The holidays are a time of goodwill, cheer, and full email inboxes. During this time of year, many email marketers struggle to find the correct balance between sending too many emails during the holidays (and therefore experiencing high unsubscribe and abuse complaints) and not sending enough emails (and seeing stagnant sales as a result). I recently saw a Zappos.com campaign that does a great job at helping to solve this issue – they notified their email subscribers about what they can expect to see in their inbox from Zappos.com this holiday season.

This fresh yet simple email explains when Zappos.com will begin their increased holiday email schedule. It also explains on which days the subscriber should expect to receive emails, and then reminds the subscriber to keep Zappos.com in mind for their gift purchasing needs.

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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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