No one knows tomorrow. But what we know is that after summer is the magical Halloween, closely followed by…. Yes, the time to create an incredible Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing campaign!
While the Black Friday shopping frenzy is off the charts, it is the perfect time for your company to rack up a portion of the holiday sales. Let’s paint you a picture; in 2021, customers spent 14 percent more than they did in 2020, with a record $886.7 billion on Black Friday.
So, dear email marketers, pick up your paint brushes and canvas for it’s time to create a successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign.
Our article will show the best tips to follow, common mistakes to avoid, the best examples you can learn from, and our tools at Atompark software that will take some of the pressure off your shoulders for a Black Friday campaign masterpiece.
Tips and tactics for your Black Friday email campaigns
In the heat of the preparation, you should remember some tips to ensure a successful email campaign to drive sales for your business. Here are some of them:
Offer irresistible promotions
Mouth-watering discounts will attract more customers. However, ensure you don’t compromise on the quality of products or services or ruin the margin cost.
It would be best to balance making your profit and increasing the demand for your products. The secret?
Keep your Black Friday emails simple!
You can try sitewide savings to make it easier for your customers and sales team to understand and use. Also, consider using tiered offers rather than running a flat rate discount across all products. These kinds of offers encourage users to spend more to unlock bigger discounts.
Write catchy Email Subject Lines to increase Open Rates
A well-crafted Black Friday email subject line should encourage a sense of urgency, show the percent discounts, and cause enough excitement.
If your subject line is not catchy enough, they may not even open your message, and your efforts at creating those exciting promos and stunning Black Friday email designs will come to naught.
You can start running A/B tests to determine what length, punctuation, tone, and content your users are more likely to open.
Follow best practices
You do not want to end up in your customers’ spam folders in the year’s biggest sale. The chances of your messages being seen there are slim to none. So, you want to follow the best practices to keep your emails in the inboxes.
According to an article from Ultramail 24, black is the most readable color on screens, while red or green are often tied to tricky advertising patterns and should be avoided.
There are other spam triggers, including:
- Wrong codes for the email HTML
- Writing all the words in the subject line in caps
- Using words perceived as click baits like “free” and “trial.”
- Removing the unsubscribe option
Encourage a sense of urgency
Believe it or not, knowing about urgency and FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) doesn’t shield anyone from its effects. So, add a sense of urgency to your emails during BF/CM sales.
According to an Experian report, promotional electronic messages that conveyed a sense of urgency had a minimum of 14% higher open rates and twice as high transaction rates.
No shopper wants to be left out of a good deal, especially when they feel every other consumer is just as interested and actively purchasing and limiting the availability.
Be human
With the fever, promotions, and the need for the perfect design, to encourage your customers to make a purchase, be careful not to lose your unique brand voice and personalized relationship with your customers.
Being human means considering your clients individually and attending to their needs. With segmentation and personalization, you can show valuable offers to your customer interested in a particular product category.
The all-time-best Black Friday email examples
Here are some of the best Black Friday emails:
Quip
This Quip email is simple yet thorough, with a clear and visible discount rate and CTA. They understand that there’s a demand for the customer’s attention, so the message is structured to allow subscribers to purchase the product with little or no barrier.
They also understand that the consumers may have skipped other emails explaining their product’s selling points. So, they repeated these main points in the black Friday email.
Maurices
There is no denying that the design on this email is simply stunning.
But that’s not all; the title, “bogo is the new black,” is an intelligent play on the popular Tv-series “Orange is the new black,” making it even more catchy.
Then there is the noticeable, mind-blowing sitewide and storewide “50% discount” to drive more sales and engagement.
Nobull
This design is bold and rich and displays the brand’s color. The sneaker collection also captured appealing and well-rounded ranges to grab attention, show all angles, and encourage sales.
They also embedded social media links at the bottom to encourage social media engagement for the brand from their subscribers.
The call-to-action here is the loyalty and rewards program for the customers to “ENTER TO WIN.”
Pretty little thing
Pretty Little Thing’s Black Friday sale email employed a countdown timer to encourage a sense of urgency and FOMO to hurry a subscriber’s buying decision.
There’s also a hard-to-miss 30% discount and a “SHOP NOW” call-to-action. Plus, the design that’s just a “Pretty little thing.”
ONSEN
ONSEN’s black Friday email is beautiful, with exquisite imagery to capture the customers’ attention.
The CTAs are strategically placed in the email, so customers do not miss the button.
Also, the wordplay, “more towels, less fluff,” does not hurt at all.
Mistakes to avoid in Black Friday marketing campaigns
While you plan a successful email campaign for Black Friday, avoid these common mistakes.
Don’t send emails with only discounts
Do not send out emails that only display your discount; you also want to show and describe your products.
Don’t be mistaken. We all love a sleek design with a ridiculous discount and a good call-to-action, but then, this approach is better for announcing the launch of a new mysterious collection.
Here, in the crazy streets of Black Friday emails, the competition is too much to let your buyers wonder what your product offers.
Don’t ignore your customers’ preferences
You can start by providing answers to these questions:
- What worked for me last year?
- What didn’t work, and why was that?
- What products have been most popular in the last few weeks?
- How can I segment my subscribers and send them the perfect deals?
The answers to these questions should inform your Black Friday email strategy. You can learn from the mistakes and accomplishments of the previous year, know what your customers are looking to buy, and then make plans for these sales.
Don’t send the wrong messages to wrong segments;
When a customer has already made a Black Friday purchase, you may want to stop sending more emails about the same promotions. It may lead to more unsubscribes and skeptical customers.
It also takes away the human component of your brand, making it appear like a profit-first brand.
You can avoid this by filtering your customers who’ve used a particular promotion or retargeting your campaigns.
Don’t create boring emails marketing campaigns;
We have stressed attending to the human factor, stating your discount, and displaying a clear action. However, some campaigns may tick all these boxes and still end up with a dull black Friday email marketing campaign.
Strive to avoid boring campaigns by using creative designs, interactive carousels, accordions, funny GIFs, or relatable videos.
Don’t skip Cyber Monday sale;
DO NOT SKIP CYBER MONDAY SALE (All caps, I know. It’s to tell you how important it is.) BF/CRM sales are a package deal.
You do not get to do one and skip the other. Your customers expect a Cyber Monday sale after Black Friday, and you don’t want to disappoint them.
How to prepare for a Black Friday email campaign?
These tips will help make you thoroughly prepared to send the best black Friday emails:
Think about the offer
Customers love discounts. That’s why most eCommerce online stores offer them on Black Friday day. From free shipping to shopping discounts and the promise of a gift with a particular purchase. So, you can also offer free shipping for the weekend to improve conversion and drive sales.
Collect the email list
Months before the BF and CRM, focus on collecting your email list of active subscribers looking forward to receiving your emails.
You can employ the following strategies:
- The header or footer on your site.
- In-line notice forms on frequently-visited web pages.
- Your checkout flow.
You can also use our Atompark Software – the email hunter, to help you extract email addresses.
Check the validity of your emails
After collecting the email list, you should ensure that the email addresses on this list are valid. Sending emails to invalid, nonexistent, or wrongly spelled emails result in your emails being returned even after you have spent some money.
You can avoid this by checking your database for valid emails and deleting invalid emails with our bulk email addresses checker.
Create some incredible templates
Your emails must be unique, catchy, and interesting for your consumers. To save time, you can select a perfect Black Friday email template that has the following properties:
- The ideal CTA button showed in a contrasting color.
- Aligned fonts and sizes.
- Appropriate image-to-text ratio.
The aim is to make your Black Friday marketing campaigns stand out with unusual, innovative ideas.
Plan your sendings
Sending your email at the appropriate time significantly affects your email conversion.
This year, Black Friday is on November 25th, 2022, the first Friday after Thanksgiving. So, it would be best if you began your Black Friday email campaign on Friday, November 18th, with the first teaser email.
The following email should present your offer before the third email, which serves as a last-chance reminder.
Our bulk mail sender will help you send timely emails as the same to all of your subscribers, so you are never left out of the fun.
Track the success with the right tool
It’s no news that the BF/CM sales may be the busiest period of the year for you. But we would encourage you to track the performance of your campaign. Find out:
- The best send times for your target audience
- What type of promotion is best for your users
- What products they purchased the most
- What days of the campaign had the most sales
This data will help you prepare for the following year. Then you will be able to predict the following:
- what promotions to employ
- which items would be in demand the most,
- the days of high website traffic, sales, and support questions.
We understand that this may be too much. Our email tracker is designed to take that load off your shoulders. The tool tracks your campaign performance, allowing you to focus on your business.
Final words
Ready or not, Black Friday is coming, and we know that these 20 tips will inspire your team to create the most successful email campaign yet while retaining your brand’s identity.
Our email studio at Atompark Software is available to take the stress off you while you focus on the biggest sales of the year.
You can contact us to learn more about our services and how they can improve your email campaigns.
Good luck to you, and have a bountiful Black Friday sales!