Holiday e-mail volume from retailers to customers in the first third of December shot up by 43% over the same period last year, according to Email Data Source.
However, coinciding traffic to merchants’ Web sites is the same as 2007 holiday traffic, according to Email Data Source, a New York firm that tracks commercial e-mail activity to company house files and corresponding Web site traffic.
While the flat Web site traffic may lead one to believe the spike in e-mail volume has done the merchants no good, Bill McCloskey, president of Email Data Source, offered an alternative analysis.
“You could also make the argument that it would have been worse and that if they hadn’t increased their volume, they would have fallen further behind,” he said.
Meanwhile, retailers’ use of free shipping to entice online shoppers to buy has dropped this year to 15% of retailer e-mails from 20% in 2007, according to Email Data Source.
“Free shipping’s usually a hot item to put in your e-mails,” said McCloskey. “There’s a definite decrease this year. One could guess that they have cut their margins so thin that they can’t afford free shipping.”
He added that retail e-mails with percent signs in the subject lines indicating a discount have risen this year to 23% of e-mails sent from 13% in 2007.
“I think what the strategy with these guys might be: ‘Let’s boost the percent-off e-mails, but with percent-off sales, we can’t afford free shipping anymore,’” said McCloskey. “Other than the increase in the numbers of e-mails, the rise in percent-off offers and the drop in free-shipping offers, everything else pretty much remained the same [in 2008 compared to 2007].”
In other findings, 39% of retail e-mails mentioned the holidays and/or gifts in their subject lines in the first third of December, according to Email Data Source.
Email Data Source has agreed to report retail e-mail trends weekly to Magilla Marketing until the Tuesday after Christmas.
