Cyber Monday is a big day for any marketer, but even more so for email marketers. Getting your message out just before consumers start a frenzy of Online shopping is key to being successful during the busiest e-commerce day of the year.
This year proved troublesome for some marketers as it was reported that almost one-quarter of e-mail messages sent on Cyber Monday didn’t even reach the inbox, according to new data from deliverability services firm Pivotal Veracity. While email deliverability usually yields percentages in the mid 80s to sometimes mid 90s, the waves of emails sent on Cyber Monday resulted in only 76.2 percent of campaigns being successfully delivered.
To review deliverability on Cyber Monday, data was pulled via Pivotal Veracity’s tracking system, which maintains e-mail addresses at numerous ISPs/e-mail providers, with default spam-filtering settings left intact to mimic most normal email users. The system, which sends campaigns to so-called “seed accounts,” is set up to automatically log in to each account to identify whether the message was received, sent to the spam folder, or blocked.
The report was based on thousands of campaigns sent to tens of millions of recipients between Nov. 23 and Nov. 30, with about one-third of the campaigns originated from retailers while the data overall reflects benchmark averages across all the company’s clients. Interestingly enough, when it came to the four major e-mail services — AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail — Hotmail proved 7 percent worse than the others on Thanksgiving Day.
Len Shneyder, a director for Pivotal Veracity, placed blame on an unmanageable amount of messages going out almost simultaneously. He added that the most popular send time was between noon and 1 p.m. Central Daylight Time for Cyber Monday, as well as Thanksgiving weekend as a whole.
“It’s not so much a matter of what marketers did wrong individually, but what they did wrong collectively,” he explained. “They all sent at what appears to be the same exact time… When volumes go up, [Internet service providers] are forced to take more draconian actions to control the volume of e-mail they are trying to process.”
This type of situation proves once again how important timing is in any marketing campaign. Had marketers realized the most popular times to send messages, as they should from past experience and research, they would have known to try alternative times such as early in the morning on Cyber Monday or during the middle of the night on Thanksgiving weekend to ensure deliverability.
Retailers and less educated marketers likely had one thing on their mind- get as many messages out as quickly as possible for Cyber Monday, when they should have taken the time to construct a well thought out and researched email campaign that would have guaranteed the highest deliverability possible. This is yet another example of having the right resources at hand and the right platforms and software to help make your campaign the best it can be.
To see how mobileStorm does email marketing the right way, take a look at our offerings or schedule a demo today.