The holidays are a hectic time of year… so hectic that we released the results of our “Cyber Week” study last Friday and only now am I getting time to finally update our blog to talk about it.

We did put out a full press release, which you can read here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/email-marketing/elite-email/prweb9048171.htm

As everyone knows, email marketing continues to explode in growth, but what we wanted to know is how much email is helping to drive sales around key spending seasons, specifically Cyber Monday through to Cyber Week.

What we did was analyze the email marketing efforts of over 2000 online retailers and compared their activity this year versus the same time period last year (2010).

Even at the outset, my gut instinct said we were going to see an increase, but even I was impressed by the magnitude of the jump.

Email marketing sending volume increased 32% on Cyber Monday (Nov. 28) and nearly 23% throughout Cyber Week (Nov. 28 – Dec. 2). This is a substantial year-over-year increase and definitely helps show that online retailers are turning to email as a primary way to get shoppers to their digital storefront.

We even went a bit further back to see how marketers were ramping up as Cyber Week neared closer. During the two weeks leading up to Black Friday (Nov. 11 – Nov. 24) we saw a 12.6% increase in volume over the previous year. One of the interesting trends we identified this year as it related to email content, was that leading up to Cyber Week, many online retailers were trying to build hype about sales they were going to have. Throughout the rest of the year, most of these online retailers are trying to go directly from email to click to sale, but this time they were sort of running ‘teaser’ campaigns in an effort to give people a sneak peek about what was coming.

In addition we took a look at engagement metrics because we didn’t want to just know if people were sending more, we also wanted to know if consumers were more eager to open and click links in the email.

On Cyber Monday, open rates jumped an impressive 14.3% over 2010 numbers, while clicks increased 10.8%. Throughout Cyber Week, opens increased by 12.6% and clicks increased by 8.8%. So, there is no disputing the fact that today’s consumer turned to their inbox to find some great deals on their holiday shopping.

I’m already interested in seeing if the pace of email marketing sending volume and email engagement continues to increase during the 2012 holiday season. Just 12 more months and then we get to find out!