6 Steps To a Successful Black Friday Email Campaign

Black Friday is just around the corner and you need to be prepared to grow your client base, increase revenue, and have a successful Black Friday. When it comes to Black Friday, for an email marketer it is your Super Bowl. Black Friday is one of the biggest sales events where every consumer is looking to find the lowest prices from their favorite brands. Especially after Covid-19, buyers are still looking to purchase online rather than in-store.

And alas, you are not alone. Your competition is also vying for your customer’s attention with Black Friday deals and email marketing campaigns. It’s time to focus on your email marketing campaign because it will be your biggest source of holiday revenue.

When you take advantage of a holiday sale, you’re able to benefit from increased traffic and conversions. To give you the cold hard facts of what Black Friday should be on your radar, let’s take a look at these stats:

• 59% of consumers between 18-44 shop online
  If you’re not targeting these ages, you’re missing an entire opportunity. This age range is the most connected via the internet and the most frequent users.
• 83% of shoppers agree that they avoid shopping in-store
  The holiday season is a traditional madhouse when it comes to shopping. Now that eCommerce is so strong people will most likely choose to remain in the comfort of their own home and do their holiday shopping with a glass of wine.
• Black Friday is the busiest email day, with 116.5 million campaigns being sent
  You need to keep your campaigns strategic and poignant since you’re competing with a lot of inbox placements.

Black Friday is a huge asset when it comes to your online business. The need for a Black Friday email strategy that targets your audience with the right incentives is one of the biggest components you should focus on.

Let’s get started on a successful Black Friday email strategy. We will map out all the information you need to get you set up for success.

Your Guide To A Successful Black Friday

Plan your Black Friday Email Schedule

Consumers are constantly searching for deals and discounts, and knowing that Black Friday is around the corner, they definitely have your promotions on their radar. To take advantage of this purchase intent you need to develop an effective email schedule to target them when they need it the most.

Divide your holiday into three mailing periods. Pre-Black Friday, the actual Black Friday, and post-Black Friday (aka the weekend). Then you’re able to make more clean and understandable messages for your customers when you have an idea of when and why you’re sending them this email.

Pre Black Friday

Your flirtatious email which can start as early as mid-October lets people know that there will be a Black Friday promotion or even an “early bird” promotion to make them aware and want an amazing deal from your business. The goal is to give potential shoppers a Black Friday preview sale that prepares them for the Black Friday sale.

Black Friday, The Main Event

Your Black Friday emails are not just competing with the normal competitors, no, your emails are in competition with all the other businesses who are sending promotional emails as well. It is a fight for inbox placement and open rates. It’s now time to be clever, intriguing, and valuable. To make sure your email list will interact with your campaigns, you need to send the emails at the right time.

Sending time data will help increase your engagement and open rates. It may vary from niche to niche but the best sending times that can help maximize your open rates is by making sure they get delivered sometime between 9 am and 11 am.

Post-Black Friday

The party doesn’t have to end on Black Friday, you can keep a post-Black Friday email campaign to target those with some last-chance deals. The trick here is to keep your campaigns short and concise, you do not want to overdo it. These post-Black Friday deals also don’t have to be as grand as your day of deals. This helps incentivize customers that missed their opportunity to make sure they take advantage of the next deal available, which is quickly approaching, Cyber Monday.

1. Boost Your Email Lists

Take some time to expand your email list before this holiday rush sets in. Did you know that email subscribers spend, on average, 138% more than non-subscribers? You want to make sure that you’re working on expanding and growing your email list before the Black Friday holiday rush begins. It not only helps with your overall email marketing strategy but also helps you increase seasonal sales and revenue.

A larger list means a bigger reach, driving more incremental revenue over the holiday period. To start, make sure that you have a few ways to capture email addresses both onsite and offsite. You should be given ample opportunities for customers to subscribe.

You should have a signup form in the header or footer of your site and should be located on the most visited pages. During check out is also a great place to have a subscribe option for customers. While you ask for their email address as part of the purchase process, you can also ask for an opt-in to pass their email to be part of your email c communication.
Social media is also a powerful tool when it comes to finding and growing your audience. LinkedIn, Facebook Lead Ads, and others are great sources for list growth and especially if you are running behind and want a last-minute push.

2. Know What Your Audience Wants

As a business owner, you can use Black Friday as a great opportunity to sell any items left in stock or any last-minute promotions to help reach your end-of-year goal. However, just because the goods are there or the promotions are available, does not mean you should be constantly emailing your customers about them. Before you ever hit “send” you need to have a clear idea and understanding of what your target audience wants and what they are looking for.

You need to understand your metrics, you should be able to monitor any online consumer behaviors such as the seasonality of a certain product or service. From there you are able to have a better gauge of when the right time is to send the promotion or when people are more likely to purchase an item.

You can directly ask your customers by sending them a holiday survey and you can even incentivize responses by adding a 10% coupon code at the end. Keep this email short and sweet, just like your survey should be. No one wants to take time out of their busy day to answer a survey or read a lengthy email so do the heavy lifting for your customers.

If you’re able to understand your metrics and see patterns regarding click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversions you are one step closer to achieving a successful email marketing campaign. As mentioned above, the holiday season also brings its own metrics to understand. Seasonal purchases and e-commerce typically spike during this time of year but the key is to know when is the right time to send your campaign in order to be in front of the right audience at the right time.

3. How Do Your Metrics Compare?

When was the last time you took a good hard look in the mirror? It may be time to conduct a competitive analysis. Sometimes we can get lost when focusing so much on our data that we don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. View your business from a different perspective and analyze how you measure up to your competitors. Your audience is not your audience, you share it with your competitors.

It’s always good to keep one eye open for your competitors but it’s not something you need to obsess over. However, once in a while, it’s good to keep yourself in check to understand what works for your competitors and how to do it better. It’s more important to pay attention than to copy off their work so walk that fine line carefully. Pay attention to the frequency, timing, and offers your competitors are using in their email strategies.

4. Your Email Design

When you start to craft your Black Friday email design, you want to make sure that you’re well prepared. You can even recycle a template that has been successful in the past to help you save time.

But if you plan on creating your own template this holiday season, remember to be short, concise, and to the point. While everyone is receiving many many holiday emails, especially for Black Friday, you want to be one that is easy to read and memorable.

You can use a funny GIF or write your email as a grocery list - aka, bullet points. Make sure that everything is easily scannable and that you have a strong call to action at the end of the email.

A call to action is one of the best assets to have in your emails because it directs your customers to the next step of their journey. It takes out any of the guesswork for them and makes it a lot easier to get to a landing page or whatever your conversion may be.

5. Send To A Clean List

When you are sending your email campaign it is crucial that you are sending to verified email addresses. The best way to send your Black Friday campaign is to send it to a clean email list. This means running all of the thousands of contacts you have through an email list cleaning tool. You can then export the clean and deliverable emails that help you maintain a good email sender reputation score, and stay out of spam traps, and off of black lists. Remember, the strongest email campaigns are those that get delivered.

You’re Ready

This holiday season, make sure to follow these steps above to help strategize your Black Friday campaigns. Plan ahead, boost your email lists, take into account what your audience wants, understand and study your metrics, have a planned email design in mind, and send to a clean email list. With these tools in your toolbox, you’ll be able to create a great Black Friday strategy.