Your 2023 Black Friday Email To-Do List

In our recent Black Friday E-commerce Email Analysis, we noticed that send volumes and engagement rates for e-commerce emails sent around Black Friday decreased significantly between 2021 and 2022, while complaint and unsubscribe rates plummeted at the same time.

This change hints at e-commerce email marketers resorting to more proactive sending tactics like spreading their messaging out across a longer timeframe and sharing promotions after Black Friday itself to achieve greater campaign success.

By planning well in advance and implementing a carefully crafted content strategy, you are sure to optimise your overall campaign performance.

The fear of missing out (or FOMO) is a powerful emotional driver that you can use in Black Friday emails. By convincing subscribers that they’re missing out on an exciting or exclusive deal or opportunity, you could prompt them to take action to correct this situation – like clicking on a call-to-action button.

Similarly, you can nudge audiences by creating a sense of urgency in your copy, making your promotions time-dependent, and adding countdown timers to your emails.

For more on the powerful behavioural psychology tactics you can use to prompt action in your promotional emails, have a look at our Retail Email Guide.

Personalising your promotional messages can make your brand more relatable and make recipients more likely to engage with follow-up messaging. The first step is to address them by name, but you can do far more than that.

List segmentation is another effective way of personalising content to ensure relevant promotions reach pre-defined groups of recipients in your contact lists. With platforms like Everlytic, filtering via interest-based tags allows you to get a clearer picture of which promotions are attracting the most attention from recipients.

This function is especially powerful if you’re sending to subscribers who have already purchased an item from you.

It’s likely that your Black Friday audience will be doing most of their shopping on mobile. To ensure your creative comes across as intended, and that your subscribers’ online shopping experience is seamless and enjoyable, ensure you make your emails mobile responsive, i.e., optimise them to display correctly across different mobile devices.

Everlytic offers highly customisable templates that are responsive to a range of digital screens, along with drag-and-drop email builders to ensure that anyone can create attractive scalable emails in no time.

If you’re sending out a series of promotional emails leading up to Black Friday, then you’ll benefit from monitoring email performance closely. That’s because some promotions you’re offering might be resonating really well with recipients’ interests, and you’d likely want to make the most of this engagement.

Similarly, you can use learnings from prior sends to help inform this year’s campaign strategies. For example, your emails may not have performed as well as expected on the Wednesday leading up to Black Friday last year, but they had excellent engagement on the preceding Tuesday and Thursday. Take note of such trends before you start planning future sending dates.

Black Friday emails falls under the direct marketing category, so ensure that all your contacts have opted in to receive your communication before you start sending.

Unsolicited promotional emails get marked as spam, resulting in damage to your sending reputation or even blacklisting. Rather take the time to ensure your subscribers opted in by using a double opt-in tool and subscription forms that clearly communicate your intent in using recipient data.

Black Friday, and the surrounding weeks, offer e-commerce marketers a golden opportunity to engage with your audiences and deliver value to consumers. Make the most of this opportunity by taking a deliberate approach in 2023 that’s based on solid strategy, worthwhile messaging, and trusted communication technology.