Email Marketing Trends for October 2012

Spooks, sales and sleigh bells. With holiday promotions kicking off in September, the fall holidays of Columbus Day and Halloween don't truly take center stage.  October saw a mix of Halloween treats and early holiday shopping sales.  Overall volume continues to rise as we get closer to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas! Check out October's Mid-Month Email Menagerie (pdf) for samples of promotions and content trends in the past month.  Now, let's dig into sending trends for the month.  You can also download this report as a PDF. 

Email Volume by Day

Oct 15th & 22nd (both Mondays) tied for the busiest mailing day of the month with 49% of brands mailing. No one theme dominated either day.  Fall sales, Halloween promotions and holiday themes were rather evenly distributed.  There was a 3% increase over September's busiest day (49% vs 46%).  This makes a 2 month increase that we can expected to continue into November.

Halloween (Sat 10/31) was the slowest mailing day of the month with only 23% of brands mailing.  

Mondays took a strong lead as the busiest mailing day of the week.  Columbus Day and last-minute Halloween deals led to the 3% month-over-month bump.  

October 2011's mailing volume looked similar to this year though Halloween 2011 was on a Monday which may have led to more late week and weekend mailing volume.

Emails Sent per Brand

The most frequent sender in October sent 75 emails which is 5 more than the previous month's leader.  The average number of emails sent by brands continues to increase.  We will see this climb even higher in November. 12% of brands sent 1 email during the month.  This is up 2%.  A few brands have launched "alert" programs that have a different from name and highlight limited time offers geared toward gifters.

Subject Line Trends

Longest: 

If the "list subject lines" are included, the longest subject line was by Fab.com and clocked in at 239 characters.  Fab had 43 of the top 50 longest subject lines for the month.  They clearly have a lot to say.  To illustrate the gap between the list approach and a headline approach, excluding the "lists," we drop down to 127.  

And now... October's longest (non-list) subject lines:

Surprisingly, Hartstrings was the only brand to use "BOO!" in October.  Does anyone else frequently receive "We miss you" emails from Hartstrings?  Hmmmm....

“The Tiny Dozen” features subject lines that are 12 characters or fewer to give you ideas to keep it short and sweet!

Most Frequently Used Characters

Numbers were used more frequently in October.  The special characters either called out steps the consumer needed to take or the days left for a promotion.   

 (Click to view the full list of special characters.)

(Click to view the full list of special characters.)

There was only 1 email that used more than 3 special characters last month.  That jumped to 7 star-filled emails in October.

Please let me know if there are other trends that you would like to see in the monthly Email Marketing Trend reports. And as always, I welcome your comments...any trends you're seeing? What do you make of the trends for October?

Email Marketing Trends - September 2012

Email Marketing Trends - August 2012

Email Marketing Trends - July 2012

Email Marketing Trends - June 2012

Email Marketing Trends - May 2012

Email Marketing Trends - April 2012

Email Marketing Trends - March 2012

Jim Davidson
Manager of Marketing Research