Black Friday Email Campaigns: Strategies for Sales Success

Set clear campaign goals and objectives

The first step to an effective marketing campaign—during the holiday season or any other part of the year—is taking the time to outline your main objectives and goals. This will help guide your campaign strategy and inform your marketing messages. Below are a few examples of common email marketing campaign objectives.

• Increase sales. No matter the business, one of the most common goals of any marketing campaign is to increase revenue by driving more sales. Since the holiday season is often the busiest time of the year—and the time when more shoppers are looking to buy—there’s a huge opportunity for businesses to focus on creating emails that convert.
• Promote new products or services. If your company plans to launch a new service or product during the holiday season, it's a good idea to create campaigns that generate excitement and increase awareness around the new offerings.
• Engage existing customers. Offering exclusive BFCM or holiday deals to your existing customer base can be an effective method for boosting engagement and increasing brand loyalty.
• Reach new leads. The holidays aren’t just about connecting with and selling to existing customers. Your holiday email campaigns can also capture the attention of new audiences and potential customers when you offer signup incentives.
• Clear inventory. Want to refresh your product offerings in the new year? The holiday season is a great time to clear out older items or excess inventory by offering discounts and letting shoppers know it’s their last chance to buy.
• Cross- or upsell. Encourage your subscribers to purchase additional products by offering bundled deals or exclusive upgrades when they make a purchase during the holiday shopping season.
• Drive website traffic. Email campaigns that you send during BFCM can help increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website for the remainder of the holiday season and beyond. Add a compelling call to action to your email and encourage folks to visit your website for more items, discounts, tips, and more.

Ultimately, you need to prioritize your objectives based on the unique requirements of your business. Select multiple goals that align with your overarching marketing strategy and implement them to help your business thrive during the holiday season.

Determine your audience

Once you’ve determined your goals, you’ll also need to identify your target audience. These are the people you want to reach with your holiday marketing; the folks who would most likely benefit from or take interest in your products or services. Your target audience can be based on demographics, interests, shopping habits, geographic location, and more, and will be beneficial as you start thinking about the messaging and other specifics of your holiday campaigns.

Segment your email list

Once you know who your target audience is, audience segmentation can make it easier to tailor unique holiday emails to smaller, more focused groups of people. Factors like age, gender, location, preferences, interests, and purchase history can help you customize your emails to meet the specific needs of each group. You can also segment based on recent engagement levels and email activity. This can make it easier to create and send campaigns that reward loyal customers or re-engage folks who haven’t been active in a while.

Craft compelling subject lines

Throughout the holidays, customers will be bombarded with promotional emails. You won't be the only business utilizing a Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or holiday email campaign to boost sales. This is why it's vital to craft compelling subject lines that grab attention so you can stand apart from the competition. Engaging subject lines can help increase open rates and encourage people to read through the content.

Your subject lines should generate curiosity and create a sense of urgency to drive higher open rates. Whether you’re offering a BFCM sale or you’ve got special deals planned for the entire season, your campaign should create urgency.

These promotions are often time-sensitive, so make sure you convey this to your email recipients by incorporating language such as "one-day sale" or "limited-time offer" so customers are more inclined to open the email immediately.

A well-crafted subject line should be catchy and tell the value story of your holiday deals or discounts. Ensure the subject line is concise and highlights how your recipients will benefit from engaging with your email, but avoid any clickbait or misleading language.

Design eye-catching emails

Once you've convinced customers to open your emails—thanks to a well-crafted subject line, of course—ensure they read and interact with your message by designing an eye-catching email template. Create content that is informative, visually appealing, and aligns with your brand image. Here are a few tips for developing templates that resonate with your email subscribers.

• Keep it clean. Use a structured and organized layout to ensure your holiday campaigns don't overwhelm recipients. Maintain a clear hierarchy of information so important details, such as CTAs, are visible.
• Utilize visuals. Adding high-quality images can help showcase your products and best deals. Use images, graphics, or GIFs that fit your holiday theme and highlight the unique selling points of your products or services.
• Be consistent. Although you want your email campaign to distinctly highlight your seasonal sale, your template should still maintain consistency and align with your regular brand identity. Using brand fonts and colors is an important tool for creating a cohesive brand experience that customers can immediately recognize.
• Highlight key offers. Announce BFCM or other holiday sales with eye-catching banners or badges that draw attention to the most compelling points of your message. Elements such as a countdown timer can encourage recipients to act quickly.
• Design for mobile. Many recipients view emails on mobile devices, so mobile optimization—such as adjusting screen sizes and functionality across devices—can help boost your sales potential.

Designing engaging emails helps your business showcase your holiday deals and effectively captivate your audience, which can lead to increased engagement and higher conversion rates during the busiest time of the year.

Determine the optimal send time

Once you've created your email campaign, you need to determine the optimal time to send it out. The timing and frequency of your BFCM and other holiday emails can significantly impact your campaign's effectiveness. The optimal time for your holiday marketing can vary depending on your market, audience, time zone, and offers.

Ahead of the holiday season, consider running A/B tests on your email marketing campaigns. Try different days of the week and schedule emails at varying times to gather performance metrics. The results of these tests will help you identify the days and send times that are more likely to result in higher engagement—and, potentially, more sales. If you use Mailchimp, you can even take advantage of powerful AI tools that analyze the engagement patterns of your contacts and make data-backed predictions about the days and times when folks are most likely to engage with your emails.

As BFCM approaches, make sure your audience knows exactly what to expect when the season officially kicks off. For instance, consider sending a countdown teaser email a few days before the big sale and follow it up with additional promotional emails highlighting individual offers or items. But don’t stop there—after BFCM, continue sending emails to help keep customers informed and engaged throughout the rest of the holiday shopping season.

These emails can be built and scheduled ahead of time, so you can stay focused on running your business—and maybe a little extra time with friends and loved ones, too.

Leverage automation

Automation allows businesses to scale their email marketing efforts while also ensuring their audience receives the right messages at the right time, no matter where they might be in the customer journey.

An automated email series uses predefined rules to trigger email messages based on actions your customers take—or don’t take. This could include sending a series of onboarding emails to welcome your new subscribers, sending automated reminders when folks leave an item in their shopping carts, or sending follow-up messages after a purchase with tips for taking care of or using a newly purchased item. By incorporating automation into your holiday campaigns, you can streamline your processes, create more engaging content, and enhance the overall customer experience.

If you use Mailchimp, the Customer Journey Builder makes it easy to design fully automated experiences that take customers from prospect to purchase. Each journey can be customized to fit the goals of your business, with triggers based on your specific data points and emails (or SMS messages) that are personalized and relevant for each customer.

Analyze campaign performance

After sending an email marketing campaign or automation, you can monitor and analyze reporting metrics—like opens, clicks, conversions, etc.—to keep track of performance and find out what resonates with your audience. Then, you can use those findings to help you improve future campaigns. The more you learn about your campaign performance, the better you can tailor your designs and messaging to the needs of your customers throughout the holiday season.

One additional—and often overlooked—element to keep in mind as you’re planning for and designing your holiday campaigns is the deliverability of your emails. After all, even well-designed emails won’t be impactful if they don’t reach the inboxes of your audience. Here are a few best practices that can help you optimize your email marketing campaigns for deliverability.

Build a clean and engaged email list

The first step in building an effective email list is to obtain explicit permission from your contacts. Use signup forms or landing pages to easily collect email addresses and other valuable information that will help you create segments and send relevant, personalized emails all season long.

Personalize your email content

In email marketing, personalization is one of the most important techniques for driving engagement and boosting conversions—which, in turn, has a positive impact on deliverability, too. This is particularly true during the holidays when consumers’ inboxes are flooded with countless messages from businesses that are trying to make a sale. A personalized email—starting with the subject line and continuing on through the rest of the message—is a great way to help your emails stand out from the crowd.

As mentioned earlier in this article, creating segments to divide your audience into smaller groups—based on interests, location, demographics, purchase history, and more—improves your ability to send more personalized, relevant content. Even just addressing contacts by their first name in the subject line or body of the message can make an email feel more personal, boost open rates, and help your overall deliverability.

Avoid spam filters

Use spam filter testing tools to analyze your emails and determine how likely they are to be filtered into recipients’ spam folders. These tools also provide tips for optimizing your emails for a higher rate of deliverability. Avoid common spam triggers in your content such as all-caps subject lines, clickbait claims, or excessive use of punctuation.

Create your holiday campaigns with Mailchimp

Email marketing is a great asset for building and maintaining a loyal customer base, and the concepts outlined in this article can help your business create effective email campaigns this holiday shopping season—and into the new year, too. When you use Mailchimp, you’ll have access to the tools you need to streamline your holiday marketing efforts, develop a consistent brand identity, and measure the impact of your campaigns all season long.