Email Marketing Best Practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are right around the corner. For ecommerce retailers, this means planning has already started or needs to begin ASAP. And when it comes to key tactics, email marketing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday will be one of the most important strategies to execute.

Want to make sure that all your target customers come to your store on Black Friday or visit your e-commerce shop on Cyber Monday? You need to use email marketing in conjunction with your other marketing efforts, including paid ads, social media marketing, and more.

Why Use Email Marketing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Simply put, because you can’t afford not to.

For tons of businesses, and maybe even your own, Black Friday 2021 is the chance you have to get your books back into the black (in fact, that’s where the retail holiday’s name comes from!). Black Friday is the single best time to market as much as possible. You can advertise extreme deals and get people to visit your store or e-commerce website far more reliably than at any other time.

Cyber Monday 2021 is even more important for online exclusive businesses. It’s the chance for e-commerce shops to catch up to their retail counterparts and take advantage of the growing reliance on online shopping for industries ranging from tech to toys to furniture.

Email marketing may be treated like an afterthought by many marketers, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, email marketing can help supercharge your Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales.

How to Use Email Marketing for Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals

Not sure where to start? Let’s break down five best practices for Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails that you can leverage for this year’s email marketing campaign.

Make Your Emails Attractive

For starters, pay a lot of attention to how attractive your emails will be in a prospective customer’s inbox. Emails that aren’t attractive will be ignored or, worse, thrown in the trash category.

To make sure your emails are opened, follow these key email marketing tactics:

• Always include an immediately identifiable sender name, which can be your brand, your email marketing program, or more. Never use your email address alone; people are primed to view these emails as if they are from spammers, even if they aren’t
• Include a persuasive (but not annoying) subject line to draw attention to your email
• Remember that many of your shoppers will be on mobile devices. Keep them in mind and include all the key info for your marketing email within the first 20 or so characters of your emails’ subject lines
• The “preheader” is the first line of text from the email that may show up in the inbox of your email recipients. Make sure this preheader text is informative and engaging in equal measure

Going through each email you plan to send and ensuring that they check all these boxes will go a long way toward boosting your email marketing’s overall success rate.

Personalized Your Emails to Shoppers

Customers, regardless of industry, love personalization; tons of studies have confirmed that personalized emails connect better with target consumers than generalized ones.

Use personalization in your Black Friday emails by including your recipient’s name in the subject line or the preheader text, throughout the body of the emails, and more. Depending on your email analytics tools, you can also recommend specific products based on your customers’ shopping habits or favorite product categories.

Give Subscribers a Reason to Read Your Emails – Use Teasers

You can and should also use Black Friday “teaser” emails in the lead-up to your actual marketing event. For example, you can send out a sale announcement email up to three days before your Black Friday sale. This lets all of your subscribers know that a big marketing event is coming, but builds anticipation without telling them exactly what you’ll have to offer.

You can do the same thing for Cyber Monday, but consider adding a teaser to the end of your Black Friday emails instead. A line at the end of your Black Friday email marketing messages such as, “That’s not all – check back with us on Cyber Monday for even more great deals!” can do a lot to get customers to visit your site twice in the same seven-day span.

Depending on your resources, you might consider drawing up some countdown emails, sending one per day over the last three or so days until your big Black Friday event.

Send Cart Abandonment Emails

The majority of customers on Black Friday will be stuck in the middle of the purchase cycle for quite some time. They’ll use their online shopping carts to gather products, then shop around for better deals for the same products.

To remind them of your store and its excellent opportunities, send cart abandonment email marketing messages. These emails can remind your customers of what they’ve already started to buy, plus give them a slight kick if they feel too hesitant.

Your abandonment emails should be engaging, alerting, and exciting. You can even throw in a few warnings along the lines of “These deals will be gone soon… .” Just don’t overdo it.

Extend Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Campaigns

Black Friday is hugely popular, enough that you should extend your email marketing campaigns prior to and after the retail holiday. Conversely, many shoppers lose sight of Cyber Monday, so make sure you’re talking up your Monday promotions in your Black Friday emails as well.

Wrap Up

Done right, email marketing can be a cornerstone for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing efforts. Without email marketing, your store will see less traffic, your deals will be less popular, and even your other marketing efforts will seem less successful.

But the right email marketing efforts can make the most of this year’s Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales weekend.