Black Friday & Cyber Monday are just around the corner. Stores are busting out wreaths and bows, Santa is getting ready to make the rounds at the shopping malls, and there’s a faint chill in the air.
It’s coming. The holidays are coming…and so are a lot of emails. Last year, retailers sent 55.4% more email campaigns on Black Friday compared to the previous year.
With your customer’s getting flooded by holiday emails, the challenge is how do YOU get more opens and clicks and make more sales?
Here are a few tips and best practices to tallow to help get the engagement and results you want from your holiday emails:
Be prepared to send A LOT of emails.
We recommend starting to tease your Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) deals now, leading up to the big weekend. Send one email at least a week before BFCM to build interest and hype up your deals. The second is sent early on Black Friday and the third email with last minute deals as traffic begins to slow down. Now, this is just a bare bones strategy. To really take full advantage of the big weekend, it isn’t uncommon to see ecommerce companies send upward of 7 emails a day during BFCM since only about 30% of emails are normally read during this weekend.
Schedule your emails in advance.
The peak volume days are Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. The best time to send on Thanksgiving is around 12 pm, between 4am and 8am on Black Friday, and from 8 am to 10 am on Cyber Monday (by highest revenue per email). If your goal is open rates, send your email on Black Friday at either 10 am or 4 pm. Around 10:00 am, people often go through all their morning emails (and then catch up again at noon). From 4:00 to 6:00 pm, people get ready to leave work or have arrived home, which are other popular times to check their personal email.
Focus on subject lines.
Spend time drafting a subject line that will boost your open rates. This is not the time to get fancy, coy, cute, or subtle. These subject lines need to be catchy yet dramatic. Why? Because you are fighting for attention, hunger games style in customers’ inboxes. Our biggest tip here: be direct and urgent. Avoid being too pushy or too aggressive, a subject line in all caps can turn people off. Here are some examples. Be direct with what you’re offering with a splash of urgency. And did someone say “emoji”?
What’s your deal?
The type of offer that we’ve seen to be the most straightforward and that encourages the highest order values are “buy 2 get 1 free” deals. It outperforms almost any other type of offer by 14-22%, as people know what they’re getting, but it also makes them buy more than they normally would.
Creating bundles can also boost the average amount spent. By packaging items together, you can motivate people to buy a wider range of products.
Best in design.
Now is the perfect time to highlight your winning creatives. Now is not the time to roll out new ads or A/B test and refine campaigns. The best option is to repurpose the marketing material that you have already optimized in the months leading up to BFCM. This way, you can be certain that your creatives have the highest conversion rate possible without leaving it to chance. It’s easy to repurpose material, just add a border around your creative where you mention the BFCM deal available.
Optimize for mobile!
Mobile continues to grow and people are taking advantage of BFCM deals on their phones. People are away from their computers and checking emails on their phones, and if they see something they like, they’ll often buy it right on the spot, from their phone.
It’s important to understand that you can’t just send a couple of emails and hope to get good results. You have to be creative and engage people through multiple channels. Reason being that people are being contacted over so many channels and different businesses that you need to cut through the noise.
By following these best practices you can drive more opens, clicks, and (fingers crossed) more sales during the peak volume email season that is Black Friday Cyber Monday.