by MarketingCharts staff
93% of major online retailers sent their subscribers at least one promotional email on Cyber Monday (November 26), making it the busiest email marketing day of 2012, details The Retail Email Blog. In 2011, Cyber Monday was also the most active email marketing day for major online retailers, though relatively fewer (87%) sent emails. Of note, Black Friday did not make the list of top 5 busiest days of 2012, after appearing second on the list in 2011.In 2012, Free Shipping Day (December 17) came in second with 87% of the more than 100 major retailers tracked sending at least one promotional email. Green Monday (December 10; 84%) followed, ahead of Thanksgiving (November 22; 83%), and December 6 (80%). That means that more retailers sent emails to subscribers on Thanksgiving than on Black Friday.
Retail Email Volume Grows by 19%
The blog post also reveals that the top online retailers sent an average of 210 emails to each of their subscribers over the course of 2012, or 17.5 per month. That’s up 19% from the 2011 average of 177. Not surprisingly, the heaviest months were in November and December, when the retailers tracked sent an average of 23 and 25 emails to each subscriber, respectively. Still, December saw among the slowest volume growth on a year-over-year basis, with January, February, and October seeing the biggest jumps.
The growth in email volume doesn’t appear to be specific to the retail industry. A newMarketingCharts report finds that a subset of insurers tracked by Eloqua with a personal lines element to their business sent a steadily increasing number of emails during the year, from an average of roughly 82,000 in January all the way to an average of 249,000 in October.
All of that emailing leads to clutter. According to a Blue Kangaroo online survey of more than 1,000 US adults aged 18-64, a whopping 43% said that more than half of the new emails in their inbox the week prior to the survey came from marketers(including daily deals, retail newsletters, and sales alerts).
