Let me start by saying, I am extremely excited for this new opportunity and really looking forward to working with all of you on a daily basis; as well as being a part of a growing industry and a rapidly expanding company.  I’m proud to report that over the last year, the Thanx Media team has grown by 8 people, not including myself, while continuing to add to the customer base.  Within the short time that I have been here, I have had the pleasure of getting to know the entire team and want to express how proud I am to be working with a group of extremely talented professionals.  In order to accomplish the goals I have set forth for myself in 2012, I will be looking to incorporate my 23 years of retail and operations experience into the Thanx Media culture and help guide the ship.

My main duties will be: manage the sales process, ensure we are meeting our project management objectives, SaaS operations and customer care.  Although they’re all important, it’s the last duty I want to touch on today.  My goal is and always has been to delight customers.  I want to emphasize the word “delight” and not use the word “satisfy”.  It’s easy to satisfy; I can shop on any website or walk into any brick and mortar store to buy something and be satisfied with my experience.  Does that mean I’ll go back?  Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.  But if I was delighted with my experience and it was memorable?  You bet I’ll be back!  Many companies set out to just satisfy their customers, for me that’s never been good enough.  From my own professional experiences where I was required to make important and tough decisions, I always found myself asking the same question, “Is this decision in the best interest of our customers?”  Here at Thanx Media, I plan on bringing this same unwavering customer focus to our already strong foundation.  My team and I expect to delight our customers!

2011 has been a strong year for Thanx Media and as we grow our technologies and our team, I look forward to bringing a different level of expertise to the table and help create an even better 2012!  From me and the entire Thanx Media family, Happy Holidays to all of you and may the rest of 2011 bring much success.

Reading the news about early holiday shopping has been incredibly exciting over the last few weeks.  The good news started when the first Thanksgiving Day sales numbers were first being reported.  According to Internet Retailer and several other sources, roughly $500 million worth of products were purchased online, a 39% increase over last year.  Keeping in mind that most of these stores weren’t even open, this half a billion dollars is all unearned revenue without an online presence.  Another piece of information about the Thanksgiving Day numbers that I personally found incredibly telling was that just over 11% of purchases occurred on mobile sites, compared to about 6.3% last year.  This shows that a mobile site is no longer a ‘nice addition’, but rather a necessity.  Those stores that had a customer friendly, easy to navigate site, plus were able to offer promotions and sales in the times before and after families ate, definitely had an incredible advantage over their competitors who either had an unfriendly site or weren’t able to offer their prospects any experience at all.

Real-time sales figures from Thanksgiving Day

Black Friday has typically been a day when relatives (as mine do) or friends (as mine do) leave for stores before dawn and shop till they drop.  However, more people decided to forgo the crowds and testosterone this year, adopting instead to stay in and make their purchases from home.  According to this Mashable article quoting a study completed by IBM, online sales were up 24% this year compared to last, while almost 10% were completed from mobile devices.  Again, these are huge numbers, likely in the hundreds of millions of dollars reaped by companies that were prepared for the influx in online consumers.

Once Sunday rolled around and the food had finally been digested and the dishes were cleaned, it was time to look at some of the hard numbers that were coming in.  Some of the important ones reported by the National Retail Federation: $400.00- average amount spent per consumer for the whole weekend (average amongst 3,800 consumers asked to take part in survey), $150.00- average amount of the $400.00 total that was spent online, 42.2M consumers shopped online and $1.3B was sold online between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday.  Knowing this, I couldn’t wait to get into the office Monday and see what sales were going to look like.

Last year Cyber Monday produced a hair over $1B in online sales, but it didn’t have nearly the four day run up that this year’s Thanksgiving weekend provided.  I was interested to see if stores had offered better promotions during the weekend and how this would affect Cyber Monday, known as the online Black Friday.  Were the numbers going to reflect the increases from the weekend or were people shopped out after the long weekend?  To little surprise and lots of excitement, the numbers impressed even the most optimistic.  Most believed this year would see about the same numbers as last year, but when the numbers came out that sales were closer to $1.3B or 130% of last year’s number, it was truly stunning:

Year-by-year review of Cyber Monday sales

All told, the weekend produced over $2.5B in total sales!  For those of you, like me, who purchased something online between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday, congratulations, we’re in the record books.  Same time next year?