As the push for last minute sales drove volumes higher, email volume surged 34 percent from Dec 21 to Dec 31 last year. Looking at trends for 2011 thus far, Experian CheetahMail is predicting this increase to be even higher.

As featured in a new white paper: The Happy Holiday Inbox: Last minute tips for spreading the cheer with email this year, the biggest trends include:

• Mobile and social galore: Links to social networks and mobile viewing are amplifying email marketing promotions. Fifteen percent of email openers read emails on a mobile phone, and that number is growing.   Additionally, forty percent of online consumers who use social networking sites plan to use Facebook for feedback from family/friends to help make a decision about a product, according to a survey by PriceGrabber.com.

• Touting and shouting shipping deadlines: Including deadlines to provide urgency, and directions that encourage customers to act fast, is more prevalent than ever.  An analysis of last season’s campaigns confirms that on average, shipping deadlines improve email transaction performance by 22 percent.

• Creativity shines: The 2011 holiday season is showcasing some of the trendiest and most appealing looks email has ever sported.   And it’s no wonder – compared to email campaigns without animated gifs, ninety percent have significantly higher transaction rates (60 percent) and 118 percent more revenue per email than the campaigns without the animation.

To learn more, download the white paper today.

Compared to holiday-related emails sent on all other major U.S. holidays – including Cyber Monday, Valentines Day, Christmas and more – those deployed on Memorial Day tend to spur the highest transaction rates.

What could be the reasoning behind this trend – why are customers so quick to react to these emails, on this date, in particular? And, what can email marketers do the make the most of it?

Our observations lead us to believe that one of the main transaction-rate drivers is the pure sense of urgency that Memorial Day emails evoke. Many of the emails sent on the holiday itself stress that it is the “last day for the sale” through subject lines such as, “Last Day 20% off,”  “Memorial Day only, $2.99 shipping,” and “Time is running out!  Final hours.” Given that much of America celebrates over a three-day weekend, in combination with the unofficial kick-off of summer and backyard barbeques, those “last hours” and “final day” messages have such a high propensity to attract attention and customer action.

How can Memorial Day emails make your customers act this year? There are a few things email marketers can apply to their holiday campaigns to be successful:

Be relevant to the season: Summer is more than a new season. Summer is an exciting time for so many people especially those ready to get outside after a long winter! People are ready for activities and merchandise relevant to the season. Make sure everything about your email – the copy, imagery, featured products and more – scream, “Summer’s here!”

•  Build up excitement early: Highlight Memorial Day sales, specials and items at least three weeks prior to the holiday. (Note: that means now)
• Use holiday-appropriate imagery: When planning your creative, think of bar-b-ques, outdoor gatherings and parties.
• Create urgency in the subject line: This is a ‘must do,’ especially for the emails that go out on Memorial Day itself. Words such as ‘final,’ ‘last’ and ‘today only’ can be your best tools.

As the Hispanic market grows in size and spending power, it is important to consider including specific messages to this group as part of an overall marketing program. The engagement metrics show this group to be highly engaged with email campaigns.

According to the 2011 Digital Marketer Report, of the emails sent to the Hispanic market:

• Seventy percent were in Spanish and 31% were in English
• Had 26% higher open rates and 43% higher click rates when compared to “All industry” benchmarks
• Had 41% higher open and 59% higher click rates when sent in Spanish as opposed to English
• Responds best to promotions with dollars off or percentage off. Email campaigns with these types of financial “rewards” had 81% higher transaction rates when compared to emails with “nonfinancial” rewards (free gifts, free shipping, etc.)

Want to know more about the Hispanic market? Download the 2011 Digital Marketer Report or take a look at Simmons’ National Hispanic Consumer Study.

Perhaps I’ve now seen all of the Toy Story movies too many times with my kids, because the line from the theme song really sticks out with Facebook Messages; “Some other folks might be a little bit smarter than I am, bigger and stronger too, maybe. But none of them will ever love you the way I do, it’s me and you.”

Even without seeing the new Messages user interface and only seeing ‘Zuck’ and ‘Boz’ demonstrate a portion of it yesterday, it seems apparent that the Facebook email application is not a ‘Gmail killer’ or intended to be competitive with any full-fledged email client webmail or software program. But what it does have that no one else has captured is the notion of a truly personalized messaging platform.

However, my wake-up moment on the webcast yesterday was when they disclosed that any user can change their privacy settings to restrict emails just to their friends, friends of friends, or everyone. More importantly, should the user tighten their settings to exclude everyone, Facebook will bounce all emails from that sender to that user. In other words, if a marketer does not have a ‘fan’ or ‘friend of friend’ relationship with that user, then they should assume the address will bounce.

It is important to note that there apparently will not be a ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ folder for these unrelated messages to be filtered into, just an ‘other’ folder that isn’t designed to be a ‘reputation’ or anti-spam filter since all emails from unrelated senders will just bounce away. There is no ISP ‘Batphone’ when trying to resolve deliverability to ‘friends’, so even the most experienced and skillful deliverability team in the world won’t be of much assistance with most Facebook deliverability problems.

The clear conclusion from this is that marketers should not attempt to collect an @facebook.com email address without making a strong effort to first ensure that the user is a ‘fan’ or logs in through Facebook Connect.   This should require Facebook-specific language on the email registration or transaction page, or most certainly on the post-registration or transaction page. Because if you don’t do something to befriend these users, then your ‘Messages’ may not get there at all.

As Jordan noted in his earlier post, there are a lot of things you can do to make your transactional emails better. But as any busy email marketer knows, there are also about a million other things you could be working on instead. The question is, how high of a priority should improving your transactional emails be? After all, only a small sub-set of your entire list receives one of these messages every day.

Let’s be clear: your transactional emails should take an extremely high priority, regardless of your industry or line of business.

In our latest research, The transactional email report: Benchmark data and analysis for connecting purchase behavior to email marketing, we see that two key indicators — revenue per email and transaction rates — are off-the-charts for transactional emails. The transaction rate of order confirmation messages is eight times higher than standard promotional messages.

In other words, you can get much more bang for your buck by improving your transactional emails rather than, say, your weekly newsletter.

So what are you waiting for? Have a look at The transactional email report to learn more about what makes transactional messages so valuable to email marketers.

Sending email based on web analytics data is a topic we’ve already covered on this site in some detail. As most email marketers know by now, web analytics data can be used in abandoned shopping cart campaigns (ReMarketing), browser behavior campaigns, and other targeted campaigns. But to me, the most important aspect of these campaigns is how the data is being used and what the net effect is on the subscriber base.

Here’s my real-life example that illustrates the issues surrounding web analytics/email integration:

I am a frequent shopper of the online retailer Amazon.com, where I have purchased books, electronics, and baby items exclusively. Last week, however, I received an extremely targeted and somewhat perplexing email promoting Amazon.com’s variety of gourmet and specialty meat selections. Wild Boar 10 Rib Rack anyone?, asked the email. The first line of the message was “As someone who has shown an interest in gourmet meat…”

What? Gourmet meat? Me? From Amazon.com? Huh?

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