• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 1, 2015

Jeff Rutherford, media relations consultant, "desperately" wants a Gmail plug-in to delete every Cyber Monday and Black Friday promotional email. As an added bonus it should delete faux-Thanksgiving emails, too, he writes in a Facebook post Tuesday.

Too many emails send the sentiment "We're thankful for you. Now please buy more crap you don't need from us," he says.

Consumers bought about $11 billion in "crap" from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday in 2015 -- up 15% compared with the same days in 2014, and 30% of all online sales in November, at $39.5 billion. 

For the first time, big box retailers similar to Walmart, Target and Kohl’s (Criteo declined to provide where the data comes from, but did say it's pulled data from more than 19 million transactions.) generated more online sales on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday, according to Criteo. In fact, according to the company's data, these types of retailers generated approximately 8.3% more online sales in 2015 on Black Friday, compared with Cyber Monday.

While a well-designed campaign will send the same email message across paid search and social advertisements, in all fairness Gmail has a Promotions tab that filters this sort of stuff into a separate bucket.

Meanwhile, email volume rose 26.8% across all industries, about 30.8% for retail -- between Nov. 14 and Nov. 27 -- in 2015, compared with 2014, according to Experian Marketing Services.

As one part of a cross-channel campaign, email pushes consumers to Bing, Google and Yahoo search engines to research products, or deep link directly to the retailer's product page on their Web site or in mobile apps.

Marketers spent 85% more year-over-year (YoY) to run mobile shopping product ads in search results during Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday 2015, contributing 10% to total search spend, according to Kenshoo.

Half of consumer clicks on a retail ad were on a smartphone. Overall mobile search spend jumped in 2015, compared with the prior year. In fact, advertisers spent 64% more this year to connect with consumers via mobile search than they did in 2014.

Advertisers may want to direct those mobile search ads to younger adults, ages 18 to 34, since the Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates this age group more likely to favor smartphones for retail activities than any others.