‘Tis the Season to be Online

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Email marketers had their work cut out for them on both Black Friday (Nov. 27) and Cyber Monday (Nov. 30). Both days hit all-time email volume highs, however, nearly one in four email marketing messages were not delivered to recipients’ inboxes on Cyber Monday, reveals new deliverability data released last week by Pivotal Veracity.

“Cyber Monday has become a veritable trench warfare of offers, specials and hype in consumers’ email inboxes,” comments Deirdre Baird, president and CEO of Pivotal Veracity. “As delivery queues get packed with messages, ISP spam filters go on high alert and many marketers end up with lower inbox delivery rates.”

According to Akamai Technologies and the National Retail Federation, global Web traffic peaked at more than 7.9 million visitors per minute to retail sites on Cyber Monday.

“The temptation to mail every Tom, Dick and Harry on your list can be hard for marketers to resist — especially with the holiday shopping season now in full swing,” adds Baird. “But sending out a last minute offer to someone who hasn’t purchased anything from you in the last 12 months is going to shoot you in the foot, and could even have longer term consequences for your reputation in an environment where ISPs are increasingly looking for signs of positive user engagement in deciding whether or not to deliver your mail.”

Responsys reports that on Black Friday, 69 percent of major online retailers sent at least one promotional email, up from 59 percent in 2008, as tracked by the Retail Email Blog. On Cyber Monday, 71 percent sent at least one promotional email, making it both the most popular retail email day of this year and also the most popular of all-time.

Because Cyber Monday has become so important, retailers trying to get ahead of competitors are increasingly targeting the Sunday prior. This year 45 percent of major online retailers sent at least one email on Nov. 29, making it the busiest Sunday ever for retail email marketing.

“Among Responsys clients, we saw even more dramatic increases on Cyber Sunday,” confirms Don Smith, Responsys’ chief information officer. “The email volume on Sunday was nearly three times the usual amount because of retailers trying to get the jump on Cyber Monday.”

This increase in Sunday activity, Responsys reports, makes the Cyber Monday messaging statistics all the more remarkable.

 

Published December 8, 2009