Inside Outdoor Fall 2016

during the big opening weekend when,

as the primary driver of sales, emails

led to 23.3 percent of online orders,

including 25.1 percent on Black Friday

and 22.1 percent on Cyber Monday.

That compares to 1.8 percent of all

e-commerce orders directly attributed

to social media campaigns last holiday

season, which is similar to 2014,

when social media drove 1.9 percent

of orders. Certainly, social platforms

influence purchasing and can be ef-

fective at generating interest, creating

buzz and allowing for discovery, and

we are in no way ready to give up on

“buy buttons” on social sites. Up to this

point, however, social media has yet

to connect directly to online purchases

the way legacy digital platforms, such

as email and search, have.

Of course, customers tend to receive

a boat load of retailer emails from

mid-October through mid-January. A

full 77 percent of retailers send mobile-

optimized emails during the holidays,

according to the Omnichannel Retail In-

dex, up from 55 percent in the summer.

So it pays to have some guidance as to

how, what and when to blast out.

According to analysis of the email

marketing campaigns of 30 major retail-

ers, Cyber Monday- and Black Friday-

themed emails deployed in the few days

leading up to each day tended to perform

very well, despite the abundance being

sent. Open rates on emails deployed in

the weekend immediately prior to Cyber

Monday averaged 14.9 percent, the

highest in the holiday period, shows the

analysis by Yesmail Interactive.

Meanwhile, a relatively newer

“shopping holiday,” Green Monday (or

the second Monday in December), has

been touted as the third-largest online

shopping day of the year (behind Black

Friday and Cyber Monday), yet only

10 percent of retailers in this Yesmail

study deployed Green Monday-themed

emails in the three-day period sur-

rounding the shopping day.

“Those deployments paid off in

terms of engagement as they gener-

ated significantly higher open rates than

base communications over that period,”

said the Yesmail study. “In addition, in

2015 Green Monday emails significantly

outperformed the ones from 2014 – an-

other reason for marketers to consider

implementing them this year.”

Black Friday-themed emails that

were deployed after the Friday, in the

weekend immediately following Black

Friday, also did particularly well, sig-

nificantly outperforming base commu-

nications. This seems to suggest there

might be some remorse marketers can

tap into among those who feel they

“missed out” on Black Friday deals. The

same cannot be said for Cyber Monday,

as post-Cyber Monday emails, with an

average open rate of 11.1 percent, had

the lowest engagement over the period.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Free

Shipping Day emails underperformed

compared to base communications and

experienced a steep drop in open rates

compared to 2014. Yesmail researchers

attributed the poor performance to the

increasing prevalence of free shipping,

particularly during the holiday season,

and generic subject lines that failed to

indicate any uniqueness to free shipping.

Christmas-themed emails, mean-

while, tend to perform better the deeper

the calendar moves into December,

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