the search trends. There’s a ton of great information there.

Coincidentally or not, but 3 of the 6 major US affiliate networks — and here I imply Commission Junction, LinkShare, buy.at, ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network and AvantLink — announced holiday deals and offers of their merchants on November 17, 2010. These are:

LinkShare affiliate network (in a blog post):

ShareASale affiliate network (internally through affiliate interface):
[Edit of 1:14 pm: ShareASale has just announced it in a blog post too]

and AvantLink affiliate network (in a blog post):

I haven’t seen Commission Junction announce anything like this. Neither have buy.at or Google Affiliate Network blogged about  anything similar. If they have, and I’ve missed it, please correct me. I know that individual merchants have been sending out notifications of their deals via email, but I haven’t seen those deals bring aggregated anywhere in one place on the latter three networks.

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Edit of 11/20/2010: Commission Junction has just added a visible link to their Holiday Success Center (seen by every affiliate upon logging into their account now):

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Edit of 11/22/2010: buy.at has also just posted a blog entry with Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals available at its merchants:

I know, more than likely this has been happening during previous years too, but this year I can witness it first-hand (a month ago I’ve opened affiliate accounts with all major affiliate networks) — multiple merchants are guilty of lousy advance planning and/or advance equipping of their affiliates with the necessary tools (and information) for the holiday shopping season 2010.

Here’s just one of many examples (highlighting mine):

3 of the 4 above-quoted promos started the day before this merchant has announced it to their affiliates. Now, I do understand that you do not want affiliates to start promoting your deals and promos in advance (because people will simply not buy until the date the promo/sale starts). However, giving your affiliates at least a few hours of advance notice is a must (if, of course, you care about them marketing your deals), especially during a season as busy for marketers as this.

I love what Walmart did this year. On November 5, they’ve announced their Holiday Campaign Calendar — to help affiliates “keep organized and up-to-date on all” Walmart’s holiday campaigns run in November-December 2010. The merchant’s affiliate newsletter continued explaining that from this Campaign Calendar affiliates will “at a glance… see what Holiday Campaigns will be live on the site, when you’ll receive banners and detailed Holiday item lists, key shipping dates and more”.

Here is that calendar (to enlarge, click on the images):

Definitely a great strategy for other merchants and affiliate program managers to borrow, and not only for the holiday shopping season(s) but for the entire year.