• by Ray Schultz , December 3, 2018

Email volume and sales rates hit new highs over the Thanksgiving weekend, but there has been a shift toward the earlier days in the cycle, judging by a study by Omnisend.

Open and click rates were highest on the Monday and Wednesday of Thanksgiving week, topping 10%, although they fell slightly on Black Friday itself— no surprise, given the email volume of that day. And consumers bought almost as many items on Thanksgiving Day as they did on Black Friday.

The order count peaked at 9.44 on Black Friday, which also drew over 40% of the weekend email volume. Cyber Monday, on which 30% of the emails were sent, pulled an order count of 5.56 — the lowest of the whole cycle, prompting Omnisend analyst Whitney Blankenship to ask, “is this the beginning of the end of Cyber Monday?” The open rate dipped below 10% on that day. 

Monday had the third highest order count, Wednesday the fourth and Tuesday the fifth. The Thanksgiving order count appeared to hit almost 9. 

In addition, open and click rates fell on Saturday and Sunday, despite the fact that consumers have more time to shop on those days. However, those days still did better than Cyber Monday in sales.

The study also shows that while email ROI is still the highest of any channel, SMS is gaining — achieving an ROI of over 2000%. SMS campaigns were sent 33 times more than they were on normal business days. 

Omnisend, the provider of an ecommerce platform, studied 4,299 campaigns sent by clients.

It found that 2.13% of cart recovery emails resulted in a purchase, compared with 1.65% in 2017.

And while the open rate dropped to 34% from 37.69% last year, mostly due to email volume, the click-through rate rose from 7.62% in 2017 to 9%. 

In addition, 38% of all welcome emails were opened, generating a 9% click-through rate and pulled an order rate of 2.09%. 

Order confirmation click rates fell from 14.80% last year to 12% and post-purchase click rates from 8.64% to 6%. But order rates rose slightly for both — from 0.20% to 0.35% for order confirmation emails and from 0.30% to 0.45%.

Customer reactivation automation produced an order rate improvement from 1.31% to 1.41%. 

Omnisend recommends sending emails earlier next year, and to avoid bunching them up on Black Friday. It also suggests using SMS for cart abandonment and reactivation.