Reportlet: Holiday Frequency Increases

The holiday season is crucial for retailers, so needless to say they advertise and promote themselves like crazy, including ratcheting up their email marketing efforts. Just how much did they crank up the volume? To find out, I looked at 80 major online retailers and compared their email volume during the holidays, which I defined as the five-week period of Nov. 18 to Dec. 22, to the 15 weeks prior, Aug. 5 to Nov. 17. What I found was that retailers increased their email volume by 47% on average, upping their send rate to 2.2 emails per week from 1.5 emails per week.

Of course, that’s just an average increase. To get a better idea of how email frequency changed during the holidays, I looked at the range of email frequencies before the holidays…



…and during the holidays.



I also looked at the range of frequency increases during the holidays.



Then I broke the retailers into groups based on their email frequency before the holidays and looked to see how much each group increased their email volume per week during the holidays.



It’s perhaps not surprising that retailers with lower pre-holiday frequencies had a lot more latitude to increase their frequency during the holidays. The best example of this is Blue Nile, which increased its frequency 425% during the holidays. The jewelry retailer had the statistical benefit of sending out only 0.27 emails per week prior to the holidays. It then ramped up significantly during the holiday period, sending out three emails in the week ending Dec. 22 alone as it pushed its next-day FedEx delivery promotion. While most of the retailers that increased their frequency by more than 125% sent out less than one email per week prior to the holidays, the exception to that was RedEnvelope, which increased its frequency to 4.2 emails per week from 1.07—an increase of 294%.

Meanwhile, the most prolific emailers going into the holiday season were much more limited in their ability to increase their volume. For instance, Bluefly, which sent out an average of 6.07 emails per week prior to the holidays, boosted its frequency just 12% to 6.8 emails per week during the holidays. Similarly, Spiegel increased its frequency by only 21%, to 6.2 from 5.13.

Shockingly, several retailers actually sent fewer emails per week on average during the holidays, including Circuit City, Northern Tool, Dell, TigerDirect, MLB, ProFlowers, Bloomingdale’s and Apple. Clearly these retailers missed out on a golden opportunity to put themselves in front of customers during a period when they were most likely to open their wallets.

I hope these stats help you benchmark your 2006 holiday campaigns and prepare for a merry 2007 holiday season.