I mean that literally, of course. Take one look at this report, and you’ll understand what this holiday season is really all about: marketing like a rock star.

Want to know how to win over your adoring fans and go double platinum? Let me to take you on a cinematic, guided tour of the data from the report to find out what it takes to be an email marketing rock star this holiday season.

This year, email volumes will “go to 11″

Every year, email volumes peak during the holiday season, managing to surpass the previous maximum output of the year before. But how is it even possible to exceed what was previously considered the maximum?

By taking your email program “to 11.”

Experian CheetahMail estimates an overall email volume increase of 15 percent to 20 percent for the 2010 holiday season in comparison to Holiday 2009.

This means that email marketers, just like Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap, have figured out a way to ratchet up their volumes “to 11.”

Volumes just keep going up, so email marketers had better be prepared for the barrage of messages coming from their competition and act accordingly.

Party like a rock star, even the day after

By now, everyone in America knows that Cyber Monday is an email marketing free-for-all — basically, a 24-hour email party that sees tremendous email volumes and promotions come and go in a very exciting flurry of activity. But what if some marketers don’t want the party to end so quickly?

Party like a rock star. Wake up the next morning, and keep on partying like last night never ended.

That’s at least what seemed to happen last year, when the day after Cyber Monday ended up having the greatest percent of year-over-year volume increase of any day during the holiday season. Marketers should expect more of the same this holiday season. Will the Tuesday after Thanksgiving become the next big calendar date in email marketing?

(Side note: This year, we will be referring to the day after Cyber Monday simply as “The Hangover.”)

It’s the final countdown!

As the band Europe first discovered in the year 1986, the public has a huge appetite for the notion of countdowns.

Our 2010 Holiday Marketer confirms this fact, showing that despite only being the 7th most popular type of email offer, countdown offers garner the best open and click rates of any offer type.

Emails featuring limited-time offers had a high performance last holiday season — exemplified by the strong click-to-open rate of 20.33 percent.

So there you have it — market like a rock star this holiday season, and the leather pants and pyrotechnics will surely take care of themselves. To learn even more about what it takes to make it in the industry, download the full report now.

And remember, it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock n’ roll!

Taking a look at the data from the report, there are a number of relevant tidbits that merit a quick shout-out:

• Email’s “eco-friendly” reputation may not hold as much sway with environmentally-conscious customers as you thought, so don’t cancel the print catalogs just yet.
  “Surprising to many, Behavioral Greens, which are the group of consumers that are most green aware according to Experian Simmons, account for nearly half of all catalog purchases.”
• Shorter really is sweeter when it comes to email subject lines during the holidays.
  “All industries with the exception of consumer products and services experienced the highest open rates when using subject lines of 25 characters or less last year.”

• Email and search still drive the most traffic to retail sites, but keep an eye on additional traffic from social networks.
  “Last December, search engines and email were the top referral sources for retailers, but social networking referred nearly five percent of traffic, a rate higher than portal front pages.”
• The economy will continue to be a factor in online marketing strategies this holiday season.
  “In 2008, searches for the term ‘layaway’ jumped as consumer awareness increased. Layaway programs effectively drove early purchases with the peak for search-term variations that included ‘layaway’ taking place last year during the five weeks leading up to Thanksgiving.”

Have a closer look at these findings and many more by downloading the report in full from the Experian Marketing Services’ website. Now start digging out those old tree ornaments, break out the egg nog and get marketing!