2020 Email Marketing Holiday Season in Review

The 2020 holiday season was chaotic and irregular because of the pandemic, a contentious election, and consumers’ financial challenges. Email marketers struggled with those issues, which led to mixed performance results, although email marketing still delivered a high return on investment.

Overall, email volume was up 9% year-over-year during the fourth quarter holiday period, according to data from Oracle Marketing Consulting based on a panel of more than 40 major national B2C brands using the Oracle Responsys Campaign Management platform. In fact, email volume was up every week except during election week, when now-proven-false allegations of election fraud and the threat of violence caused retailers to close stores and pull back on their marketing efforts.

Over the holiday period, email open rates trended nearly identical to last year, finishing up 0.8%. On the other hand, email click rates over the holiday season finished 6.3% below last year’s level, and revenue per email was down 5.8% year-over-year as well.

This blog post goes on to discuss…

• How demand was pulled forward earlier in the holiday season
• How marque shopping days underperformed
• How email churn has remained low
• Which sectors under- and over-performed
• How trends during the 2020 holiday season might affect this year’s holiday season

For a full discussion of each of those issues…

>> Read the entire post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing Blog