Retail and ecommerce-focused marketers frequently change their game plans during the shopping-centric months of November and December, often ramping up frequency and shifting message content. Does email performance differ during this period? To help answer this question, this year’s report compares performance on a set of metrics between holiday emails – those sent during the heavy shopping period corresponding to the roughly six weeks from the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday through Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve – and non-holiday messages, or those sent the rest of the year. There was minimal disparity when studying results across all categories of senders. However, as you might expect, some significant differences emerged in the Retail & Ecommerce sector. The mean (average) open rate was 18.8 percent lower during the holiday season. The mean click-through rate was down 28.6 percent on holiday messages. However, the click-to-open rate varied less than 1 percentage point between the two time periods. The findings, which you can read more about starting on p. 21, suggest that some retailers’ failure to deliver personalized content and offers is resulting in lost engagement and revenue.