The biggest eCommerce event of the year is approaching and it’s time to start the preparations. As an email marketing agency, we know BFCM is not won on Black Friday week alone. The secret to a successful Black Friday email marketing strategy is planning in advance. So before the hectic days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday arrive, make sure you have your BFCM email marketing strategy ready with these 10 tips.
1. Know when to start and what to promote
BFCM went from Black Friday weekend to Black Friday month with brands launching their BFCM sales earlier every year, some of them even starting mid-October. This can vary depending on the industry your brand is found in, so make sure you are researching when your competitors started their sales last year, how long they lasted, and their offers. This way, you can plan strategically to make sure you are starting your sale at the optimal time and you’re giving out an offer that will stand out among your competitors. These are some email marketing content tools that can help you do some research on your competition:
And although seeing what your competitors did or didn’t do is a best practice, you should not forget to also go through your own Black Friday email marketing strategy from last year. Identify what went great and what didn’t go so well, so you can adjust this year’s strategy accordingly.
Since Black Friday sales are starting earlier, the preparation must also start earlier. During the fourth quarter, try to avoid giving out too many high discounts on your regular sales, so that when the time comes for your BFCM offer, customers aren’t already tired of your discounts and your Black Friday looks even better and more attractive for them.
2. Get to know your subscribers well before BFCM
Before BFCM, try to connect more with your subscriber to get to know them better. Send little surveys on your emails and give out incentives for people that answer. You can ask their gender, age, favorite product, favorite collection, or even what they expect from your BFCM offer. Learn how to leverage email to conduct surveys and gather user data by checking one of our latest posts.
If there’s a lot of information you would like to collect, maybe an external form linked to your email it’s the best way to go. However, if it’s something more specific, you can use personalized profile properties in Klaviyo to create segments based on the information you gather. Here’s how that works:
- Decide on what information you want to gather and add the survey to your email
- Use the following syntax so that when someone clicks on one of the options, a personalized property is added to their profile. {% update_property_link ‘PROFILE_PROPERTY_NAME’ ‘Profile Property Value’ ‘website link to redirect your customers to after clicking’ %}
Here’s an example of a survey and how a profile looks, once the subscriber has answered it and a property has been added to their information.
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3. Double-down on subscriber collection to power up your Black Friday email marketing strategy
Create a new popup that teases your BFCM sale to collect more subscribers. Ask people to leave their emails in order to be added to an “exclusive list” and promise them VIP treatment, early access to your Black Friday offer, or other interesting incentives around Black Friday. You can do the same in a landing page format so you can share it on your other marketing channels.
4. Hype up your BFCM offer with teasers
Before your BFCM sale starts, send out emails teasing your Black Friday offer, give out tips for people to make the most out of your sale, and give your subscriber information on what they can expect so they are ready to spend their money on your store instead of on your competitors.
5. Build an early-birds sale leading up to BFCM
An early bird strategy is an excellent idea if you want to offer your most loyal customers an early Black Friday email marketing treat, and it’s also a great strategy if you want to have a long BFCM sale without it becoming boring.
How to do an early-birds or early access Black Friday sale?
- Determine your early birds list. You can create a special pop-up/landing page for people /even if they are already your subscribers) to specifically sign up for the early access list. This is also a way to hype up your BFCM sale. You can also add to the list VIP customers: repeat buyers, high-spending shoppers, etc.
- Determine the offer. You can keep the same offer for your early birds sale as for your regular BFCM sale, and you can just push on the “early access” angle in your emails. However, you can also choose to give your early birds a better incentive for subscribing to the early birds sale.
- Send your emails. Once you have your offer, create your early birds emails. Make sure to state the benefits of being part of the early access list: not only early access, or better discounts, but customers can also avoid stoic or delay issues when they shop early.
6. Put out a better offer than your competitors’
An attractive BFCM offer is super important, but sometimes that not be enough, especially if your competition is giving out products practically for free. Make sure you are enhancing and communicating your offer in an attractive way by highlighting other of the perks of buying from your brand.
- Loyalty rewards: If your subscribers buy now, they get your BFCM discount, but they also collect rewards points they can use whenever they want to redeem great discounts or free gifts. Communicate this to your email list so they feel they get value from you 365 days instead of only during BFCM,
- Free shipping: If you have an ongoing free shipping offer, remind your customer’s about it. It’s a nice little cherry on top for your brand to look even more attractive.
- Values: If you donate part of your sales to a charity or an ONG, tell your customers about it. If your audience is especially conscious, this will be a great way to incentivize them to help to the cause by placing an order.
- Post-BFCM discount: After Q4, sales tend to slow down because of the post-BFCM blues. To make sure you are still selling during next year’s first quarter and you stay relevant, send a post-BFCM discount. Send a special discount to people that purchased your BFCM offer to redeem it after the holidays.
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7. Keep your Black Friday email marketing strategy interesting
If your BFCM period is longer than usual, keep things interesting by throwing extra incentives to your Black Friday offer here and there as flash sales. For example:
- Free shipping for 24 hours
- Free item on orders over a certain amount
- Extra discounts for VIP subscribers
- Double loyalty rewards points campaigns
- Different collections on sale every week
- Create mystery boxes
8. Leverage FOMO and scarcity
Push sales by reminding your customers this is the best offer they’ll get so people a lot of people are buying from you and they should place their order before their favorite products go out of stock. You can push on FOMO & scarcity through the copy of your emails, but also with extra details on your product showcase like:
- Slashing prices to showcase the original prices vs. the BFCM price
- Add ribbons mentioning how much people will save on each item if they get it during BFCM
- State if a product is going out of stock, is selling fast, etc. You can even mention how many units there are left.
- Give price bands rather than giving specific prices for each product so people have to click on that product to see what the actual discount is.
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9. Offer real value and not just gimmicks
Yes, BFCM is all about selling (and buying). But don’t forget email is also all about providing value to your audience. In the midst of hundreds of BFCM emails, an email with a non-promotional-focused angle can be a breath of fresh air and can set you apart from your competition. Don’t be afraid of emotional angles. Discounts are not the only thing that can sell during BFCM. Identify your subscribers’ pain points and emotional desires to attract them to your product and close the deal by presenting your BFCM offer. Basically, try to answer the question: Why should they buy? And build your Black Friday email marketing strategy from there.
10. Take care of your deliverability
It’s common for people to blast their list during BFCM. But this is not always worth it, as it can damage your sender’s reputation and leave you with a deliverability issue that will take you the whole year to fix. Instead, before BFCM try to slowly re-engage subscribers through your normal emails, so your engaged segment is much larger once the actual BFCM sale arrives, and you can send your offer to a bigger list without harming your deliverability permanently. Here’s our detailed guide on improving your deliverability.
Black Friday – Cyber Monday can be a hectic time for eCommerce store owners. So if you want to make sure your Black Friday email marketing strategy is extra successful this year, book a free call with us and we’ll take care of everything. Want to see what we can do?
Additional BFCM resources:
