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Pre-Black Friday Emails: Volumes, Read Rates Up; Deliverability Down

Article by John Landsman CATEGORIES: Deliverability, News & Updates TAGS:

Just how important is the Thanksgiving holiday to retailers? In one word: Very. In 1939, Fred Lazarus, Jr., a well-connected Ohio merchant (founder and CEO of Federated Department Stores, Inc. – now Macy’s, Inc.) persuaded President Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving a week earlier. Making it the fourth Thursday in November would lengthen the Christmas shopping period in years where November has five Thursdays. Congress later made it official.

It’s not your Father’s Black Friday

The Friday after Thanksgiving wasn’t always called “Black Friday,” but it has always produced huge retail activity, often the heaviest of the year. Much of it is aggressively promotional, as it forms the gateway to America’s official holiday shopping season. Black Friday became the common designation for that day, so resonant that its original meaning has been considerably stretched. We commonly see references to “Black Friday pricing” in the summer months, including comparisons of Amazon’s Prime Day (mid-July) as “bigger than Black Friday.” Black Friday is now a yardstick whose meaning and impact extends far beyond the day itself. Ecommerce has been a robust driver of this evolution.

This year’s Black Friday is nine days away, but related email activity has been clearly evident for some time. Let’s take a look.

  • We detect Black Friday references as far back as September, but in just the past thirty days, we’ve seen about 2,700 Black Friday themed emails (up 13% from the comparable period last year).
  • Engagement with these emails has improved over last year: about 15% of these emails had a read rate exceeding 20% in 2016, versus 11% in 2015.
  • However, deliverability has eroded considerably: only 27% of these emails had an inbox percentage exceeding 90% in 2016, versus 48% last year.
  •  In the past thirty days the major full-line multi-channel retail brands have deployed Black Friday themed emails with varying degrees of intensity: Amazon (35 campaigns), Walmart (27) Target and Kohl’s (4 each) and Macy’s (0).

 

Top-performing 2016 Black Friday Emails

In the table below you’ll find examples of recent top-performing emails themed to Black Friday, in order of read rate. They have three factors in common:

  • They’re implicitly or explicitly price promotional.
  • They’re deployed to what appears to be relatively targeted audiences.
  • They use “Black Friday” as a clear baseline reference. Note associated words like “countdown,” “presale,” and “preview.”

 

[table id=6 /]

This is our opening round on Holiday 2016. We’ll be back with much more.