This year Black Friday and Cyber Monday land on November 29 and December 2.
If you want to boost your sales, you need to take the Black Friday shopping weekend very seriously and start working on your Black Friday email marketing campaigns.
Why Black Friday email marketing is important
Black Friday weekend sales demonstrate healthy year-over-year growth.
Last year, Black Friday was even bigger than 2017’s Black Friday in terms of customers and sales.
In fact, according to the National Retail Foundation, 165 million Americans shopped over the Thanksgiving Weekend, which covers Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
According to Adobe Analytics and Practical Ecommerce report,
- In 2018, Thanksgiving generated 27.9% more online sales than a year before. The average order value was up 8% over Thanksgiving Day in 2017.
- Online sales on Black Friday jumped 23.6% from 2017. The average order value also increased by 8.5%.
- Cyber Monday was the biggest online sales day of the year with a revenue of $7.9 billion, an increase of 19.3% over 2017.
Black Friday 2019 is expected even to exceed those numbers. If you want to have a great sales year, you need to make sure you’ve got the best Black Friday email marketing ideas.
Find out how Omnisend’s powerful and easy-to-use email marketing can help you sell more. Connect your store today to get your 14-day free Premium trial.
Here are the 8 important steps you need to follow.
1. Boost your subscriber list
We’ve written before not only why it’s important for you to build up your email list, but also nine proven ways you can build an email list today.
This is especially true in the holiday season, as the Black Friday – Cyber Monday weekend is the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
Even more, the customers who’ve already bought from you will be more likely to buy again, so having an email list becomes much more important.
If you want to boost your subscriber list, you should try to improve the urgency and offerings for your products. This should be done before your Black Friday Cyber Monday discounts and offerings.
You should also change the copy on your signup forms in order to emphasize the holiday season offerings.
Place a banner at the top of your homepage or on your most popular pages showing off your promotions. You should also note that some of your special deals will only be available to subscribers.
You can also create a special landing page to grab visitors’ emails from, for example, your advertising campaigns. That way, you don’t have to adapt your entire shop.
Just create a landing page that will direct your visitors towards the desired actions.
Lastly, if you haven’t already done so, you should invest in advertising campaigns. The most popular may be Facebook Ads, which will help you.
This will make you competitive and help you to stand out, especially if you start your promotions earlier.
2. Start sales before Black Friday – Cyber Monday weekend
In order to get noticed by your subscribers and visitors, you shouldn’t promote your Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales on Black Friday or even Thanksgiving.
Instead, you should start promoting your sales well before then. This is because people are more primed to begin their holiday purchases well before Thanksgiving, as Adobe Digital Insights measures the holiday season beginning from November 1.
Adobe’s Digital Insights shows that the holiday season begins well before Black Friday. Image source
Beyond that, by Thanksgiving and Black Friday, your customers’ email inboxes will be flooded with promotional emails, and yours will be lost in the mad rush.
One great thing to do is to start sales on the week of Black Friday, or even the Friday before that.
3. A/B test your subject lines
Getting your open rates up can be a complicated question. It could be a combination of time of day, day of week, weather, political event or many other things.
There are many things that can motivate your subscribers to open your emails, including certain email marketing psychology tips.
However, one of the biggest things affecting your open rates can be your subject lines. Normally, you have to decide, based on your intuition or your experience with your email list, which subject lines lead to better open rates.
However, there are also many aspects to consider, such as whether you should use the word ‘free’ in your emails, or if it’s better to just say ‘discount’ or ‘sale’ or explicitly state what the discount will be ‘20%’.
Because of the mad dash revolving around the Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping weekend, you don’t really have much time to test different versions.
That’s why you should do A/B testing on your email subject lines. A/B testing allows you to enter two different versions of the subject line and see which one performs better.
In Omnisend, version A will go to 25% of your recipients, version B to another 25%, and the winning subject line will go to the remaining 50%.
4. Create urgency in your Black Friday email campaigns
It’s also important for you to create a sense of urgency in your Black Friday marketing campaigns.
For example, you can introduce a timer or scarcity so that your users understand that there is a limit to the great deals you’ll be offering.
For example, you can set your email and page timers to expire on Cyber Monday at 11:59pm to have them in sync.
By using scarcity, you can show how much is left of a certain product, with notifications of others looking at or purchasing those same items.
Booking.com does this very well.
5. Send abandoned cart email series
Omnisend analyzed data from 15,000 brands and discovered that sending a series of 3 cart recovery emails resulted in 131% more orders compared to only sending one abandoned cart email.
This can be very simple: customers normally need a few more reminders than just a one-off email. Their inboxes are filled with lots of new emails every day, and even if they intended to finish their purchase, it may have gotten lost.
See the example below:
Sell more today with Omnisend’s powerful and easy-to-use email marketing. Connect your store today to get your 14-day free Premium trial.
6. Consider adding more channels into your strategy
Consider adding text messages or Facebook messenger to your Black Friday communication. According to data, outreaching your audience via three and more marketing channels brings up to 90% higher customer retention.
Ideally, you can add these channels to automated abandoned cart workflow.
See the example below:
For text messages, you will need your customer phone numbers. You still have time to start collecting this data from your customers in the signup forms.
It’s important that you also provide extra incentives for your current customers and subscribers to remain loyal to your brand.
For your subscribers, you can offer a few good things that your normal website visitors wouldn’t get. This can include early-bird offers, discounted items, free shipping, or any combination of those things.
For your loyal customers (that you can identify and segment), you can offer something even better.
For them, you should offer some really great incentives. After all, you’re not focusing here on only the short-term Black Friday Cyber Monday shopping period, but you’re also looking to build up your brand, your customer’s loyalty, and extend each customer’s lifetime value.
Your loyal customers should receive exclusive deals, such as a free gift after a certain amount ordered, or free shipping for all orders, or even a buy-one-get-one half off, free, or something similar.
At Omnisend, we have some interactive elements for such things, like a Scratch Card or a Gift Box.
8. Extend your deals past Cyber Monday
Lastly, it’s probably a good idea for you to extend your deals a little bit past Cyber Monday.
You don’t have to be too crazy and extend it all the way to Christmas. No, just extend it for one or two days.
Here, the marketing of your extension is important. You still want to maintain the scarcity and exclusivity of your promotions.
Therefore, you can try to extend it with similar language as Julep uses:
First off, their subject line is straightforward and eye-catching:
EXTENDED! 50%. Off. Everything.
Secondly, their sale is extended only for 48 hours, which still maintains that sense of urgency.
Therefore, those customers who missed your sales for one reason or another can still buy from you at your special prices.
This also means it’s easier for your emails to get noticed, as most of the mad-dash last-minute emails are sent on Cyber Monday. By Tuesday morning, everything should be quieter in their inboxes, and you’ll be noticed more.
Skyrocket your sales with your Black Friday email campaigns
If you want to increase your sales, it goes without saying that you need to double down on your email marketing. If you don’t have an email marketing strategy yet or haven’t invested in email marketing at all, you still have time to fix that.
You won’t believe how much money you’re leaving on the table by ignoring email marketing ($40 ROI for each $1 spent).
While Black Friday is more than a month away, now is the best time to start planning for it. After that, implement your strategies and get your piece of the Black Friday – Cyber Monday pie.
This article was originally published by our friends at Omnisend.
