Typically when we talk about the benefits of Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, we focus on sales and acquisition. After all, it’s a big, obvious opportunity for both. Brands often see a rise in sales, so we want to discuss how to encourage the biggest rise possible. There’s also often a lot of new customers looking for new brands to buy from, so we talk about how to find that audience.
But what about one of the most lucrative audiences in ecommerce - existing customers?
Retention and loyalty are very important when it comes to the sustainability of an online brand. And over BFCM, that group of customers is also going to be shopping for deals. They’re also the group you can most easily reach and engage with. One way to do just that is through email marketing.
Let’s talk step-by-step how you can utilize email marketing to engage with your most valuable customers, and succeed this Black Friday weekend.
Step #1 - Analyze email marketing
The best place to start your strategy is by looking at your email marketing. Email is perhaps your most valuable channel of communication with existing customers. In fact, this audience will be those most interested and engaged with your brand as they’ve either purchased something before, or have actively signed up to receive marketing content. It’s a much more effective channel too, as 88% of email users check their inbox multiple times a day and 59% say email marketing influences their purchasing decisions. It’s cross-generational too unlike platforms like social media - 81% of Gen Z say they check their emails every day.
Here are some things to look at in your analysis:
- - Open rate and click-through rate (CTR) of different styles of email content
- - Open rate and CTR of different audience e.g. loyal customers, new customers, email-only subscribers
- - Performance of emails that advertised sales throughout the year
- - Performance of emails in the lead up to BFCM the previous year
- - Incentive uptake - successes and failures
All of this will give you a clear picture of your email performance when it comes to existing customers and performance. It will allow you to find that sweet spot of what each audience responds best to and what actually leads to sales.
Step #2 - Segment your audience
Segmentation is the key to success when it comes to email. You can start with top level, basic segmentation or get straight to the more granular approach to really target specific groups of subscribers. In any case, it allows you to focus on content that actually performs and resonates with your audience, rather than shooting in the dark and seeing what works.
Top level segmentation to start with would be new customers, long-term/loyal customers, and email-only subscribers i.e. yet to purchase. From there you can get more detailed:
New Customers
- Acquisition source (e.g. social media, email sign-up etc.)
- Product category purchased from
- Incentive used (or not)
- Engagement with emails
Long-term/Loyal Customers
- Lifetime value (LTV)
- Time spent as customers
- Number of orders or frequency/recency of orders
- Products/categories purchased
- Engagement with emails
Email-only (i.e. yet to purchase)
This segment is more challenging as they haven’t yet placed an order, however you’re starting at an advantage as they’re interested in your brand enough to sign up for emails.
- Sign-up source
- Email engagement
- Website engagement (site visits, products viewed etc.)
Using these segments, you can get a clearer picture of which emails perform best with different audiences. That includes the format, the content itself, any incentives, CTA placement etc. You can also combine segments to create new ones to get even more detailed, for example high LTV with high or low email engagement.
Segmentation also gives you a more accurate idea of metrics like open rate, engagement etc. among different audience sets. For example, an open rate with your entire audience might be 40% but then when you segment to only include high value existing customers who engage with your emails, then the open rate increases significantly. Then you can know better what content engages which audience best.
Step #3 - Create engaging Black Friday content
By this step, you’ll have analyzed past performance and content, as well as segmented your audience to gain a deeper understanding of what truly engages them. So, the next step is to start planning the kind of content you’ll send. Black Friday weekend may only be for a limited few days, however the build-up should last through the weeks before the big day.
In the run up to Black Friday weekend, plan to send regular emails that build anticipation with your existing customers and subscribers.
- - Tease the offers you have planned - even if it’s just a preview to start with, letting customers know the kind of deals they can expect
- - Details on how to get the most out of your deals such as when deals go live, if there are any time-limited deals, and information about shipping and delivery
- - Offer exclusive email subscriber bonuses or early access to certain deals. You can scale these depending on the segment you want to target, so high value customers are offered something more exclusive than regular email subscribers.
- - Create Black Friday buying guides detailing some of the deals on offer, highlighting popular products.
As an additional tip, make sure your emails are optimized for mobile devices - 81% of users check their email on a mobile device. Most of the time when we’re building email content we’re using a desktop device, so it’s easy to think it looks good on desktop however you need to make sure content works across devices.
Step #4 - Offer an incentive for high value segments
When it comes to existing customers though, 97% would like to see more rewards from their favorite brands. So, why not give your customers what they want? Incentives are an easy way to capture interest in advance of events like Black Friday. Offering these in advance and sending reminders will keep existing customers and email subscribers engaged in your BFCM marketing content.
An effective incentive you can offer is gift cards. These are more tangible feeling to customers than a discount code, as they’ll expect these from other brands on Black Friday anyway. A gift card gives them money to spend on Black Friday, encouraging them to spend it so they don’t “lose” it. Whereas a discount or coupon might not feel as much like they’re missing out on value.
Gift cards can also be scaled depending on the segment. The higher value the segment, the larger the incentive. For example, if a customer orders frequently and regularly spends $50+, or one who orders semi-frequently but spends much more. You can start small, say $5 gift card for lower LTV and increase the gift card value as the LTV does.
You can offer these gift cards in the weeks leading up to BFCM. Or you can let customers know what the rewards will be, and send incentives out the week before. For instance, you can say “customers who have spent (x) before (date) will receive ($) gift card to spend for Black Friday”. This might encourage some customers to place orders in advance so they can guarantee a larger reward.
Step #5 - Create an automated flow that will re-engage your audience
Email automation is a great method for continuing to engage your customers in the most effective way possible. You can create different automated flows depending on the audience, and their behaviors with email and your store. It can be a simple, straightforward flow that sends emails out based on time lapsed or if they opened the first email. Or it can be more complex, taking into account click-throughs, store browsing, products purchased, abandoned carts and more.
These automated emails can last from the weeks before Black Friday, to long after the weekend has passed. Using data you have prior to BFCM and then what you have after, you can create an automated email flow that’s perfectly personalized to each audience segment and effectively re-engages them over time.
For example, you might have an email automatically sent out to high LTV customers 2 weeks before Black Friday with their exclusive gift card. Then that may split into customers who opened the email, and those who didn’t. Each audience gets a different email - perhaps the one for those who didn’t open the email receives the same email again but with a different subject line that’s more urgent. And then the audience that did open the email is split into those who clicked through to browse your site, and those who didn’t. What this does is engage each individual audience based on behavior, without you having to do the leg-work with every email sent.
After BFCM, you can use these automated flows to engage different audiences with whom you saw success. For instance, you may have a group of those who were previously email-only subscribers who converted into customers. You can set it up so that they’re automatically added to a BFCM specific welcome flow in the weeks after the event is over.
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Email is one of your most valuable tools for engaging with your most valuable audience. By engaging with them in advance of and after Black Friday, you can foster further loyalty as well as a boost in sales.