5 Email Marketing Tactics to Increase Sales by 90% This Black Friday

— October 30, 2018

5 Email Marketing Tactics to Increase Sales by 90%25 This Black Friday

Email is one of the biggest drivers of sales around Black Friday.

Do you have your strategy in place?

This article will focus on five major email marketing tactics, specifically for Black Friday.

The tactics in this post have increased purchase-rates by 90%, on average, so pay attention.

Note: Rather than recommend something without the numbers to back it up, I’ll be basing a lot of the tactics in this guide off a report from Omnisend, who analyzed 128,000 newsletter and automated email campaigns sent by more than 7,200 brands around the Black Friday holiday period.

Let’s get into it.

#1. Ask for more lead information

The reason for this is simple, personalized emails outperform non-personalized emails massively.

Depending on who you ask, personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates, improve click-through rates by an average of 14%, conversions by 10% and open rates by 26%.

My recommendation is to collect different things, depending on your industry:

If you’re in B2C:

  • Email address: Goes without saying…
  • Name: The most impactful piece of personalization is the ability to address your recipients by their name.
  • Gender: Automatically allows you to halve the products you offer to someone, which doubles the personalization.

If you’re in B2B:

  • Email address: Goes without saying…
  • Name: See above.
  • Business name/website: Allows you to go to their website and see what they do, who they are, etc. Putting personalized snippets like “I love that you’re raising money for the homeless this quarter!” is hugely influential on reply rates.
  • Phone number: It’s far harder to say no to someone on the phone than it is over email.

Here’s what Omnisend found when they analyzed signups perform fill-out:

5 Email Marketing Tactics to Increase Sales by 90%25 This Black Friday

In short, the sacrifice you make with the total number of people signing up (because you’re asking a lot of info) is more than made up by the increase in sales.

#2. Send a series of emails

A series of 3 emails perform better than single emails.

A lot better…

  • 90% more orders for a welcome series (thus the title of this post)
  • 63% more orders for a cart recovery series
  • 75% more orders for customer reactivation

5 Email Marketing Tactics to Increase Sales by 90%25 This Black Friday

If you run any kind of sales email strategy, you’ll already know that a follow-up email, and a follow-up email after your follow-up email, is going to increase your chances at a conversation or a deal.

It’s just as true for Black Friday marketing as it is within your sales funnel.

If you’re just getting into email automation, my recommendation is to start simple. Write your welcome email, cart abandonment email, or customer reactivation email exactly as you normally would.

Then, write two follow-ups. Something simple like…

Hey [First_name],

Just wanted to check in to make sure you received my last email?

Our 50% discount on [product] only lasts for another 24 hours, and I wouldn’t want you to miss out!

Let me know if you have any questions,

[Name]

Honestly, you don’t need anything fancy, just a few lines which bring your original email back up to the top of their inbox.

 

#3. Create a win-back campaign

This is a big one.

Winback campaigns are a series of automated email sent to previous customers enticing them to buy again.

They’re especially powerful around Black Friday

When marketers created win-back email campaigns for Black Friday, they earn 106% more orders compared to the rest of the year, with a 1.3% order rate.

Winback Email Open Rates around Black Friday vs Rest of the Year:

5 Email Marketing Tactics to Increase Sales by 90%25 This Black Friday

Winback Order Rates around Black Friday vs Rest of the Year:

5 Email Marketing Tactics to Increase Sales by 90%25 This Black Friday

If you have an email list of 25,000 previous customers, sending a 3-email series promoting your Black Friday deals will result in more than 300 sales. 1.3% doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?

There’s a reason for this:

Winback campaigns are all about recurring value: “You’ve already bought from us once. Here’s a reason you should by from us again.” Black Friday is the holiday made of value. And think about it, if someone bought from you last Black Friday, they’ve likely worn through or want an updated version of whatever you sell. 12 months is the perfect amount of time to try to recapture previous customers.

 

#4. Send at the right times

This one is a bit tricky, because your prospective customers may be in different timezones than you, but keep it in mind nonetheless.

When Omnisend analyzed 128,000 newsletter and automated email campaigns sent by more than 7,200 brands between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017, this is what they found:

5 Email Marketing Tactics to Increase Sales by 90%25 This Black Friday

If you can’t quite see that, let me break it down.

The best times to send Black Friday emails are:

  • 6am
  • 8am
  • 1pm
  • 4pm

#5. Implement a cart recovery strategy

This is a no-brainer, but many early-stage e-commerce companies still miss it.

Here’s how an abandoned cart recovery strategy works:

  • Use popups or a welcome mat as soon as people arrive on your website (or account creation during checkout) to get the contact information of your website visitors
  • Use the Wishpond tracking pixel to track your website visitors as they navigate your site.
  • When someone views urls which contain “/cart” but not “/confirmation,” add them to a List (or segment)
  • Automatically trigger an abandoned cart email as soon as someone meets the above conditions

Here’s how cart abandonment emails do around Black Friday:

5 Email Marketing Tactics to Increase Sales by 90%25 This Black Friday

Now, you might not think that 1 or 2% of your website visitors coming back to complete a sale is all that big a deal. But think of it this way, before cart abandonment emails, you were losing everybody who didn’t complete a purchase. With them, you have a shot.

Related Reading:

For a guide to cart recovery emails, check out “How to Write Abandoned Cart Emails.

Final Thoughts

You can’t argue with stats – especially when those stats come from 128,000 email campaigns from more than 7,000 brands.

The tactics in this article can have a huge impact on your bottom-line sales this Black Friday, but you need to get rolling soon. You need to be setting up by the end of October, or your competitors will have the edge on you.

What are your thoughts? What do you have planned for your email campaigns this year?

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