1) Plan Your Black Friday Email Campaigns
To make your email campaign a success, plan a well-thought-out series of holiday emails. Announce your promotions in advance. “Countdown e-mails” are a great way to increase the excitement for your offers. Extend your campaign up to Cyber Monday and beyond and surprise your customers with extended promotions. After all, Black Friday should not be seen as a single “shopping day”, but rather as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.
- BEFORE the campaign: Announce your offers by email and inform about the dates of your campaign.
- DURING the campaign: Share your actual offers and discounts.
- AFTER the campaign: Announce the end of your campaign and indicate further deals.
2) Technical Requirements and Infrastructure
Countless emails will be sent to consumers around the world on November 26th, 2021. The number of visitors can be much higher compared to usual business days. Your technical infrastructure for your homepage, landing pages, and email deliverability should be prepared for this situation. Make sure, that not only your inventory and logistics processes are running smoothly, but also your online platforms.
Run stress test on your website to cope with increasing visitor numbers and avoid disrupting the customer experience. If you send e-mails yourself, it is important to ensure deliverability. To be on the safe side, we recommend to outsource e-mail campaigns and leave send outs to experts. Specialists take care of deliverability and thanks to their technical expertise and infrastructure they are well prepared for this situation.
3) Personalization and Exclusive Offers
Address your customers personally and segment your database according to various criteria. For example, you can create segments for loyal customers and reward them with exclusive offers. High Discounts or early access to certain promotions can be part of those ‘members-only’ programs, which increase curiosity and conversion rates.
The same applies to the use of external databases. Use data-driven marketing solutions and benefit from segmentation options. Interest, income and purchase intention are just some of the information that should be considered for personalized promotion emails.
4) Address Existing and New Customers
As mentioned earlier, Black Friday / Cyber Monday is the ideal opportunity to send out exclusive offers to existing customers. But the campaign is also ideal to attract new customers with exciting offers. Use specialists and their external databases to send your promotions to millions of potential customers. Make sure to pay attention to GDPR-compliant data sets and targeting options. After all, you want to share your offers with the ideal target audience instead of a broad mass.
We at Audience Serv are specialized in e-mail marketing solutions for new customer acquisition. Using our GDPR-compliant database we are able to run highly targeted campaigns for you. In addition, we use unique technologies to make your email marketing campaign a success. Contact us for more information.
5) A / B Testing Benefits
A / B testing is an essential method for optimizing the performance of email campaigns. You should also use this approach with Black Friday campaigns. Test different discount levels and offers for different customer segments and find out which promotions are best performing ones by target group. In addition, subject lines and email content should also be analyzed using A / B testing. The following applies to the subject lines: attract attention by all means, but avoid spam words such as “Sale” or “free”.
6) Choose a Converting Email Design
In order to increase the conversion, a professional email template is essential for your campaign. Rely on a structured layout, responsive design, and an appropriate combination of image and text. Keep your brand identity and use your corporate design for recognition value.
Make sure to include the most important information about your offer at the beginning of the email. This increases the conversion rate. In addition, offers should be visualized for better performance. For example, include product images in your email and clearly show what your offer includes.
7) Increase sales with intelligent cross-selling and upselling
Use the results and data you obtained from your Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. With suitable recommendations, you can make additional sales to the same customer and increase the average order value. For example, you can offer accessories for the purchased product. It is important to recognize the needs of the customers and to find the right timing for the email. Analyze each client’s goals and adapt the content to your insights.
8) Analyze Results
Like any online marketing campaign, your Black Friday / Cyber Monday campaigns should also be evaluated in order to measure and optimize success. Pay attention to the most important KPIs such as opening rate, click rate, delivery rate or bounce rate. All the insights you can get will help you to plan similar campaigns.
Conclusion
Both, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, should be used by companies in e-commerce to increase sales. However, marketers should be aware of the high competition in the user’s inbox. A well-thought-out email campaign including A / B testing can help to define the ideal campaign and to stand out from the competition.
With the beginning of the Christmas Shopping Season, retailers can leverage from multi-stage campaigns with mailings over several days. Different or extended promotions can be helpful to exploit the potential of the campaign. It is important to analyze and record results in order to optimize similar campaigns accordingly.
It should be born in mind that the technical infrastructure plays an essential part for the success of your campaign. Delivery problems are a major challenge in email marketing – especially in phases like these. Leave the send out of your Black Friday campaign to experts who can ensure proper delivery.
