The eCommerce industry doesn’t enjoy a steady stream of revenue like many other sectors. Instead, it generates most of its earnings during specific sale seasons, and Black Friday is among the top grossers, bagging $9.03 billion last year. Acquiring $10.8 billion in revenue, Cyber Monday, too, made online retailers happier than ever before. Just because people are willing to spend, you may not be able to encash the raining opportunities unless you come up with a concrete strategy to win customers and rev up your conversion rate.
Email marketing is going to be your darling as you plan to strengthen your bottom line during these major sales events. Today, I will share my two cents based on my experience as an email marketing expert on how you can develop an email campaign strategy for both of these important holidays. Let’s get started:
Black Friday And Cyber Monday Email Strategy
You may improve your chances of success by doing the following:
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1. Start Growing Your Email List Right Now
On average, email subscribers spend 138% more than non-subscribers. As a result, the most crucial strategy to focus on right now, i.e., before these sales events, is growing your audience. With a larger list, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience, which will result in more income over the Christmas season.
Increase your on-site and off-site list-building efforts but don’t compromise on the quality of subscribers. Always go for a double-opt-in form. I would also advise you to run your onboarding email series in a prompt manner since the purchase intent runs strong during this time of the year.
2. Come Up With A Vision For Your Sales Strategy
Any marketing campaign’s success hinges on planning, and this is especially true for events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, given the competition and the sizable opportunity. It all begins with defining the potential for your particular product range and your ability to meet the total demand.
Naturally, you might not be able to fulfill the entire demand but knowing your capacity is the first step to building a sustainable sales strategy, with past email campaign metrics being the benchmark. The past results will give you a concrete starting point as you would be able to comprehend what works well with your existing subscribers. Using segmentation, you can personalize your offers and target your subscribers according to their affinities. Lastly, define the deliverables in terms of the number of emails to be sent, email templates to be developed, automation workflow tweaks required, and other deliverables for your email team.
3. Examine The Results Of Last Year’s Holiday Season
It’s time to organize your holiday email marketing schedule. Analyzing your own program’s historical success will provide the most useful information for future planning.
Study the performance of your 2020 Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing campaigns to determine the most effective promos and messages, as well as the best dates to send for the best results. To discover significant topics, look at the campaigns with the greatest open and click rates from the previous year:
- Subject headings
- CTA buttons
- Design and creative aspects for email
Click monitoring across campaigns, albeit underused, frequently offers unexpected information. Examine whether content blocks, promotions, photos, or calls-to-action were the most successful in past campaigns.
4. Tune Your Subject Lines To Perfection
In the days preceding up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, most of our inboxes are bombarded with promotional materials, followed by a second and third deluge of emails on those days. If your subject lines don’t pique your audience’s interest, they’ll discard your emails.
There are a variety of approaches to creating an attention-grabbing subject line. You can make a joke, pose a query, or offer a list of useful products (or deals, in this case). You may also concentrate on the expiration date of your promotional offer or the excitement around significant occasions such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The idea is to convey the importance of your email in as few words as possible. Since most mobile inboxes only display 25-30 characters of an email’s subject line, which is the same for wearable devices, the length is critical.
5. Keep Your Email Copy Concise And Use Alluring Templates
If your reader has to read too much text in your email, the chances are that they will skip to the next email. Your email text should ideally be between 50 and 125 words long. As a rule of thumb, it should quickly motivate the recipient to make a purchase by focusing on how the offer is a steal deal rather than focusing on the product’s qualities like regular marketing emails.
Your email templates, on the other hand, must look appealing, follow all email design best practices. Make it easy for the recipient to navigate through the offerings. Visual hierarchy is to be given more importance since your primary goal is to make it easy for the subscriber to start their purchase right away.
6. Up Your Call To Action Game
Frankly speaking, the call to action is the most crucial component of any Black Friday/Cyber Monday email marketing campaign. As discussed in the above section, your target is to smoothen the reader’s journey and make them quickly reach your CTA button.
Therefore, your CTA button should fetch a bit more attention, and it is necessary that it tempts the reader to open the link and confirm their purchase ASAP. This can be accelerated by using the right color palette, typography, CTA copy, and making the button highly accessible. The outbound link should be readable and give the user an idea of where they are going to land since many people prefer hovering their mouse over it to confirm the same. Have a look at this example which follows most of these best practices:
Summing Up
Creating email campaigns around Black Friday and Cyber Monday is most likely to improve your brand recognition and revenue. The final piece of advice I would like to give my readers as an email marketing expert is to stay away from overkilling any aspect. Keep it simple, attractive, and unless you make a huge mistake, these tips will surely help you make handsome sales this Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Author: Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.
