According to reports, holiday 2011 is off to a strong start, with good retail sales numbers for the days of Black Friday through Cyber Monday. comScore reported shoppers spent more than a billion dollars on Cyber Monday alone, which is an increase of 22% over 2010 and the heaviest online spending day in history. Email marketing is certainly helping drive a good portion of this ecommerce activity, and at e-Dialog, we are seeing the traditional email volume increases associated with the Christmas shopping season. Let's take a look at some numbers.

 

For Thanksgiving and Black Friday this year, the total amount of email sent globally by e-Dialog increased more than 50% over the same days in 2010. We saw a lot of emails promoting a "Why Wait?" message, encouraging consumers to head into stores that were open on Thanksgiving, or offering Black Friday deals online before Friday. Another strong message was free shipping, which was to be expected, since that is something that helps seal the deal for consumers.

 

For Saturday and Sunday, email volumes were also higher than the same dates last year, but "only" by about 30%. Messages were mostly either extending Black Friday deals, or hyping the upcoming Cyber Monday promotions. Cyber Monday itself was again a high-volume mailing day, with e-Dialog clients sending 30% more email than Cyber Monday 2010. It set a record here at e-Dialog for the most emails we've ever sent in a 24-hour span.

 

Overall, looking at the past five days, we've seen email volume surpass 2010 by an average of 30%. It is hard to tell at this point if shoppers will get overwhelmed with all the mail being delivered to their inboxes. Interestingly, we did see an increase in transactional messages, which by definition are more personalized and relevant, so perhaps there won't be any email fatigue happening.

 

What do you think? Are marketers balancing the increase in frequency with an increase in relevance? Can the current email volume be sustained through the end of the year?