Timberline Interactive

What a difference a day makes.

Yesterday the vast majority of email messages we surveyed bore subject lines expressing some variety of "There's Still Time!" for Holiday delivery.

Today, in near unison, leading online retailers are raising that urgent "Last Chance!" warning, about the impending expiration of free standard shipping offers. And while it looks like herd mentality, marketers have plenty of research at their fingertips to suggest that urgency sells. For instance, Marketing Experiments reported on an email A/B test in which the time-sensitive message outperformed the control group about six to one.

Here are a half-dozen new emails with "last chance" subject lines: