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Lessons from Past Retail Holiday Campaigns

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We recently co-hosted a webinar with John Landsman from eDataSource, and he shared some insight into Amazon’s 2014 holiday email activity — specifically their Black Friday and Cyber Monday activity.

In today’s post, we recap a few highlights on campaign vs. send volumes, as well as delivered and read rates.

eDataSource compared Amazon’s 2014 holiday email activity against those of four major retailers and two big-box specialists. As shown in the charts below, the actual number of Amazon Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday themed campaigns during the 2014 is vastly larger than the others.

Amazon Detected Campaigns

But Amazon’s send volumes were significantly lower than that of the most frequent emailer — suggesting an effort to target campaigns to more narrowly defined customer segments.

Amazon send volumes

And their strategy pays off.  Amazon’s inbox placement rate (a proxy for deliverability) is considerably higher than the others’ in this group.

Amazon inbox placement

And its read rates (open rate proxy) are almost as high as the highest in the group.

Amazon read rate

The takeaway here — A higher number of holiday campaigns focusing on tightly define customer segments can be more effective than focusing on higher send volumes.

In tomorrow’s post, we’ll cover how to take your holiday emails to the next level with contextual elements.

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