8 Tips for Building a Successful Black Friday Campaign
Black Friday is the day that traditionally opens the Christmas shopping season, and falls on the last Friday of November. The countdown to the next 29th November has already started a long time ago, so let's see how to deal with the upcoming Black Friday by focusing on email marketing, a tool that offers many opportunities for growth against a usability that fears no comparison.
Email Marketing at the time of Black Friday
It is said that the name Black Friday derives from the black stamp to be associated with the terrible traffic that was created in big cities in the United States on the occasion of the first Friday of Christmas shopping: the custom was born from an initiative of the big chain Macy's, which in the twenties launched a big campaign of pre-Christmas discounts, thus starting the phenomenon of Black Friday.
Much has changed since then, and today the battle of Black Friday is mostly played on the digital market, the same one that led Black Friday to become a global phenomenon, far from the Thanksgiving to which it was originally linked.
Email marketing, today, is confirmed as the inevitable tool for a promotional campaign that aims to fit with some success in the seasonal fluctuations of the great bazaar of the digital market. The alternative, of course, is to not be part of it.
Preparing an email marketing campaign for Black Friday is an almost inevitable operation, whatever your business is. Whether you're a wedding photographer about to release a new website, or you have a small candy store downtown, Black Friday is an opportunity not to be missed.
Before you start studying a strategy that will put you among the countless emails that users don't want to read, you should consider a few things.
First of all, during Black Friday the stores have always tried to beat the rush and apply the most irresistible discounts, but the most recent trends indicate it also as a fierce competition in terms of visibility.
It won't necessarily be the "last call" promo that attract old and new customers.
Secondly, we are well aware that an effective digital marketing strategy today must be omnichannel.
What does that mean? That a good promotional campaign passes from SMS, traditional advertising, social media, display advertising, shameless acts of guerrilla marketing ... and of course email. When you think of a special campaign for Black Friday, then, think from the beginning how to integrate languages, channels and tools.
Once established the necessary premises, let's see what strategies, tools and ultimate solutions you could associate to an email marketing campaign for the next Black Friday.
How to create an email campaign for Black Friday
There are only a few days left to that crazy parenthesis of unexpected expenses that opens with Black Friday and closes well after Christmas, passing through Cyber Monday.
This is a rather varied parenthesis, which takes place today largely on the digital market: just think that in the period between November 2018 and January 2019 online shopping has reached 53% of total purchases in the retail sector (Google/Ipsos statistics).
The extreme diffusion of email marketing has ended up becoming a critical issue, at least in the context of the big annual appointments with unscheduled purchases: whatever your customers are, each one of them receives numerous promotional emails every day. Let alone Black Friday.
So how to set up a successful email campaign for Black Friday?
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Be technically impeccable: according to Google, the one-second delay in loading a page can affect the final conversion rate by up to 20%.
The first thing to do, when you decide to tackle Black Friday with a dedicated campaign, is to make sure that all your tools are responsive (the percentage of purchases made through mobile devices has grown by 180% in the last two years, reaching 61% of the total), fast and able to support the terrible Black Friday traffic. -
Have good timing: Black Friday falls on November 29th, everyone knows at this point of the year. A great way to stand out from the crowd, and attract visits and conversions, is to plan the campaign so that it anticipates the others, or follows them by a few hours.
Many large companies focus on developing an empathic channel with chronic latecomers, others base the success of their campaigns on the game of anticipation, or the repetition of the rhetoric of Black Friday in association with events far away from Christmas. - Study an email campaign integrated with the other tools of digital marketing: does your email contain the coupon for a discount? It could be a pretext to experiment with some good gamification, or to link the coupon to an opt-in campaign. Why not link the coupon to a mini-game (on the landing page or directly on your site) whose score will define the applicable discount, or a mobile phone number to send the code received via email to get the best promotions?
- Be original: it's clear to everyone, the problem with email marketing - at least on those occasions when the competition is global, total and concentrated in a few hours - is in the difficulty you may encounter in making your message attractive enough to guarantee at least one opening click. You could go against the current, and advertise your choice not to offer discounts, launch charity campaigns related to Black Friday purchases, or study a form of shocking communication. Occasions like Black Friday, after all, are ideal for experimentation.
An email campaign for Black Friday should therefore be part of an integrated and original strategy, and be supported by an impeccable technical response. Let's see which tools - among those proposed by MailMarketing - can be used for a special campaign, which can get the most out of the next Black Friday.
The perfect email campaign: original, clear, interactive
When you decide to set up a specific communication plan for Black Friday or for another particular occasion, a good email campaign is essential: even if to some people it may seem a limited tool, and so certainly the competition is not lacking, do not forget that email marketing carries, on average, more than 20% of visits to e-commerce sites.
We cannot speak of particularly immediate conversion rates then, but it is equally true that users who arrive at the purchase starting from email spend on average 138% more than others (wordstream.com statistics).
So it's clear that a well orchestrated email campaign consistent with the general communication plan can have a big impact on the success of your Black Friday sales.
How to create successful email campaigns with practical and immediate tools?
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Send personalized emails: MailMarketing provides you with four custom fields, to customize up to 4 tags to be attributed to as many groups of contacts. Do you want to focus on your most loyal customers? Create a special campaign for them.
If, on the contrary, you want to intercept only the users of a certain area, perhaps on the occasion of a new opening, you could dedicate a special promotion to them.
A functional segmentation of your contact list will allow you to get the right message to the right target group. -
Share on socials: a good coordination between the email message and the one - much more liquid - that travels on socials is a must, when studying an important campaign. While it is true that in essence it will be the email that will convert, there is no doubt that it is with good work on social channels that you will be able to extend your audience.
A good campaign for Black Friday also passes through the integration of email and social initiatives: insert social icons in the email and convey a consistent message, which may propose particular advantages for those who, on one side or the other, start to follow one of your channels. -
Target the most active customers: thanks to MailMarketing's advanced statistics, you can check the engagement rate of individual users for each campaign. If you want to offer an exclusive Black Friday promotion, you may want to target the most active users; on the contrary, you may want to use the power of Black Friday to catch up with less clickable customers.
The division of contact lists by engagement is now an established practice, which allows you to take advantage of Black Friday for promotional operations aimed at retaining the best customers as well as re-engaging less brilliant users. -
Create a clear, consistent and interactive email: are you late and still don't want to give up your place on the Black Friday scene? With the tools provided by MailMarketing you can create a personalized and perfectly responsive email in a few steps, using the graphic editor or templates available.
Have you already planned the release of your omnichannel campaign for Black Friday 2019 and are you looking for news? The html editor allows you to insert interactive content in the body of the email that could make a difference. A mini-game, a countdown, the map that invites you to the new store: whatever display you want to experience, inserting the direct link inside an email will certainly facilitate an engagement of another level.
Black Friday is coming soon: an opportunity that never before in recent years allows you to organize communication, to study priorities and possible changes of direction in view of the important test of the Christmas period.
The battles on the ground of exceptional discounts are now the prerogative of a few realities, so when you want to get the most from opportunities like this, it is be good to think of Black Friday as a spotlight on your marketing and communication strategies: an opportunity to refine, experiment and analyze market trends.
