Please unsubscribe from my email list! This is basically what many marketers are saying to their customers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It's important to understand the data, psychology and user behavior behind the impact of marketers waiting until the one time a year when they believe they have consumer attention to deploy a marketing message.

Yes, we have data showing that in these cases, retailers and eCommerce companies that bombarded consumers with messaging on Black Friday and through the weekend into Cyber Monday, had more people unsubscribe from email lists than actually make purchases.

Why is this happening? Simple.

If you're not consistent throughout the year, you're just a pesky reminder to unsub on Thanksgiving Weekend when user behavior changes to "I now have time to hit this button, and I'm happy to do it."

When brands or companies wait until October and have their "oh shit" moment; which manifests in the form of - let's get something up for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, etc., that's when they fail. They send emails to their customers at the same time 12 other brands are doing the exact same thing, and while the user is having Thanksgiving Dinner watching the Redskins/Giants on NBC, scrolling through their emails during commercials, the "unsubscribe" button gets tapped more than ever. Why?

Another factor to be aware of, is that it used to take less time to delete an email than to unsub, but now - with the "unsubscribe" button on the native mail app at the top of the opened email, it is easier and less time consuming than ever. Also, users have all the time in the world to clean out what lists they're on over the Thanksgiving holiday. So, if you've done a good enough job building your brand awareness during the previous 365 days, you can and will avoid the unsub on Thanksgiving Weekend.

So I'm fully aware of how successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday are at generating revenue. Roughly $5 billion from Black Friday, $6+ billion from and $2+ billion from Small Business Saturday have been reported this year according to my Alexa briefing this morning from Tech Crunch or whoever. But, the reason this works is because companies have built up brand awareness throughout the previous 365+ days by deploying consistent messaging across platforms to their most loyal customers while providing some level of value along the way.

Thanks and have a great day!

Paul Hickey has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.