Study shows overlooked sweet spots for email marketing

Don’t assume you’re being annoying

Everyone likes to take a break during the holidays – including companies who market online. Perhaps your company is easing up on sending marketing emails during holiday seasons, under the assumption that consumers will be overloaded with emails, will find these email annoying, and won’t take time away from their celebrations to read them. However, new data from email marketing company Return Path suggests that this accepted wisdom may be flawed.

According to the data, consumers receive an average of less than 10 emails per day from October through mid-November, with that number increasing only to 12 daily emails on peak days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Consumers also chose to read 22.4% of their emails during the holiday season, only very slightly less than the quarterly average of 22.8%.

What’s more, customers weren’t especially annoyed about receiving extra shopping-related emails during the holidays. Spam complaints were filed for only 63 out of 10,000 emails about shopping, which is less than for other email categories, such as travel, news, or finance.

Improve your email marketing results

Perhaps you don’t need to slow down your email marketing during holiday seasons after all. However, if you want to improve your email marketing results, Return Path offers advice and resources for successful email campaigns .Their “Best Practices” guide offers many suggestions for optimizing your email program during the holidays. For example, they suggest allowing members who sign up on your site to opt-out of getting extra holiday messages. They also discuss the process of getting your email campaign certified and added to a “whitelist” that will ensure your messaging doesn’t get blocked by spam folders, and that your images are visible to readers.

Don’t be scared off by the idea of email fatigue from marketing to your customers during one of the most busy shopping seasons of the year – the holidays, be they President’s Day or New Year’s Eve. They might be more receptive to your messaging than you think!