The numbers are in, and it seems that this year’s Cyber Monday frenzy consisted mostly of the same old song and dance that we’ve seen in the past. (This, of course, is in addition to the trends we commented on earlier regarding Black Friday email spikes) Based on the analysis of 170 clients across all industries between 2006 – 2009 for the time period of the Sunday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, email marketers sent Cyber Monday promotions (surprise!) earlier and more often than ever before.

Ok, so maybe the headlines are not such a shock to the system. But looking at the overall data in the context of Thanksgiving week and Black Friday, we do see some nuanced trends worth noting alongside the larger stories that we’re all familiar with by now. These trends include:

• Overall volume growth. There was a 28 percent increase in email volume from the Sunday before Thanksgiving through the end of Cyber Monday. This has been a consistent theme throughout past Cyber Mondays.
• Early-bird catches the worm. The lifts in volume on the days just before Cyber Monday were even higher than those before Black Friday, further solidifying the trend of earlier promotional mentions and previews of shopping specials before the actual promotions begin.
• Rise and shine. Similar to Black Friday, over 50 percent of emails were sent prior to 8am EST. In related news, how much longer can Folgers brand coffee rightfully claim to be “the best part of waking up?”

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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 seems like every holiday season we see companies explore new and creative ways to make their email campaigns stand out from the competition.

This year is proving to be no different. Recently Neiman Marcus Group has made its presence known in inboxes around the world by using large animated GIFs to capture user attention and generate response.

While this marks a new development for Neiman, who have traditionally featured static imagery in their emails, animated GIFs themselves have been around pretty much since the creation of World Wide Web.

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Just in time for the holidays, our friends at Experian Marketing Services have produced a valuable new research report packed with useful tips and insight for maximizing holiday marketing strategies this year. So what do we expect to see this holiday season in respect to the email marketing industry’s performance? The 2009 holiday marketer: Benchmark and trend report has some interesting points well worth your consideration, especially for all of you email marketers out there looking to gain an edge on the competition this winter.

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.”

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Free shipping is a vital topic of consideration for most businesses, as it often involves the business itself incurring the associated, and often expensive distribution cost. To help you decide if free shipping offers are right for your organization, Experian CheetahMail has produced a new white paper exploring the issues related to free shipping.

As part of our research for this white paper, we conducted a study posing the following questions to email marketers:

• Are more companies deploying free shipping emails?
  On average, about 50% of mailers were offering free shipping in Q1 2009, representing a slight increase from the 48% we saw a year earlier. This percentage rose significantly in the 4th quarter of 2008, with some 60 to 65% of mailers using a free shipping offer for holiday sales.

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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?

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Can you guess which company sent an email campaign featuring a luxury image and a value offering within the same message?

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