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1400 email campaigns and counting – What’s Happening for Memorial day this year

Article by John Landsman CATEGORIES: Uncategorized TAGS:

 

By John Landsman, Director of Strategy and Analytics
Like many national Holidays in the U.S., Memorial Day’s lightheartedness often obscures a solemn intent — in this case, honoring our nation’s fallen soldiers. But Memorial Day is also our bright gateway to summer. In much of the country, swimming pools reopen.  Decks and patios come back to life. Dusty grills are wheeled out of garages.  Youngsters nine months confined to oppressive classrooms eagerly contemplate their imminent release. And for email marketers, this sense of freedom is always observed as another opportunity for customer engagement and buying. So, we wondered who’s been emailing what for this holiday, even though it’s a week away at this writing. The short answer is:  quite a few, and quite a lot.
  • Almost 1,400 related email campaigns have deployed within the past thirty days, very few before that, and over 14% more than in the comparable 2015 period.
  • As you can see in the below table, a higher percentage of this year’s campaigns deployed in the past fourteen days, and also in the past seven, than during comparable periods last year.
  • And a slightly smaller percentage of this year’s emails drove read rates exceeding 20%.

  • These emails appear to cover a wider range than usual of product and service classifications.  It’s a great time for promoting new cars, travel, even financial services.  Retail is most heavily represented, of course. This, despite our continuing to observe that the several full-line national retail brands (Macy’s, Kohl’s, Target, Walmart and Amazon) are practically nowhere in evidence with Memorial Day themes.  We detect a total of only three related email campaigns among those brands — so far.
  • See examples below of the better email performers.  In the spirit of fun, you might note that the best among them came from NFL Shops:  an email featuring football tee shirts!  Go figure…

We’ll update this initial reading after the holiday, to see how much more actually happens, and how it performs.