Well, you can say you heard it here first: Cyber Monday is barely a few hours into full swing and yet we’re already seeing email volumes increase by roughly the same percentage as last year in the run up to today’s mailing frenzy.

Last year, we saw an increase in ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ mentions the week before Turkey Day. This year, we saw even earlier and more frequent mentions of the two retail holidays in the run up to Thanksgiving.

• According to our data, in the week leading up to Thanksgiving this year (2010), email marketing volumes are up 23% overall.
• Holiday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions began before the week prior to Thanksgiving. Companies such as Sears led the charge by advertising black Fridays as early as October:
  

  Keyword	First Date Seen in Subject Line
  Black Friday	1-Oct-2010
  Cyber Monday	11-Nov-2010
  Christmas	5-Oct-2010
  Holiday	5-Oct-2010

Of course, we had a feeling this might be the case all along. Our predictions from the 2o1o Holiday Marketer said as much:

Overall email volume from Nov. 22 until Dec. 31 was up 15 percent year over year, spiking on Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It is interesting to note that in 2009, those high volume–prone days actually turned into longer spikes encompassing several days. The same pattern is likely to occur in 2010, with high volume periods of several days prior to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and each Echo Monday (the Mondays between Cyber Monday and Christmas).

We will keep you posted with more data about Cyber Monday as it becomes available. In the meantime, you can read other prophetic predictions for this holiday season in our recent report, The 2010 Holiday Marketer.

The dust has settled from Black Friday, and the results are as interesting as you’d expect at this time of year. The big holiday push kicked into high gear over the course of last week, and all of the retail hoopla translated into more marketing mania than ever before.

Based on the analysis of 170 clients across all industries between 2006 – 2009, Experian CheetahMail has made the following determinations about the week of Black Friday:

• Email volumes increased by 24 percent for the week of Thanksgiving 2009  as compared to the same week in 2008.
• The trend of emailing more leading up to Black Friday continued in 2009 just as it had in 2008. However, the volume totals for several of these days — the Sunday, Monday and Wednesday before Thanksgiving, along with Thanksgiving Day — were much higher in 2009 than last year.
• 50 percent of emails were sent prior to 8 am each day. Of the dates examined during this time period, Black Friday had the most even distribution of send time between midnight and noon.
• Black Friday itself saw almost identical email volumes as last year, dropping roughly 1% from 2008.

Meanwhile at Experian Hitwise, our source for consumer and competitive insight, we’ve seen how specialty websites focusing solely on Black Friday sales have played a significant role in driving traffic to retail sites. Comparing the week before Thanksgiving in 2009 vs. 2008, Hitwise saw the following:

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It’s that time of the year again, so without further adieu, let’s talk about everyone’s favorite unofficial holiday, Cyber Monday!

Contrary to popular belief, the term “Cyber Monday” was not coined by an army of scotch drinking Japanese robots from the 1980′s, but rather by Shop.org, the prominent digital retail group who sought to create a sister holiday for Black Friday that focused solely on online commerce. Cyber Monday falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving and has become more and more recognized over recent years.

While we at Email Responsibly have touched on the topic of Cyber Monday in the past, today it’s time to look forward to see what is in store for Cyber Monday this year.

• In general, we expect to see an overall increase in the number of Cyber Monday and Black Friday mentions (by name) in email campaigns this year. This development comes on the heels of last year’s holiday season in which we witnessed firsthand the increasing usage of the actual term “Cyber Monday” in email campaigns. Furthermore, we expect to see these terms being used earlier, more prevalently and together in the same email – certainly more-so than in prior years.

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