Listen Up Email Marketers: With 38% More Email Opens, Black Friday “Officially” Your Biggest Day Of The Year

Email marketing firm Movable Ink has released new data around this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday email consumption, revealing 38 percent more email opens occurred on Black Friday compared to Cyber Monday’s email open rates.

According to a post on the company’s blog, “With competition for consumers’ attention – and wallets – fiercer than ever, brands started their holiday email marketing programs early.” Movable Ink said the total volume of emails it sent between Black Friday and Cyber Monday was up “a whopping” 3,085 percent year-over-year.

In addition to email open rates, Movable Ink’s data showed 59.9 percent of marketing emails sent on Thanksgiving Day were opened on smartphones (presumably by consumers avoiding awkward family conversation and recovering from food comas).

At 57.5 percent, Black Friday followed Thanksgiving as the second biggest day for smartphone email open rates. The average marketing email open rate on smartphones for Q3 was 45.5 percent, says Movable Ink.

On the record as the biggest online shopping day ever, Movable Ink says Cyber Monday’s marketing email open rates stood at 40.1 percent for desktops and a 45.5 percent for smartphones. For tablets, the data showed iPad and Android devices accounted for 19.3 percent of Saturday’s email open rates and 18.7 percent of Sunday’s email open rates.

“Black Friday is now officially the biggest day of the year for email marketers,” said Movable Ink CEO Vivek Sharma, “The surge in mobile opens should also make marketers take notice – without mobile optimization in place, a lot of money could have been left on the table.”