Retailers increased their email volumes by 45 percent during the holiday season according to the Email Experience Council.
In its report, the Email Experience Council looked at volume data collected by RetailEmail.Blogspot on 109 of the leading online retailers and defined the holiday email season as the six-week period running from November 10 to December 21. It was compared to the 12-week period that preceded it. Retailers sent 3.3 emails on average, up from the 1.9 emails sent in the pre-holiday season.
“With the clearly weakening economy, retailers were under pressure even early on in the holiday season,” said Chad White, director of retail insights and editor-at-large at the Email Experience Council. “And e-mail is a very inexpensive and effective way of driving sales, and I think that’s why they pulled the trigger.”
The percentage of retailers sending more than three emails per week doubled during the holiday season. Some retailrs were sending over five emails per week increasing from less than 4 percent to more than 10 percent. The majority (88%) of retailers increased their frequnecy during the holiday season.
Sixty-five percent of retailers increased their frequency by 100 percent or less, and 23 percent increased their frequencies by more than 100 percent. The most active sender was Harry & David, who incresed their frequnecy by 744 percent during the holiday season.
“I think the question now is will this come back to haunt them,” White added. “Will they have higher list churn, spam reports or deliverability issues. All of this could mean that this increase in sales during the holiday season, could hurt sales later in the year.”
