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:

• Visits to these specialty Black Friday sites are up 4 percent compared with the same week in 2008.
• Referral traffic from these specialty sites is up 14 percent compared to the same week of 2008, making them an increasingly important aspect of holiday retail promotions.
• Wal-Mart received the greatest share of referred traffic from Black Friday websites for last week with 13 percent, followed by Target and Best Buy with 4.12 percent and 4.04 percent, respectively.

And over at PriceGrabber.com, our sister company for comparison shopping, we saw the specific products that consumers were seeking on the day of Black Friday, as well as some indicators of the nation’s economic mood:

• The most sought-after products on Black Friday 2009 included Wii™ Console, nuvi® 265WT GPS and Apple iPod® touch 8GB.
• The down economy is forcing consumers to make do with what they have. With people holding on to critical items they already own such as cars, they’re researching ways to extend the life of what they are driving now. Searches for tires are up tremendously (118%) this year.
• Practical spending for the home saw a jump this year. Large home appliances such as freezers (104%), washers (50%), dryers (33%), refrigerators (30%), cooktops & ranges (23%) and dishwashers (21%) are seeing increases in traffic as consumers are researching aging appliances now that they are home more.

If you follow media news, chances are you’ve heard the expression “coveted demographic” used to refer to a particular audience segment that most advertisers wish to target. Often times, TV networks, magazines, websites, and movie studios tout their “coveted demographics” to give the impression that advertisers are only an ad placement away from reaching the hearts (and wallets) of the free-spending masses.

But what about email? Does the email channel reach these “coveted demographics?” A quick look at the data indicates that yes, email is a popular choice among consumers with the most spending power.

Of the top four Mosaic lifestyle groups that use email the most, three of them are what you would describe as upper-middle to high-end American consumers. In other words, a large proportion of email users have discretionary income to spend on the products and services of their choosing.

Obviously, this analysis is a bit simplistic — the definition of a “coveted” lifestyle group is subjective and depends heavily on an advertiser’s type of business (think of the difference in customer demographics between dollar stores and luxury designer stores, for example). But at the end of the day, the consumers with the highest spending potential represent the highest potential customer lifetime value to the marketing world, so the generalization is legitimate to a certain extent.

A quick glance at three of the top four lifestyle groups that use email the most reveals as much:

• Upscale America: College-educated couples and families living in the metropolitan sprawl earning upscale incomes providing them with large homes and very comfortable and active lifestyles.
• Affluent Suburbia: The wealthiest households in the U.S. living in exclusive suburban neighborhoods enjoying the best of everything that life has to offer.
• Aspiring Contemporaries: Young, mostly single, ethnically diverse, online active households living in new homes or apartments with discretionary income to spend on themselves.

Learn more about consumer behavior with online competitive intelligence by Experian Hitwise and lifestyle groups by Mosaic, Experian’s lifestyle segmentation system.

A new report available today from Hitwise reveals that 11% of all upstream traffic to the top 500 retail websites during the 2008 Holiday season came from email.

The clickstream data shows that the triumvirate of search (30%), other Retail 500 websites (15%), and email represented more than 50% of all upstream holiday web visits to the nation’s top e-commerce sites. So what can we take away from this information? For starters, it means that SEO continues to be a big deal for leading retailers worldwide, and rightfully so. Secondly, this data indicates to me that when people know which product (i.e. a Nintendo Wii) or category of products (a video game system) they are looking for, their first destination will be the search engine. From there, they will be taken to a retailer’s e-commerce site, which may inspire them to compare offers with other e-commerce sites.

But what if the customer doesn’t know what he/she is looking for?

Reading between the lines, one sees that email is an excellent tool for influencing purchase decisions when a customer is not seeking a specific product. In other words, email represents a prime opportunity to push products that a customer didn’t even realize they wanted until you presented it to them. Therefore, if you’ve been considering using affinity modeling in your email campaigns, the holidays might be the best time to give it a go.

The report also notes that the demand for gift cards has increased over previous holiday seasons, particularly in that people are searching for them over a more prolonged period of time than ever before.

With search traffic for gift cards remaining high over a 14-week period during this past holiday season, you may want to consider adding a prominent gift card call-to-action on your email campaigns that remains there throughout the duration of the holidays.

Just like the Christmas lights, some things are best left in place until Easter!

Here’s a statistical anomaly that will make your head spin: websites in the “Lifestyle” category receive twice as much web traffic from email as “Entertainment” or “Travel” industries. I discovered this while poking around in the Hitwise application to see which industries rely most heavily on email to drive traffic to their websites. Apparently, the “Lifestyle” industry is head and shoulders above the rest (see the pink line, below) when it comes to email driving traffic (probably due to high clickthrough performance). And not just by a little bit, either.

I was a bit surprised by this, mainly because when I think of the “Lifestyle” category, I immediately think of beauty/health and fashion websites. Having seen the success of a few retailers and bloggers in the fashion/beauty/health industries firsthand, I could understand how the category would perform really well given how active their audiences are. But nearly 1.6X better than the nearest competitor? That seemed fishy to me.

A closer look at the composition of the “Lifestyle” category quickly reveals why email is such a huge factor in driving its web traffic: people will click through if it means they may get a date out of it.

Ah yes, the power of compatibility. When you throw dating sites into the mix, these numbers make a lot more sense.

I used to jokingly say to my friends that the Internet was not created for the purpose of linking computers in the U.S. Department of Defense, but rather for the creation and distribution of jokes forwarded to us via email. I may have to revise that theory now – the Internet was clearly made for dating!

My response then is the same as it is now: email is fine, the kids are alright, and we can all play in the same sandbox together.

My impression at the time was that many industry veterans seemed genuinely freaked out by the fact that their own kids were now using these new and different forms of communication a lot more than email. And truth be told, the meteoric rise of social networks, particularly among young people, was (and remains) worth noting, learning about, and venturing into for some businesses. But social networks’ relationship with email is less about “this or that” as it is about “this and that” — the two channels are not competing with one another so much as coexisting peacefully within one online ecosystem.

One easy way to understand this coexistence is to take a look at clickstream data from this past week (ending 10/4/08), provided by our friends at Hitwise:

The above data shows that nearly 15% of all social networking site traffic is currently coming directly from email accounts like Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live/Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL Mail (These are 4 of the top 13 sites visited immediately before social networks).

In short, these social networks rely heavily on email alerts to remind their customers to visit their sites. The simple truth is that many people check their email more often than their Facebook page, so email plays a key role in Facebook’s long-term success. It’s no secret that you can’t register a Facebook or MySpace account without also having an email account.

Equally interesting, the gap in online market share between email and social networking has narrowed dramatically in recent months. The following Hitwise data shows how the traffic gap between web-based email services and social networks is the lowest since August of 2007:

In case you’re still not convinced, Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK, provides further evidence that social networking’s popularity is coming back down to earth, pointing out that Facebook’s growth in the UK is also slowing down.

I guess this all means that social networks aren’t the Big Bad Wolf after all.