Cyber Monday Marketing, Black Friday Marketing for Auto Parts

New ideas for Cyber Monday auto parts deals

A few years back we participated in a free webinar on online holiday shopping with Web Shop Manager. It made sense to update this with Cyber Monday marketing ideas for 2020. As the holiday selling season approaches you’ll want to prepare your Black Friday email marketing. You’ll also want to plan for your Cyber Monday auto parts deals. Go into the Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) shopping season fully prepared!

Best holiday shopping days for auto parts

CLICK TO ENLARGE: Cyber Monday marketing ideas are great but also extend beyond that date into other days in December.

Here’s a calendar showing the best online shopping days for 2020. In general, Cyber Monday, plus the first three Mondays in December, are the most important online shopping days for auto parts in the holiday shopping season. In 2020, Cyber Monday is November 30.

The first three Tuesdays in December are also important for auto parts deals: Dec. 1, 8 and 15.

Watch for a lot of shopping activity on Sundays in 2020. Nov. 29, Dec. 6, 13 and 20 should be very busy on auto parts websites.

Historically, the first Monday after New Year’s Day is also good, as consumers are shopping for clearance specials on auto parts and truck parts.

More Cyber Monday marketing ideas

Here are more suggestions for your Cyber Monday and Black Friday marketing promotions.

• Plan to add any promotions to your Google Merchant Center feed so your Black Friday Cyber Monday sale shows up in Google Shopping.
• Create any Black Friday or Cyber Monday marketing pages soon enough to give search engine bots enough time to crawl and index them.
• Check your robots.txt file and your meta data to make sure you’re not blocking search engines from crawling and indexing these pages.
• Follow search engine optimization (SEO) best practice with any pages for Cyber Monday auto parts deals.
• Best practices for SEO and for user experience (UX) should include interlinking from the home page.
• Don’t use a new URL each year, recycle your Black Friday or Cyber Monday URLs. For example, don’t use /auto-parts/sale/2020/cyber-monday/, instead use /auto-parts/sale/cyber-monday/.

2020 UPS, USPS, FedEx cut off dates

Here are important dates to keep in mind for your holiday marketing and operations. The first date is Tuesday, December 15. That’s the cut off for USPS Retail Ground®, UPS® Ground, and FedEx Ground® and FedEx Home Delivery®. The next important date is Saturday, December 19, the cut off for USPS Priority Mail®. Then Tuesday, December 22 is the cut off for UPS 2nd Day Air® and FedEx 2Day® and FedEx 2Day Freight®.

These dates are all taken from the USPS, FedEx and UPS online calendars and generally refer to the continental US. Refer to their calendars for more detail.

Top holiday online sales days: historic vs. 2020

If you sell auto parts and accessories online and you are planning for the holidays, take note that in 2020 most of the peak days are in December. Many people erroneously focus on Black Friday, after Thanksgiving. Here are the biggest online selling days:

1). Monday, November 26, 2012, known as Cyber Monday, topped comScore Inc.’s list of top 2012 holiday season shopping days with $1.465 billion in online sales. This was up 17% from 2011. This year it’s Monday, November 30, 2020.

2). Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012, only a week and a day after Cyber Monday, came in second with $1.36 billion in online sales. This year it will be Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020.

3). Monday, Dec. 10, known as Green Monday, had $1.28 billion in total online sales in 2012. This figure is up from 2011, which had $1.13 billion in sales. Green Monday is traditionally the second Monday in December, or as defined by comScore the Monday with at least 10 days until Christmas. This year it’s Monday, Dec. 14, 2020.

4). Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2012, the day after Cyber Monday, came up with $1.26 billion in online sales (this year it’s Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020). This was up 13% from 2011, when the day after Cyber Monday ranked #4 with $1.12 billion in sales.

5). Tuesday, Dec. 11 had $1.22 billion in online sales, following the trend of Monday and Tuesday being the most popular days to shop online. This year the fifth biggest day should be either Monday or Tuesday, December 14 or 15, 2020.

Aftermarket industry trends 2013: Historic biggest days for holiday online shopping days for auto parts and accessories, with sales dollars of auto parts excluding online auctions.

Aftermarket sales trends: Historic top online selling days for the holidays

Hedges & Company is forecasting a 30% growth of online retail sales in the automotive aftermarket in 2020. That’s an important trend in the aftermarket.

This is one of the most underutilized selling seasons in the automotive aftermarket with tremendous potential to sell auto gift items, clothing, diecast collectibles, and home or garage accessories like signs or art.

It’s even an effective season to sell traditional hard parts and automotive accessories if you utilize wish lists so non-automotive friends or spouses can comfortably buy gifts for an auto enthusiast.

For perspective, here is our past forecast for online sales of auto parts and accessories for the top online selling days in the 2013 holiday season:

1). Monday, December 2, 2013: $19.8 million in online auto parts and accessory sales.
2). Tuesday, December 10, 2013: $18.4 million.
3). Monday, December 9, 2013: $17.2 million.
4). Tuesday, December 3, 2013: $17 million.
5). Monday or Tuesday, December 16 or 17, 2013: $16.5 million.