The 2014 Holiday Season has come to a close and it's time to review your marketing strategies and record the results for next year's season.
I've compiled some email details that you can use as a benchmark for your own strategies.
I've subscribed to hundreds of email newsletters from retail jewelry stores, large and small e-commerce jewelry sites, and a few chain stores. This is a graph showing the quantity of emails I received from all those senders from November 1, 2014 through December 26, 2014:
(click to enlarge)
As you can see on the chart, the first tall spike is from Black Friday, November 28th. The second tall spike is from Cyber Monday, December 1st. Then during the last full week before Christmas, the number of emails was relatively consistent those 5 weekdays.
I should also point out that most of the email lists I've subscribed to are spread across the United States, but I have several in Europe and a few in Australia. Your email marketing company will probably tell you to send email based on your local time zone, but I was surprised to see how the email timing is working out in reality.
Here's a chart showing the hours of the day when I received emails during the 2014 Holiday Season.
(click to enlarge)
The spikes show emails received during the times I would expect them. The 5AM spike is an attempt to capture customer attention first thing in the morning. The 9AM rise to the 10AM spike represents the attempt to capture customer attention when they first get to work in the morning. The 8PM spike is an attempt to capture attention after dinner, as people are winding down before bed.
This chart would be the perfect representation if I were only measuring East Coast retail jewelers. Here's what I expected to see for my multi-time zone measurements:
(click to enlarge)
I adjusted the values on the above chart to show an average rise and fall around the 5AM, Noon, and 8PM hours that represented my expectations, which were wrong.
Since the numbers don't lie, it's obvious that most of the email marketing campaigns are focusing on the Eastern time zone, even though that's not where the most of the stores are located. How did you time your own email campaigns this year? If you're not doing them yourself, then make sure your agency is correctly timing the emails for you.
Here's some other statistics I measured during the months of November and December.
Of all the Subject Lines captured:
18.4% of them used the "% off" phrase
6.7% of them used the word "sale"
10.8% of them used the word "holiday"
9.0% of them contained the word "free"
3.3% offered "free shipping"
11.8% included a dollar value
Now go back and compare these numbers with your own campaigns and write down some notes so you remember all this next year.
