The chaos of Cyber Monday has come and gone, but not without some lessons learned.  As we pored over the deeply discounted deals of December 1st, it was clear that some companies stood out for their marketing efforts.  Here are a few of our favorite Cyber Monday moments:

The Good

Cyber Monday campaigns with the most success tend to focus on 3 key features.

• They know their audience – they review their demographics and showcase targeted ads to each segmented demographic on Facebook.
• They offer a preview – some companies are going as far as creating a Cyber week.  Overkill? Maybe. Successful? YES.
• They engage their audience – the most successful companies will offer content that compares the products being discounted to help the searcher make an educated decision.

So who was winning at Cyber Monday? Amazon. Amazon focused deals on the individual, showed a preview of what was coming, offered deals every 10 minutes and, in some cases, delivered the product within 30 minutes of purchase.

The Bad

The biggest Cyber Monday fail that we saw was by the Washington Redskins.  The deal posted was only available by phone.

The Ugly

A personal favorite for off-beat marketing tactics, Cards Against Humanity has always had noteworthy deals around the holidays, but not for the reasons you might think.  Last year, they created a Black Friday “deal” that raised the standard price of its game to an additional $5 to protest the holiday – and it was one of their highest purchase volume days of 2013.  This year, once again in protest of the “bullshit” holiday, they offered to sell you exactly that.  For the bargain price of $6, they would send you sterilized cow poop.  And it sold out.

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