Predictions of Holiday Email Winners and Losers

Kmart, Home Depot, Nordstrom, and OfficeMax will prevail in inboxes; Amazon and Bergdorf’s will falter, a study claims.

With Adobe reporting that mobile purchases on CyberMonday were up 80% over last year, this surely will be a merry mobile holiday season for retailers—but not for those that haven’t optimized their emails for mobile viewing, according to mobile click-to-buy company LightningBuy.

The company’s Mobile Email Scorecard, which monitored 60 Internet retailers during Thanksgiving week, found that only 35% of them sent mobile-optimized emails promoting deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. “According to BlueHornet, 76% of consumers check emails on smartphones before viewing them on computers,” says LightningBuy CEO Carissa Ganelli. “That means email campaigns had better be optimized for mobile or retailers will miss out on sales.”

The scorecard declared 15 retailers the “winners” of the holiday season’s opening sprint, and predicts they’ll prevail throughout December by paying attention to mobile purchasers. They include Banana Republic, Home Depot, J. Crew, Kmart, Nordstrom, OfficeMax, Sears, and Target. “Impulse purchases are a key component of the frenzied holiday shopping season, and these retailers will garner a higher share of them,” Ganelli says.

“Losers” were so-designated because their non-mobile-optimized emails led to non-mobile-optimized websites.  Amazon, which prefers to drive users to its app, leads this list, which also includes Bergdorf Goodman and Baby Gap.

The 60% of retailers not designated winners or losers had mobile-optimized emails or websites, but not both.

“This leaves a huge opening for competitors that have made the effort to be where consumers are, which is on mobile devices,” Ganelli says.