Contributing Editorial: Three Critical Holiday Email Marketing Questions

By Chad White, Director of Retail Insights and Editor-at-Large, Email Experience Council

In the retail industry, you can learn a lot from watching your peers, especially during the critical holiday season. During the fourth quarter of last year, I did just that, tracking more than 3,300 promotional emails from the top online retailers through the Retail Email Blog. Based on that monitoring, the Email Experience Council has produced the Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season, a roadmap to the e-mail holiday season. Here are three questions addressed by the guide that will set your email marketing efforts on the right track:

1. Are you starting your holiday email campaigns too late?

If you're waiting until Black Friday, then you've abdicated at least half of the holiday email season to your competitors. Last year, retailers, on average, began their holiday campaigns 58 days before Christmas — on October 28. I repeat, "on average." This year, I've already seen Christmas-related emails from Circuit City, Hallmark, HSN, KB Toys, Toys "R" Us, and Williams-Sonoma. So while offline Black Friday is often touted as the beginning of the holiday season, that's definitely not the case online... by a long shot.