Black Friday is a huge revenue opportunity for brick-and-mortar stores and online retailers. The only problem is that it is such a big deal that it can be easy for a business to get lost in all the competition.
Raising awareness is an important part of running a successful Black Friday sale, but you have to do it with more than just eye-catching discounts and giveaways. The discounts and giveaways eat into your margins so they can only take you so far.
Black Friday email campaigns offer one of the best options for promoting your holiday sales while keeping costs down. Especially since Black Friday will happen mostly online this year. Email marketing is incredibly cost-effective. It can be a great way to raise awareness while engaging with customers.
With the right strategy, an email marketing agency can put your Black Friday campaign over the top. Read on to learn about some of the most effective Black Friday email marketing ideas you can use to boost sales this holiday season.
Look Back to What Works
You have to realize the holiday shopping season is a different economy for retailers than at any other time of the year. Some of the insights from email campaigns you have been running for the rest of the year might apply. For the best insights, you need to look back to past Black Friday email campaigns.
Dig up the data from previous Black Friday campaigns. Which subject lines generated the highest open rates? What CTAs got the most clicks? Which offers drove the most sales? Do you have any Black Friday email templates that can transfer to this year? You will want to update your campaigns, but there should be some value in lessons from the past.
Grow Your List
An email campaign is only as good as its list. You not only want to have a large list with a lot of subscribers, but you also want to have a high-quality list with subscribers that will take action. You might not have much time, but you can still make an effort to build your list before the shopping holiday begins.
If you don’t already have one, add a sign-up form to the header or footer of your site. You could also consider adding a pop-up form to the pages of your website to build your list before the holidays. You should also consider making a small offer to incentive signing up. Something as simple as a 10% discount bonus can do a lot to increase the sign-up rate. This is one effective way to convert leads to sales.
Make the Promotions Hard to Resist
People are looking for the biggest deals on the weekend covering Black Friday through Cyber Monday. If the discount isn’t enough, they will just ignore your offerings, but if it is too much, you run the risk of cutting too deep into your margins.
A 20% discount is a good starting point for the sales you will highlight. After that, you want to find strategic discounts that can go higher. This isn’t to say that you can’t offer discounts of 10% or less. Therefore, you need to use big discounts as something to attract customers to the sale. Once they are there shopping for big discounts, they will be more likely to act on the smaller ones.
A good way to make your offers effective is to highlight the best ones in your Black Friday email subject lines. If your biggest discounts are 70% off for Black Friday, put that in the subject line. When people see 70% off in the subject line, they will be interested and many of them will open the email to learn more.
Keep it Going Over the Weekend
Black Friday is no longer a one-day sale. This is especially true for retailers that operate online. If you want to make the most of this opportunity, don’t let it end with Friday night and pick it back up on Monday. Maximize sales by continuing your Black Friday email campaigns through the weekend.
Have a Saturday “day after” sale. Promote this sale to your email list and highlight the great deals that are still running through the weekend. You could also retarget customers that put items in their cart for Black Friday but did not purchase. Send them a cart abandonment email that reminds them of the item and give them the opportunity to get the sale price the day after. Another hack is then to make sure the navigation through your site to checkout is effortless because it is one of the most effective ways of reducing friction during the checkout process. This little push will be enough to get many of those customers to come back for more shopping.
As a final point, make an effort to retain the new customers you gained with these Black Friday email marketing ideas. Most Black Friday shoppers will not have the same loyalty or lifetime spend as customers you acquire at other times of the year. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t win some of them over. Send follow up emails to thank them for shopping and do everything you can to offer the best experience possible. When it is all over, you should also plan to target them with new email campaigns to keep them coming back.
