Is your site ready for Christmas shoppers?

An Accenture survey forecasts that folks will be shopping for Christmas earlier this year, with 69 percent planning to complete the bulk of their holiday shopping by Dec. 7th. Too, consumers are more deal-oriented than ever before, with 25% of them expecting at least 50 percent discounts before they buy.

According to a Gallup survey, the Christmas spending forecast is down slightly this year, with consumers planning to spend $740 on gifts compared to $801 as per surveys taken at the same time last year.

With more merchants competing for fewer dollars, the deals are going to be phenomenal. In fact, merchants have already started to lower their prices to get a leg up on the competition.

Sears launched a campaign on October 31st, called “Black Friday Now” with deep discounts happening every Saturday from now until Christmas.

Saturdays???

‘Black Friday’, which falls on the day after American Thanksgiving (November 27th) is the first day of the Christmas season and is usually the busiest shopping day of the year… offline.

‘Cyber Monday’ is the Monday after Thanksgiving. The term was first used by Shop.org, whose research showed that 77% of online retailers reported a significant increase in sales on that day.

So what does that tell us?

That we’d better plan to get our affiliate sites and PPC campaigns ready for the Christmas shopping rush earlier than ever. I’ve noticed that folks are talking about Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals on consumer sites already. In fact,

So, although the big Christmas shopping days are still almost a month away, you need to get your site and PPC campaigns ramped up now.

1. Start checking the networks now for Black Friday deals. Here are 2 examples … Black Friday at Overstock.com and Big Savings, No Blarney: Book a Black Friday Round-Trip Flight to Ireland from $278 on Aer Lingus! (Expires 12/31/09)
2. Make sure that you are receiving merchant emails. Many merchants have their 2009 holiday shopping catalogs online and are already pumping out Black Friday and Cyber Monday ‘deal’ notices to their affiliates. Unless you are in the habit of checking each network’s interface daily, turn on email notifications or you may miss some really great deals that you could be passing on to your customers.
3. Contact your affiliate manager directly. If you have a working relationship with your affiliate manager, phone him or her and get the low-down on the best seasonal deals and best-converting offers.
4. Decorate for Christmas. Pretty up your site with holiday graphics and pictures of happy shoppers. Just acknowledging the season with a ‘Happy Holidays’ header or a “Your One-Stop Christmas Shop” graphic will show your spirit and get your customers in the mood to shop.
5. Put up a ‘Black Friday Deals’ page… or pages. Draw visitors deeper into your site with the promise of special savings opportunities.
6. Do the legwork. Compare and contrast the deals that your merchants are offering. Sifting through a myriad of sites and offers is time-consuming. Save your potential customers time and effort by explaining the difference between offers on the same product. For example, show how that company that charges slightly more for a product but offers ‘free shipping’ will save them money in the long run.
7. Create urgency. Let your visitors know that these deals will not last by including offer expiry dates in your copy. Put up an “x number of Days ‘Til Christmas’ countdown ticker on your site, eg.
   You can find the “Till Christmas” code at Javascript Made Easy
8. Set up your PPC campaigns well in advance. Drive targeted traffic to your Black Friday deals pages with pay per click advertising.
9. Touch base regularly. Now’s the time to put your autoresponder to best use by increasing the frequency of contact with your subscribers. Let them know that you’re doing the legwork to find them the very best deals of the season. Let them know what’s new and hot in your niche and tell them to stay on the lookout for more notices from you with sizzling deals.
10. Seal the deal with great copy. Go beyond price points and convince your visitors that the products you’re promoting make great gifts with tantalizing copy. For example, when describing spa or jewelery gifts for women, use words and phrases such as, ie. pamper her, soothing, relaxing, unique, innovative, hand-picked, romantic, heart-touching, romantic and indulgent. Be sure to stress the benefits to the gift-giver as well, eg. “she’ll thank you again and again for…“.

Keep these suggestions in mind as you prepare your site for the 2009 holiday season – and you’ll thank me for your increased conversions this year!

In a December 3rd press release, Comscore resported that Cyber Monday saw $846 million in online spending. Although spending over the holiday season to date ($12.03 billion) is down by 2% from last year, Cyber Monday’s online sales were up by a whopping 15% over 2007 sales. Take a look at the following screenshot where you’ll note that the preceding weekend also saw a jump in online sales by 19% over last year.

With online sales up marginally on Black Friday and significantly on Cyber Monday, analysts are still predicting a decline in the months to come. Considering that the job loss stats out today report 533,000 more jobs in the U.S. were lost in November – the biggest decline since 1974 – the outlook could look pretty grim.

HOWEVER, that depends entirely on what you are selling. For example, this is probably not the best time to start a new jewelry site. Want to know what you should sell? Read 8 Recession-Proof Product & Service Ideas for Affiliates… and stay tuned for more great recession-proof niches and product ideas. Let’s prove the analysts wrong!

Although it was suggested that my rosey outlook for online spending this holiday season was overly optimistic and perhaps even quite naive, early results indicate that Black Friday shoppers have seen the light – opting to stay home and shop online instead.

(Not to mention that they also saved time, energy, verhicle wear & tear, shipping costs and a whole lot of stress!)

In a press release this morning, comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, reported its tracking of holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 28 days of the November – December 2008 holiday season.

For the holiday season-to-date, $10.41 billion has been spent online, marking a 4-percent decline versus the corresponding days last year, while Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1 percent. For the combination of Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, online sales were up 2 percent relative to last year.

So much for the meltdown. Now bring on Cyber Monday!

First there’s Black Friday, then Cyber Monday and on Linda Buquet’s blog today, I learned about yet another day in the holiday season: eDay.

eDay is a term coined by Coremetrics™ as the top sales day of the Christmas season.

San Mateo, Calif.—November 6 , 2006—Coremetrics™, the leading provider of on-demand web analytics and precision marketing solutions, today released data dispelling the marketing myth that “Cyber Monday,” the Monday after Thanksgiving, is the largest online shopping day of the holiday season. With 2006 U.S. holiday eCommerce forecast data from its LIVEmark benchmarking service, Coremetrics advises retailers to expect their highest traffic day to be Cyber Monday, and the top sales day one week after Cyber Monday, which falls this year on December 4th. Coremetrics predicts that sales on this date, which it has coined “eDay,” will be 19% higher than “Cyber Monday,” and that 2006 overall holiday retail sales will increase 16% over last year’s holiday season.

Read the rest of the press release.

And let’s not forget that there’s RosDay coming on December 11th… but more about that tomorrow.

Whatever the day, every day during the holiday season is a great day for affiliate marketing.