So we made it through another holiday season. Am I the only one who hums Beyonce's "Survivor" as I think about it? Aside from 'surviving', what did we learn? Anything new? Anything surprising? A couple things stick out, especially when looking at some e-Dialog data and comparing this year to last. (Note:
this analysis was performed comparing 2008 to 2009 Holiday Season across a portion of e-Dialog retail clients. The holiday season is defined as the week before Thanksgiving through the week of Christmas.)

First for the not so surprising list: e-mail volume increased, as was expected. But clients saw no real backlash in the form of major unsubscribes. That doesn't mean there weren't more than a few consumers who completely tuned out though. It just means they were too disinterested to even actively opt out. A passive unsubscribe is not something to be particularly happy about, because you don't even get the opportunity to direct them to your preference center, ask them if you can reduce their frequency, or just see if they want to hear about something else. Basically, they left the party without saying goodbye.

A couple of slightly interesting tidbits (well, interesting may be stretching it a bit, but if you're a data geek like me they did catch my attention a little). When comparing 2008 to 2009 on a week by week basis, the largest fluctuations in open, click and revenue metrics occur within the very early (week of Black Friday) and very late (week of Christmas) periods in the season. Using the gut check method of data validation, this makes sense, right? We know and felt as consumers that our retail brethren were using less aggressive tactics both early and late this year compared to last year. So what did this change to a more moderate promotional strategy do? Well, overall clients in this sample saw a 2.5% increase in revenue this year compared to last year, with a slight decrease in $ per click, which was down ~ 5% compared to last year.

2009 seemed to be – as much as could be possible considering the economic conditions – a slight return to the usual, expected holiday retail chaos as opposed to last year’s over the top, the sky really is falling retail chaos. Retailers learned some hard lessons last year, and were very careful to not overbuy merchandise, which certainly helped - a lot. There also seemed to be more than a few retailers following the mantra what that a wise GMM (General Merchandise Manager) once told me, "sales without margin is a hollow, hollow victory."