Email Marketing: Christmas comes (really) early

It might be a distant memory to some, but Christmas lives on for us in many ways. After all, the naughty ones amongst us have only just put the decorations back in the loft!

Of course one thing about Christmas that’s nigh on impossible to forget is the ubiquitous nature of marketing during the period. We were quite intrigued to hear recently that Mailchimp users, according to a recent report by the email marketing service provider, sent a staggering total of 14.1 billion emails in December 2014. That’s an awful lot of emails, and up 72% from the previous December.

So what’s behind the increase? Mailchimp think that the biggest contributing factor to these figures is the growing popularity of controversial American imports Cyber Monday and Black Friday. On Cyber Monday, 1st December, Mailchimp saw 33,000 Christmas campaigns go out, with 22,000 distributed on Black Friday. Mailchimp’s findings also indicate that the Christmas email marketing season begins as early as September, with the peak day Christmas campaigns being the 18th December, when approximately 55,000 emails were distributed.

Of course, these are just statistics from one email sending provider, however they do provide an intriguing insight into trends. It will be interesting to see the changes in email marketing generally in the context of the wider marketing mix, this coming year and whatever Christmas 2015 will have in store. What is clear is that even for small businesses, especially those in retail, planning your Christmas campaigns during the Summer or before really does make sense so as to make the most of the long run up to Christmas, when the time inevitably does come!

Source: Mailchimp 2015