By now, you should have started your email marketing push toward the holiday shopping season. As consumers more than ever are choosing to do their shopping online, especially through their mobile devices, email marketing offers an incredible opportunity to deliver relevant content and promotion to your prospects in a way that makes converting effortless.
If you own an eCommerce store, you should be taking advantage of the increasingly important time of the year: Black Friday and Cyber Monday. More shoppers turn to the internet for the busiest shopping days of the year.
Black Friday pulled in $6.22 billion in online sales in 2018, according to Adobe Analytics, this is also 23.6 percent up from 2017.
To help you get off to a great start of the biggest retail weekend of the year, we’ve compiled 6 Black Friday & Cyber Monday email campaigns which can help you get the engagement and results you want.
1] Preparations for Black Friday email newsletter
If you want to run a Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing campaign that evidently boosts your sales, you must be prepared.
The earlier that you get started in outlining, planning, editing, and creating personalized newsletters using tools like designmodo newsletter template builder, the more effective your email newsletter will be on launch day. You can start planning your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns a month in advance.
You want to make sure that you have every part of the email campaign nailed down weeks before you send your first email newsletter. With that, you can focus on addressing unforeseen issues throughout the campaign.
Besides, you don’t only have to focus on only your email campaigns, preparing your infrastructure is absolutely important on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as well. Since your site will be flooded with traffic, especially when you offer incredible deals, it is important that your servers are able to contain the massive traffic.
2] Drive opens with a catchy subject line
People look to the subject line of a message after the sender name to decide whether or not they should open an email.
Marketers are sometimes a bit aggressive with all the caps, exclamation marks, and emojis in an effort to stand out among the crowd during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In our opinion, you can still use a catchy subject line that your audience tends to click on without being too overly aggressive.
For instance, Sephora got an incredible result when they used “Today is Sunday, but for you, it’s Cyber Monday” subject line for their Cyber Monday email marketing campaign.
With that exciting subject line, the consumers like they are getting something special – without a single emoji, caps, and exclamation mark. Also, you can try to play up urgency and exclusivity or try to stand out with a short subject line.
3] Avoid your email landing in spam folders
It is getting more difficult to inbox during the holidays. And according to the data released by eDataSource, only 19 percent of Black Friday emails had inbox percentage exceeding 90 percent.
This means that far fewer consumers are actually receiving your email. And no matter how incredible your Black Friday marketing email maybe, it won’t generate a reaction if it isn’t delivered to the recipient inbox.
So, before you come up with the most interesting subject line and messages, let’s look at how your email can actually get in the inbox in the first place. For starter, separate your status by message type.
Typically, you want your promotional emails and transaction emails on different subdomains and IP addresses. Doing this will sperate the state of these two channels, so if your transactional emails started landing in spam folders, your marketing emails wouldn’t be affected, and vice versa.
4] Social media campaigns
While email marketing is more effective than social media for driving sales, you still don’t have to neglect social platforms entirely. When you pair your marketing email strategy with a social media marketing campaign, you increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and conveying exciting offers to your audience. You want your audience to be aware of the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales that you will be offering.
Email obviously provide you with a direct means of informing your audience about the upcoming holiday deals, but you are not the only company trying to inform them of such deals. So, you need to go a step further and build the expectation over time, and the best way to do this is through the social platforms.
Think of interesting ways to create that anticipation. Moreover, this may seem obvious, but you can also promote your newsletter sign-up form on your social media platforms.
5] Create urgency
Creating urgency is pretty straightforward with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, because most sales are usually available on the date of the holiday, and for every sale, there is an end date. Make it obvious that the current offering will expire on a particular date.
While this may seem obvious, don’t stop to create urgency in your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and remind your customers that there is a limited amount of time or product, so they need to take advantage of the offer.
6] Use the offers to strengthen your email list
In the weeks that lead up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you want to make sure that you reach as many target audiences as possible. So, make sure that you are taking the necessary steps to grow your list of subscribers.
Use genuinely interesting offers and urgency around the holiday to convince your target audience to subscribe to your email list and receive a discount or exclusive deals.
One of the most effective ways you could use is to create a pop-up landing page for your email list. Although this draws attention away from other parts of your site, it will give you a higher conversion rate.
All in all, the only way to anticipate and build hype around your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales it to get it in front of your consumers.
