- November 27, 2018 -

First there's Black Friday.

Then comes Cyber Monday hot on its heels.

...except some evidently don't know their days of the week because I'm still getting emails today with subject lines like this: [ENDS AT MIDNIGHT] Art, Our Cyber Monday Sale Ends Tonight!

It's Tuesday, people!

Oh, by the way...I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving!

The highlight at the Basmajian house was my 86-year-old mother doing spot-on impersonations from My Cousin Vinny...accents and all.

...my 5'2" sweet mother.

...doing Vinny Gambino.

You get the idea 🙂

Back to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

One is all about retail and the other is all online...right?

Actually, there's a little more to it than that.

Black Friday was started back in the early 1950's to kickoff the Christmas shopping season. And since most people were off from work, it was a way to get them into the stores.

Then the Internet happened and Black Friday's reach had no limits.

Cyber Monday didn't start until 2005...when online retail decided to go toe-to-toe with the brick-and-mortar juggernaut that was Black Friday.

Why Cyber Monday instead of Cyber Saturday?

Turns out people like to shop on Monday when they're back in the office (supposedly working) with high-speed connections and printers. Hmm...

For consumers, there are no lines. No fighting for the last Baby Alive Potty Dance Baby Doll.

For consumers...stores pull out all the stops to capitalize on your FOMO.

Best Prices of the Year!!

This Sale Won't Be Repeated!

Bull-sh*t. For most businesses, every day is Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

Often the best deals are NOT on these two days of the year.

So watch the hype.

Don't travel on the Turnpike during rush hour.

If you use Google Maps while driving (I finally got Cheryl to use it...and she's the techie) you know that they come up with a route for you based on traffic, construction, accidents, etc.

Smart, right?

Yesterday...the Infusionsoft Facebook Groups and Support lines blew up with customers bitching and moaning that emails were late in being sent out.

Literally asking for compensation for all the sales they were missing.

(Despite doubling the processing power available for the servers that process and send emails, Infusionsoft was blamed for email providers like Outlook, Hotmail, and Comcast deferring incoming mail until they could get caught up on the deluge of email.)

Good grief...if the highways are at a standstill, reroute your mail!

In other words, if the whole world is sending emails screaming "Buy my stuff today or you'll miss out!" then TRY OTHER MEDIA!

There's direct mail, texts, phone.

Back when I was cutting my teeth on marketing (mortgage days) I followed Dan Kennedy's concepts to the letter.

If you want to deliver your message to just about everyone on your list you need to go multi-media.

And that was long before Cyber Monday hit the scene.

The ability to use other medias is largely driven by business math. Can you afford to communicate in ways beyond email?

If you can, you should.

If you can't...you should change your business so you can.

While everyone was pissed off yesterday...

...either from getting bombarded with spam from every Tom, Dick and Harry.com or from having a coronary because their emails weren't going out fast enough...

I picked up the damn phone.

Sometimes you just have to follow a different route.

Multi-media is our strong suit.

Talk soon,

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