Before the holiday season is a distant memory, let’s review what happened in email inboxes in January and how it aligned with the predictions in our 2014 Email Marketing Holiday Calendar. Let’s also look back at the entire holiday season.

January Review

During January, we predicted that major retailers would send their active subscribers around 19 promotional emails each. Our prediction turned out to be a little low. On average, retailers sent their active subscribers 19.7 emails each.

As anticipated, holiday messaging fell off quickly after the start of the New Year. Much of the holiday messaging in January involved gift card redemptions, holiday décor storage, holiday clearance sales, and upsells around accessories for popular holiday gifts.

Season Wrap-Up

For the July-to-January period, we predicted that major retailers would send each of their active subscribers 142 emails. The actual number sent was 142.3. Not too shabby predicting on our part.

Self-congratulations aside, what this means is that holiday email sending volumes behaved pretty predictably over the past 7 months because our prediction model didn’t include any dramatic deviations from previous sending patterns. So while there were lots of arguments about whether retailers were more promotional earlier—and there definitely was stronger promotional content in mid-November—that didn’t translate into significant email volume changes.

For a look back at all of our holiday advice and predictions, check out the 2014 Email Marketing Holiday Calendar. And keep an eye out for our 2015 calendar in June.