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Are you ready to make this Black Friday your most successful sales event ever? With UK online shopping reaching £3.1 billion during Black Friday 2023, the stakes have never been higher. Learn how to cut through the inbox chaos and boost your email deliverability with our expert guide.
Why Your Black Friday Email Strategy Matters More Than Ever
Black Friday isn’t just another sale – it’s the pinnacle of the retail calendar. With 67% of UK consumers planning their Black Friday purchases weeks in advance, your email marketing strategy could make or break your success. But here’s the challenge: the average person receives 42% more emails during Black Friday week. How do you stand out?
Most businesses just resort to the tactic of sending discounts to anyone who has ever signed up to their list, but we all know that when it comes to email marketing it’s always quality over quantity. Each year we are seeing businesses start to adopt more strategic and clever techniques in their emails – here are some good tips below.
7 Game-Changing Email Marketing Tips for Black Friday Success
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1. Perfect Your Email Deliverability Now
Ensuring your emails land directly in the inbox and not the spam folder is crucial. After all what’s the point in sending killer deals and great emails if people are not going to see them. Email deliverability can be a complex topic, but there are some things you can do to try and ensure you are in the best starting place:
- Cleaning your email list by using an email validation tool to ensure that any incorrect or no longer valid addresses are removed (ideally you do this regularly already).
- Implementing double opt-in on your sign up, or at the least leverage an email verification API
- Ensure your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are up to date and fully authenticating for all your email sending sources. Also make sure you are meeting the Google & Yahoo sender requirements!!
- Check your engagement KPI’s (unique opens, clicks, click thru rate etc) for your most recent campaigns at a per domain level (e.g hotmail vs yahoo vs gmail etc).
- If they significantly differ between domains you likely are landing in spam at those domain with lower rates
- Check your bounce records for any repetitional bounce reasons
- Implement a short term remediation strategy if needed to improve reputation
Pro Tip: Use engagement-based segmentation to maintain a healthy sender score. Recent studies show this can improve deliverability by up to 27%.
**REMEMBER**… Need a clear picture of your email deliverability and reputation ahead of Black Friday? Our Deliverability Audit and Strategy service dives deep into your email program, pinpointing and resolving issues to set you up for successful holiday sends, right through to Christmas.
Click HERE to book in a FREE Consultation
2. Create a Pre-Black Friday Warming Strategy
This is a strategy that sounds obvious, but actually starting setting expectation with your recipients early can really help build anticipation. Giving them an idea of what they can expect (i.e. are there certain products that get discounts, or the fact that you won’t increase the discount over the period, removing their fear of a greater discount should they hold out until Cyber Monday etc). Some aspects of this strategy would be:
- Start sending regular emails 4 – 6 weeks before, allowing you to start setting these expectations
- If your Black Friday eventual audience includes segments that haven’t opened in over 6 – 12 months, then slowly introduce these recipients into these sends, so you simultaneously warm up your daily volumes to what they are likely to be.
- Consider asking your audience what they want to see (using email polls)
- This can help you build out specific content more aligned with what they may be interested in buying from you
- You can also get an idea of how many emails they may consider overkill and allow them to manage the frequency over this period
- This warming period is also a great period to A/B test with subject lines, email length and content variations (not all at the same time though of course)
- Delve into segmentation
- Segment even deeper than normal to allow you to identify those VIP customers apart from those unengaged. Allowing you to create different content and approaches for each to help drive a more pertinent message.
- Explore other ways you can segment that are relevant to your target audience. Perhaps you have offers that are geographically appropriate, or aligned to certain preferences (e.g. vegan vs vegetarian vs neither etc)
3. Optimise for Mobile-First Shopping
With 71% of Black Friday emails opened on mobile devices it’s a no brainer to make sure your content presents well and has the best chance of maximum impact. Make sure you:
- Use responsive email templates
- Keep subject lines under 40 characters
- Implement single-column layouts
- Use large, touch-friendly CTAs
- Keep images fun but not hindering the overall message
- Be mindful of email length
- Experiment with tools such as Litmus or Email on Acid to see how your email looks on these devices
- Be mindful of Dark Mode on device to make sure your messages and email CTAs still pop!
4. Master the Art of Subject Lines & Pre-Headers
We all now how many emails fly around during the Black Friday period, so it’s more important than ever to make sure your emails stand out! Stand out in crowded inboxes with:
- Personalisation tokens (24% higher open rates). Address them by their name, even in the subject line! Think of other data you have that can refer to but still relevant.
- Urgency triggers (“Ends Tonight”, “Last Chance Saloon”). Have fun with it too, like “No really, This Is The Last Chance, or on the last day “launching tomorrow; our exclusive higher pricing”
- Clear value propositions
- Emojis (when brand-appropriate), but me mindful of not using too many
- A/B test and document all of the testing to inform future campaign and next year!
5. Implement Strategic Send Times
Timing is everything in emails, and it always amazes how many brands still just either schedule send for peak times (i.e. 9am Tuesday morning), or don’t schedule them, and actually just send whenever they are ready. The truth is that the customers for every business is different, and a lot of the time you have the data!
- Check in your Email Platform the most popular times of day historically that have triggered opens and clicks, as well as days of the week
- Avoid sending at half past or on top of the hour (like everyone else) – instead of sending at 10am, try and odd time like 10:07 so your email is more likely to arrive on it’s own vs sandwiched in between other brands’ offers.
- Plan final countdown emails for early evening
- Consider time zones for international customers and mention that you’ve done so in your content – people appreciate it
- Ask your customers! Do an email poll to ask them when they would like to ideally receive your offers and how many emails during the Black Friday period (if you are brave).
6. Leverage Advanced Segmentation
We touched on it earlier but segmentation is a big winner here (well actually in all email marketing really). Consider how you can break up your audience so that the messaging, product presentation and even unique offers are specific to them, their interests etc. Yes it may mean more work your side and more variations of content, but guess what it also means more purchases, revenue and high fives in the office. Some obvious ones to start with (but please go deeper as per your target audience’s criteria):
- Previous Black Friday purchasers
- Cart abandoners
- Product category interests
- Purchase frequency ideally cross referenced with website visit history
- Previous average order value
- Geographic location
- Engaged vs unengaged
7. Build Automated Recovery Sequences
This ones a boring one but often an area people just don’t think about. inevitably things can go wrong (from a technical standpoint) during this period. One of the most frustrating things is to lose potential sales to technical issues. With that in mind set up flows and triggered emails related to the below:
- Create abandoned cart workflows
- Set up browse abandonment emails
- Implement payment failure recovery
- Design post-purchase satisfaction sequences
- Pre-written emails ready to send in the event phone lines have issues, or the website is down
Bonus Tips for Black Friday Email Success
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So in the spirit of Steve Jobs at the Apple Events, ‘one more thing’ – well actually a couple really in case they help…
Don’t Send Emails For Email Sake
It’s a busy period and when creating the content it is easy to slip into the mindset of ‘I need to get these finished before the deadline’, whilst losing focus on what you are wanting the recipient to do. Ask yourself these questions after you finish each email:
- What is the goal of this email?
- Is the messaging concise and CTA clear?
- Is the content relevant to everyone who is in the intended segment?
- How would I feel if I received this content?
- Aside from discount codes and offers, can we provide any additional value here?
**Pro Tip** Use AI to help you here. Not to write the content BUT upload the content to (insert your favourite AI platform here) and ask for it to provide a summary of the email and also critique it. After all we aren’t far from it living in all mail clients anyway.
Check Your Deliverability & Reputation Pre & Post Black Friday
We referred to making sure you are set up for success deliverability wise above before Black Friday, but it’s equally important to assess any potential damage or impact soon your sender reputation after the period too.
With the Holiday and Christmas period just around the corner you want to make sure you are in best shape to hit that inbox again. Oh yes here at Digistrat we can help you get a snapshot on this and also build out an appropriate strategy so if of interest please feel free to book in a consultation with us HERE
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
We thought it would be helpful to share some common mistakes we have seen businesses (understandably) make over the years, to try and help you avoid doing the same thing.
- Sending to completely unengaged subscribers and/or those who signed up years ago and haven’t engaged since. Essentially just sending to anyone who has ever interacted with their brand.
- Overlooking mobile optimisation – we already addressed this above, but it’s so important we wanted to double down on it
- Not testing the CTA links in the email before sending it
- Re-sending the same content to non openers…please don’t do this; it’s like calling me continuously until I pick up.
- Dropping prices so low that customers simply feel robbed if they buy at any other time of the year – imagine being that person that buys a sofa full price at those sofa stores that always seem to be having sales
Conclusion & Some Blurb On Digistrat
Success in Black Friday email marketing comes down to preparation, precision, and performance monitoring. Start implementing these strategies today to ensure your campaigns cut through the noise and drive remarkable results this Black Friday season.
Here at Digistrat we love email, and help our clients build, optimise and drive email marketing strategies with a deliverability edge. If you are a brand looking to level up your email marketing strategy; introducing smart automation, better segmentation and personalisation etc, then we should probably talk. Equally if you are suspecting deliverability issues and need help remediating that and building a longer term strategy to avoid repetitions then we can help. In short we look at all scenarios with both our deliverability and marketing strategy lens… after all you can’t have email success unless you are nailing both aspects. Check us out at https://digistrat.co.uk
