Black Friday and Cyber Monday are one of the most expected dates of the year for all Brands and Marketers, as the date is coming closer we wanted to share with you some of the Do’s & Don’ts for Email Marketing strategies and guide you through the main and more important steps for preparing all your Email Marketing. Keep reading cause we’ve gathered some special and interesting information for you.

Do’s 

• Prepare your list: Prior to Black Friday & Cyber Monday, customers are already buying less or on the lookout for the upcoming Offers, Early Access. Avoid giving big discounts or discounts at all at least 3 weeks before and take care of your deliverability. Monitor your Open Rates, Unsubscribe Rates & Spam Rates. Take care of your list as much as possible since you’ll want to blast the list during this special weekend.

• A good first impression: As the dates come close, brands tend to attract more “in the buying mood” people so your list growth will probably increase rapidly with customers that are visiting your store for the first time. Give these new customers a good impression, explain who you are, your value, and introduce your product portfolio.

• Give more than discounts: Black Friday is not all about discounts, even though it is an important asset during these days if you only offer discounts you might find yourself attracting what we know as “promo pigs” – people only looking for the lowest price. Drive your sales with Exclusivity, Urgency, Access, Value, and price. 

• Offer smart bundles and upsell: Take advantage of these offers and upsell complementary accessories or products with all Black Friday-related purchases.

• Collect as much data as possible: Now that potential customers and recurrent clients are hooked and engaged with your content, capture all the data you can, this will give you a bunch of insights on what they liked, what they were expecting, the content that engaged the most and the offers that worked or didn’t work.

• Create a value exchange: Related to the point above, offer discounts or special access if your list gives you something in return, such as share, like, reviews, video review, referrals.

• Relate your offers to Christmas Gifts: Encourage people to get Christmas gifts on time and at the best price. If possible you can also give the option of staggered payment buying.

• Free Shipping: If your margins allow it, offer free shipping along with your main offer, if not, give it with a minimum purchase. Free shipping is one of the most attractive offers, take advantage of it. 

Don’ts

• Don’t send emails to recent purchasers: This is a common mistake, exclude recent buyers from your Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals cause they make them feel bad about losing the discount opportunity, and in the future, they’d only buy from your store if there’s a discount.

• Don’t spend much time promoting deals to already existing customers: Those who already are high-frequency buyers most likely find you anyway.

• Don’t use all your discounts on Black Friday: Save some for Cyber Monday. 

• Don’t forget about mobile experience: Around 40% of Black Friday sales occur via mobile so make your emails mobile-friendly, responsive and dark mode.

• Don’t forget to tell your list about it in advance: As e-commerce grows, there are much more competitors out there and you want to be the first one they turn to see. Promote your store everywhere and make sure you’ll be on top of mind when the time comes.

• Don’t put your Best Seller Selling items on sale: This is just a recommendation since many of our clients do decide to do it at the end – but – there’s no need to give away your margin for volume so give it a good thought and do it only if margins allow. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Guide, Step by Step: 

• Plan in advance and prepare BFCM Flows and Campaigns: One of the most important things to do prior to BFCM weekend is to prepare your Flows and Campaigns. Flows are those automated emails that are triggered by certain actions. The most basic flows an e-commerce store should have are Welcome Flow, Cart/Checkout/Browse Abandonment Flow, Post Purchase, Re-engagement. Update your flow as a good practice to showcase the BF offer, if it’s too much work and you have just a few resources a good solution is to add a banner at each email of the series.

• Analyze previous data: Take advantage of other years’ data to optimize your strategy. Tease your audience with what has worked in the past (content/deals/quizzes) so that you can build up the excitement of what’s to come, you can even begin BF deals before anyone else to increase the conversion rate.

• 1 Month before BFCM plan your approach: Prepare your segmentation, warm up your unengaged segments, test pop-ups and update your site/site banners to a Black Friday theme and update your flows so that the strategy is congruent with BFCM.

• 15 days before BFCM: Build back your email reputation, send campaigns only to your most engaged audience so that you normalize any damaged reputation. Have ready all your creatives, maximize your availability for any last minute edits that might occur during the weekend.

• 1 Week before BFCM: Speed up your website, Increase your server capacity – you never know how many visitors you might have, a website crash would be the worst of the nightmares – finally, Triple-check all your campaigns and flows: take a final look at all the campaigns and flows, make sure everything is working properly.

• 1 Day before BFCM: Send early access to those VIP customers or your Early Birds subscribers. Don’t forget to treat them in a special way and grant them exclusive early access to BF deals and even an extra incentive in form of a bigger discount.

With all this said, you’re now ready to begin your Black Friday & Cyber Monday strategy. Remember to do all this with enough time and don’t overwhelm yourself. Sometimes it’s easier, to begin with a simple plan, and later on with enough data gathered and previous experience you’ll begin to optimize your strategy and increase your revenue even more. Good Luck!