Before Black Week
1. Define a clear strategy
Make sure you have a clear plan for your Black Friday email strategy, and be conscious of the purpose of your email channel during the period. Consider what you want to achieve with your email marketing during this hectic time, and clarify what the channel should support.
For example, do you want to grow your customer list through more lead campaigns? Or do you want to adapt your flows to fit the period and incorporate before-prices into your dynamic elements to create an increased wow effect during the sales period?
It is essential to tailor your approach in line with the specific goals you have set for Black Friday, and to ensure that your email marketing contributes to achieving those goals.
2. Technical review and optimisation
A significant part of preparing for the year's major events involves a technical review and optimisation of processes. This includes considerations about whether the metrics set up are functioning correctly, as well as identifying any flow gaps where integrations are not correctly configured or updated.
Another important factor is ensuring that your customers are added to the correct list, as well as considerations around the use of a Dedicated Sending Domain and DMARC policies, if not already implemented.
These factors play a central role in creating optimal conditions during Black Week. It is therefore essential that the technical setup is configured correctly, as it is a critical component in maximising your results.
3. Optimising messaging
To improve your email performance, it is important to carry out targeted A/B tests of your email messaging. Consider which messages to test, while maintaining clear and consistent communication.
This can include messages about pre-access to Black Week, information about payment via MobilePay, and displaying before-and-after prices on your products. Note that a correct code setup is necessary to ensure optimal functionality.
Carrying out these tests provides valuable insight into the performance of different messages — data that can be used to optimise messaging going forward.
4. Grow your customer list
Focus on targeted lead generation to grow your customer list, building a subscriber base that includes both new and existing subscribers. This enables greater reach for your newsletters during Black Week.
To succeed at this, you need to implement an effective lead generation strategy that directs new subscribers to a separate customer list with an associated flow that gradually prepares them for upcoming Black Friday offers.
To strengthen the process, you can support your website's subpages by integrating embedded forms and pop-ups specifically targeted at Black Week. This increases your chances of turning visitors into subscribers, which you can benefit from both before and during Black Week.
5. Countdown to Black Week
Let your subscribers know that Black Week is approaching. Send campaign emails that tease the upcoming offers on your most popular products. Also consider including a countdown timer to build awareness and excitement ahead of the event. Gradually introducing upcoming offers helps set clear expectations and increases interest in your business. We recommend starting no earlier than around one week before Black Week begins.
6. Flows
Make a plan for your flows and consider what content you want to send to your subscribers and when. During peak season, there is an increased frequency of campaign emails focused on offers and discounts. It is therefore worth considering whether you need to make changes to your smart sending settings, and whether you should adjust your time delays across your active flows.
Ongoing segmentation should also be part of your strategy to reduce the unsubscribe rate and ensure that your messages reach the right recipients. This allows you to remain relevant and ensures your emails are opened and read by the right subscribers. Consider filtering out customers who have already made a purchase during the period, so you avoid overwhelming recipients with emails that may create friction in the buying journey.
It is also important that your flows are up to date in terms of dynamic content. Automation flows help recover lost sessions and encourage purchases. It is therefore crucial to follow up on abandoned carts and viewed products, as this can help increase your conversion rate and deliver improved results.
7. Leverage your data in Google Ads and Meta
If you are using marketing via Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads, you are likely aware of the importance of precise targeting to achieve outstanding results. In the past, it was easy to collect extensive data from first- and third-party apps, making it straightforward to gain deep insights into user preferences. This advantage has now been limited by the iOS14 update, which has reduced the amount of available data, making it more difficult to reach the right audience as precisely as possible.
This challenge can, however, be overcome by using systems such as Klaviyo, which allow you to synchronise your segments and lists directly with Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads. This creates the opportunity to target your advertising at look-alike audiences that resemble your existing segments — and at the same time, you can avoid directing ad spend towards irrelevant customers who may have already made a purchase during the period. This data continuity can significantly improve your marketing precision and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns across the entire sales funnel and your marketing mix. If you are unsure about which marketing automation software is best for leveraging your data, find our recommendations here.
During Black Week
1. Detailed segments allow for more content to be sent
During Black Week, you can almost never send too many newsletters — an important point to keep in mind throughout the week. The key, however, is to segment your lists so you do not overwhelm your subscribers with irrelevant emails, which can be a source of frustration and potential unsubscribes. Make sure you have a clear segmentation strategy and monitor your unsubscribe rate throughout the week, to ensure that loyal and new customers are not put off by the volume of emails sent.
2. Compelling subject lines
To increase the open rate of your emails, it is essential to work with compelling subject lines. You can achieve this by incorporating emojis and using adjectives — and above all, speaking directly to the recipient. Integrate elements that capture the recipient's attention, such as limited offers and time restrictions, using phrases like "while stocks last" or "only 100 available at this price".
These techniques can help make your emails appealing and drive a higher open rate and engagement. It is, however, important to strike a balanced approach that attracts attention without feeling intrusive — while ensuring your content remains truthful.
3. Keep an eye on activity in your flow emails
Your flow setup should be a tailored communication journey with critical touchpoints triggered by visitor behaviour on your website. Keep an eye on deviations in metrics and the number of flow emails sent, as this can also drive up the cost with your email marketing platform, since these typically price based on the number of emails sent per billing period as well as the number of active subscribers.
4. Deliverability and performance monitoring
During Black Week, it is important to continuously adapt your email strategy while closely monitoring how your emails are performing. Deliverability has become more complex and critical, as it is now significantly harder to reach recipients' primary inboxes. In fact, only around one in six emails reaches the recipient's primary inbox. This is primarily due to Apple's privacy protection measures, which make open rates less reliable as an indicator, making it difficult to gain insight into the true performance of your emails.
If your emails end up landing in the spam folder, it can — with the right strategy — take up to six months to return to the recipient's primary inbox. Constant monitoring and adaptation of your email strategy is therefore essential to ensure your messages reach the right recipients and achieve the desired effect. If your open rate is below 35%, you should cut back on the volume of emails you send.
During Black Friday, you may experience an increase in unsubscribes as customers become aware of the most attractive offers.
5. Segmentation, segmentation, segmentation!
If you want to run effective email campaigns, you need to work deliberately with segmentation.
This is done by dividing recipients according to different criteria such as: recent purchases, previously unopened Black Week newsletters, or previous interest in discounted categories.
By using these segmentation criteria, your messages and offers can be tailored to feel relevant in relation to each recipient's behaviour and interests. This helps increase the effectiveness of your campaigns and achieve better results.
After Black Week
1. Cyber Monday — same concept, different name
With the end of Black Week comes Cyber Monday and Cyber Week. The challenge here is to retain your subscribers and continue working with audience segmentation. It is worth noting, however, that those who made a purchase during Black Week are probably not hungry for more sales messages at this point. And yet — think news value into your campaign planning and use messages like “11,000 new items added to the sale”, so you can once again inspire with the low prices that both Black Week and Cyber Week are known for.
Focus on time-limited offers and combine these with a touch of exclusivity, so that those who receive your newsletter get extra value for their money by being subscribed. Work with personalised messaging and leverage the available data to ensure you do not end up bulk-sending to your entire contact list. We cannot stress enough how important segmentation is here! This provides more accurate data for you and a better experience for the recipient.
2. The remainder of the Christmas shopping period
During the remaining Christmas shopping period, it is particularly important to maintain the attention of subscribers who signed up during Black Week and Cyber Monday. Keep an eye on whether these subscribers are engaging with the emails you send, and be mindful of inactive subscribers to avoid them negatively impacting your open rate and click-through rate (CTR).
Alongside this, you can consider implementing a pre-sunset flow for inactive customers, where they are excluded from general sends but included in sales messages. This opens the opportunity to offer them particularly attractive deals in connection with events such as January sales and other seasonal promotional periods, in the hope of rekindling their interest in your products or services.
3. Ongoing housekeeping
The final initiatives you can implement relate to housekeeping in your email account. Make sure to regularly clean your list so that you maintain healthy deliverability and do not send emails to accounts that are inactive, deleted or unused. If you do not keep up with good list hygiene on an ongoing basis, you risk a rise in bounce rate, which will negatively affect your deliverability.
It is worth noting here that most people have more than one email address. They may have one for personal use, one for work, and a third for other purposes. The point is that you gain nothing from sending emails that are never opened, which is why it is important to maintain an up-to-date list of engaged subscribers.
Disengaged subscribers who did not take any action even during Black Friday are unlikely to do so for the rest of the year either. You should therefore focus your energy on those who show interest and actively engage with your offers, rather than on customers who do not interact with your emails.
Last chance for email preparations
Competing for consumers' inboxes requires the right strategy and planning. This helps streamline the process and reduces the risk of errors both before and during Black Friday.
It is fundamentally about building customer journeys that deliver the right messages at the right time, while staying true to your brand identity.
If you have not yet completed this year's preparations, it is essential to get started right away in order to optimise your strategy and contribute to a successful sales period in the final quarter of the year.
Would you like inspiration on how to achieve the greatest possible success with your campaigns based on results from Black Week & Friday 2023? Read more here.
