Toys "R" Us, Lord & Taylor and 1-800 Flowers.com—Cease and Desist!

It should come as no surprise that a recent marketingcharts.com report verified what many of us already suspected – retail promotional email volume the week of Cyber Monday was at an all-time high. Your inbox, like those of your friends, co-workers and family members, was likely filled every day with promotional messages, promising big savings and limited time deals.

On Cyber Monday, 77% of major online retailers hit their databases with emails. This is not really surprising, being that email is cost-effective and can be developed and deployed more quickly than most other means of communication, such as direct mail or television commercials. The troublesome statistic is this one: top online retailers sent their customers an average of 4.4 emails that week. Yes – more than four emails from each company to each customer. Email best practices often note that you should not be touching your customer with email messages more than four times per month – and these companies reached out four times in one week. Even more surprising – experts predicted this number of weekly touches to grow over the weeks leading to Christmas.

Email best practices also typically note that you should only email your customers when you have something that will be of interest to them – new news. Respect their busy lives, and make your messages easy to understand. Make your subject line brief and clear. It seems that for retailers Toys "R" Us, Lord & Taylor, 1-800-Flowers.com and others, that these best practices went out the window this holiday season. Customers on their lists reported being emailed every single day, dating as far back as mid-November – sometimes twice a day. Though some featured a "deal of the day" as their justification for sending daily emails, many of the communications repeated messaging and their offers from one day to the next. It seems the real strategy for these retailers was to get in the inbox and force their way to the customers’ top of mind by showing up day in, day out.

The interesting thing will be to see how many of these retailers ultimately see an increase in their "unsubscribe" requests after this aggressive holiday season. Where do you stand? Have you received too many emails this holiday season? Did you unsubscribe from any lists? Head over to our Facebook page and join the conversation, and tell us who, if anyone, is on your Cease and Desist List.