As Black Friday and Cyber Monday are approaching everybody is rolling up their sleeves to develop email campaigns that hopefully convert. Now, we’ve invited the folks from GetResponse, who are a bunch of email marketing ninjas, to come up with some advice for BCFM campaigns. GetResponse works with big brands such as Ikea, Carrefour, Revolut, and more, so they do know the drill. So, let’s see what tricks Michal Leszczyński, Content Marketing Manager at GetResponse, has for us.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent the biggest opportunities for businesses to meet their annual sales goals. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, with Cyber Monday happening after the holiday weekend. This year, Cyber Monday will fall on November 29.
Experts predict that Cyber Monday 2021 will be the largest online shopping day in U.S. history. BlackFriday.com projects that ecommerce sales on Cyber Monday will reach around $11.8 billion this year.
Email marketing is one of the most effective channels for promoting special offers to your audience on these dates. You must run an effective email marketing campaign.
How? Here are tips you should consider.
1. Make a gift guide
One way to remain competitive is by publishing an online gift guide. Gift guides give shoppers ideas for products at different price points. Importantly, you can release your guide one or two weeks before the big day.
Your gift guide can provide shoppers inspiration and help them select products. It also allows you to showcase your products and the special offers you’ll be running.
You should publish your gift guide on your website or blog. Once it’s up, promote it through marketing emails, and make it easily accessible through the site. You should also promote it through social media. 
Ideally, you should split your gift ideas with offerings targeting your different customers. For example, you can segment your gift guide to have one set of gifts for males and a different set for females. Or, you could have different guides for different age groups.
Another popular way is to organize your gift guide is by price: “Gifts under $20”, or something similar. You can attract customers looking for a cheap gift or have a set budget. When it comes to loyal customers, you can also create special offers based on their previous purchases.
In the example below, on the Rachel Parcell website, you could find gift guides for men and for women.
Promoting relevant offers to your target audience will help you boost sales. We’ll discuss the importance of audience segmentation in the next section.
2. Segment your audience
Over 80% of marketers don’t segment their email database. They send one email to their entire list. The data below shows the typical behavior of email recipients:
- 60% delete the email
- 27% unsubscribe
- 23% mark the email as spam
To improve the relevancy of your messaging and boost your sales, segment your list. Common ways eCommerce stores segment subscribers include splitting them into groups based on location, website behavior, spending habits, etc.
Creating email marketing content targeting different segments should be straightforward, and the results generally boost your profits. Consider the example from Road Runner as a case in point.
In the email, Road Runner created two email templates. One email is for females, and one for males. Such simple segmentation automatically increases the relevancy of the offer to your audience.
Your ability to segment your audience will be based on the data you are collecting. If your email provider connects with your eCommerce platform, you should be able to share data.
For example, you will know the sex of the person and can segment people based on spending habits, customer loyalty, etc. You can segment people on your email list in other ways too.
For example, you could use a quiz funnel to segment your audience before the promotion. Simply ask people what products they are most interested in buying over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Then, before the big day, send an email with relevant product offerings based on what the person on your email list wants to see.
Finding the right balance in segmenting your list is important. You want to keep that balance between the amount of effort it takes to segment your audience and the returns you’ll generate.
3. Create an email marketing campaign structure
You need to decide how many emails you want to send to your audience over the promotion. You might want to send several emails as part of your email marketing campaign. But before you send the campaigns, you might want to go for email warming to have better deliverability of your emails.
Here’s an example of a Black Friday Cyber Monday email campaign:
- Send a pre-announcement email before your sale starts
- Share a list of relevant products you’re offering at the beginning of the sale
- Provide exclusive offers (additional discount with promo code or offering exclusive products) – before the end of the sale
- Send a “Last Chance” email just before you close
It may seem like a lot of work, but there’s a correlation between the number of emails you send and your profits. In fact, most of the sales you’ll generate will happen on the first day of your promotion and the last day.
You can use email automation to set up a sequence of emails.
Even if you don’t send multiple emails as part of a campaign, you should have a system for sending follow-up emails. For example, you can send a follow-up email to someone who opened your email, clicked on a link, but never made a purchase.
Having basic email sequences in place, like abandoned cart emails, is important too.
4. Make a pre-announcement of your sales
To create anticipation for the sales, you can send an announcement email 7-10 days before the big day. Announce when your sale starts and ends, state the conditions, and share some of the highlights.
Subscribers want their favorite products available at a bargain price.
In your pre-announcement email, you can highlight the products you expect people to be most excited about. You should emphasize the discounts, as well as any limited stock available.
Limited stock can be a great selling point for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For example, emphasizing that you only have 100 units of a certain product on offer at a certain rate can create Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO).
Look for ways to incorporate FOMO in your email marketing campaigns. You might want to create custom landing pages for such an offer. You can easily do so with a free website builder or landing page builder. You could do this with Colibri page builder, or check this list of some free website builders just in case you want to take this approach.
To be clear, you can reference the offers you’ll be running for Black Friday or Cyber Monday in other content. As you can see from the example above, AppSumo references Black Friday in the footer of their regular emails. They start to do this more than a month before the event.
Instacart is another brand that starts Black Friday early. As early as the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, they already send coupons to their email subscribers:
Instacart customers can use these coupons at selected stores, including Walmart, Costco, and Staples, up to early December. However, these come in really handy during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
5. Give loyal customers a unique deal
Giving loyal customers a unique deal is a brilliant tactic to increase sales and boost average order values during Black Friday and Cyber Monday without hurting your profit margins. Take the example below from Estee Lauder for inspiration.
The seller combines Black Friday deals with their loyalty program and gives double points for purchases made on the day. It’s a smart tactic to make your most loyal customer shop in your store.
Running these types of offers is straightforward if you have a loyalty program. Just send an email to people who shop with you regularly to highlight what you have to offer.
The value of this approach is that it’s a way to say thanks to your loyal customers.
6. Send one email for both holidays
While I mentioned you could send multiple emails to subscribers, not everyone will appreciate getting persistent emails in their inboxes. After all, nobody wants to receive three emails from the same company in a short period of time.
An alternative approach to running email campaigns is to send just one email for the entire promotion. Black Friday and Cyber Monday go together. You could combine them in one email or make your offer last for four days instead of offering two separate ones.
Adobe Analytics has made some predictions for 2021 holiday spending. The graph above illustrates Cyber Monday’s “Golden Hours” with the peak between 7-11 pm.
A nice example of a company that takes this approach is AppSumo. They only send one email per promotion to their list, and they only mail subscribers about top-performing offers. This comprehensive case study provides some great insights into running time-limited offers and high converting email campaigns. It’s well worth reading.
7. Send a “last chance” email a few hours before the sale ends
Even if it’s Black Friday or Cyber Monday, your subscribers will probably have a hundred reasons not to take you up on your offers. They might not be convinced that they want your products that badly or are still looking for better offers. It could also be as simple as finding your store and forgetting about it right after.
Sending a “last chance” email could help you generate added revenue by reminding your subscribers that your offer still stands — and is better than others out there. They reinforce limited-time offers by strengthening customer FOMO as the deadline for availing of your promotion draws nearer.
Here’s the last chance email that I received from Grammarly on Black Friday:
Many last chance emails contain the words “last chance”, “almost over”, and “limited”. All of them say, “It’s now or never”, thus succeeding in converting customers who are still on the fence about clicking “Buy Now”.
8. Give your email design some thought
You want an unforgettable Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing campaign. Typical Black Friday emails follow a black and white design. Gold is commonly used, but you can go for any color you want.
Banners are usually the face of all emails. Pay attention to them. You’ll also need an attention-grabbing subject line.
A good idea would be to create matching Black Friday and Cyber Monday email campaigns.
Answer these questions before deciding on the design:
- What did you do last year that worked?
- What did your competitors do?
- Which items have been the most popular in the last few weeks?
Using bold colors and fonts, combined with an original design, will help increase your click-through rate and conversions. Other good ideas are GIFs, interactive carousels, and videos. Don’t overdo it. One or two animated elements per email are enough.
9. Run email retargeting campaigns
Have you ever visited a website, browsed through some items without adding them to your cart, then received an email about those items? If you’ve had this experience, you’ve probably seen email retargeting in action.
Email retargeting works by tracking customer behavior through website cookies. These cookies store information on the items you click on. Some forms of email marketing, on the other hand, use what marketers call pixels, or HTML tags that track customer behavior, including visits to product pages and shopping cart abandonment.
Here’s a retargeting email I received after I added Zoom Meetings Pro to my shopping cart and closed the browser window by mistake:
Zoom already had my contact details as part of the signup process, which allowed them to send me the email above. As a result, I remembered that I was in the middle of a transaction and returned to the Zoom website to complete it.
Retargeting also works with other digital marketing channels, including paid search, display, and email. Use retargeting to show your ads again on the next website or mobile page they visit.
10. Pay attention to the CTA & Messaging
The final tip in this guide is about your Call To Action or CTA.
When talking about a CTA, most marketers will focus on the button’s color or the word or phrase you use. The button’s color is important to a degree. It should stand out from the rest of the copy, and be noticeable.
After all, fewer people will visit your website if you can’t see the CTA clearly or it’s difficult to click.
However, you should always consider the CTA within the context of your content.
The messaging within your email needs to have one clear focus. Your goal is to generate that click to your website. Your headline should outline the purpose of the email, and the copy should highlight why people need to click on your CTA.
Don’t try to sell the products you are promoting through your email. That’s what the sales page is for. Your goal is to get that click.
Also, make sure you use simple and clear messaging, avoid using spammy words, and don’t promise in your special offers more than you provide. People are aware of Black Friday and Cyber Monday scams, so be clear, honest, and straightforward with your newsletter messaging.
Bottom Line
Promotional emails are one of the best forms of digital marketing. Make sure to share your Black Friday, and Cyber Monday deals with your customers successfully.
Don’t be afraid to use some humor. A simple joke, a slogan, a funny photo, or a GIF can work.
Lastly, don’t forget to optimize your emails for mobile. Almost half of the marketing emails are opened on a mobile device these days.
Michal Leszczyński
Michal is immersed in developing, implementing, and coordinating all content marketing projects as the Head of Content Marketing & Partnerships at GetResponse. He has 8-plus years of expertise in online marketing with a Master of Science Degree in Strategic Marketing and Consulting from the University of Birmingham (UK). Michal is the author of more than 100 articles, ebooks, and courses for GetResponse and renowned websites like Crazy Egg and Social Media Today.
