13 Best Black Friday Email Marketing Strategies You Can’t Ignore [ 2024 ]

The countdown to Black Friday has begun, so retailers are scrambling to brainstorm new and innovative ways to entice shoppers. Email is the most direct way for brands to reach their customers, and with all of the noise around Black Friday, email marketing is one of the most underutilized tools for brands looking to grow their business. 

After all, only 20% of consumers participate in Black Friday shopping and that’s because not everyone finds it worth their time and effort. So how can your brand stand out this year as we near a peak in retail marketing? Let these best black Friday email marketing strategies put you on track to win more customers and drive sales.

13 Best Black Friday Email Marketing Strategies

1. Craft an Appealing Email Design

The first and foremost thing you need to keep in your mind is your Black Friday email design. Crafting your message or using a pre-made newsletter template can help you save time.

If you want to create your campaign from scratch, drag-and-drop editors will allow you to add advanced elements, such as countdown timers, GIFs, product blocks, etc.

Moreover, to save time, you can customize pre-made designs to suit your branding. NotifyVisitors offer various Black Friday newsletter templates to get started:

Here are a few best Black Friday email design tips to nail your emails:

• High-quality product images: Buyers like to see images of the products you are advertising. Make sure to add attention-grabbing visuals to captivate them.
  
  
• Font size and color: Find the balance by testing different combinations. Some of the best fonts that you can use are Arial, Verdana, and Georgia.
  

• Template colors: Black Friday emails use black and yellow color palettes. Moreover, Christmas is around the corner; you can use red and green to hint at it. You can also consider more festive colors to prepare stunning holiday emails.
  

• Clear design: Design visually appealing and easy-to-read layouts or select a pre-made newsletter template. Use white space to improve your email readability.
  

• Email template size: Pay close attention to your email sizes to make sure that your messages display correctly in the inbox. The ideal email dimensions are 600px wide and 1500px high, with a file size of <102KB.

2. Don’t wait for  Black Friday Weekend

If you want to create a buzz in the right way, then it’s crucial to start the sale before Black Friday weekend. You shouldn’t wait for the sales on Black Friday or Thanksgiving to reach a vast audience. Instead, you should start with your promotions before that, as people are more aware of their holiday purchases before the official season starts.

According to Adobe’s Digital Insights, the holiday season begins before Black Friday. Moreover, your customers’ email inboxes will be flooded with promotional emails by Thanksgiving and Black Friday.

Therefore, your best Black Friday Emails strategy would be to start early. Make sure that you convey the message that your sales will go live on the week of Black Friday or even the Friday before the official week. So, if you don’t want your customers to lose in between other promotional emails, start early.

3. Conduct an A/B test on your Black Friday Email Subject Lines

Boosting your email open rates may sound easy, but it’s not. It combines any particular time of day, week, weather, political event, and whatnot. Different things encourage your email subscribers to open your emails.

However, one of the most significant factors that impact email open rates is your email subject lines. Usually, your instinct or experience determines which subject lines result in better open rates.

But you should also think of other aspects. While determining the subject lines keep the Black Friday weekend buzz and craze in focus, you won’t have much time to test various email subject lines. Then, you should conduct A/B testing of your email subject lines. It will help you to launch two separate versions and measure which performs better.

You can conduct A/B testing by sending version A to 25% of your recipients and version B to another 25%. The winner variation should become the email subject line of the remaining 50%.

4. Grow Your Email Subscribers List

If you do not have an email list, then it’s time that you should create one immediately. Email lists come in handy, particularly during the Holiday Season. Black Friday weekend is the biggest shopping weekend. Therefore don’t forget to leverage it and be ready with all tactics to reap huge profits.

If you did it correctly, there is a chance that the people who have already bought from you earlier will purchase again. Hence, having an email subscriber list is important.

To grow your email subscriber list, first, you have to improve your offerings for your products. So you have to ensure that you do this before you start offering Black Friday discounts and they go live. To highlight the Holiday Season offerings, make use of theme-based visuals, as it’s a great way to make your signup forms attractive.

Likewise, using promotional banners on the top of your popular page is another great way to offer special discounts only to your email subscribers. Moreover, you can also consider building an exclusive landing page to capture emails from visitors. By simply doing so, you can lead your visitors toward the desired actions you want them to take.

5. Integrate Email Marketing And Social Media

Integrating your Black Friday email marketing efforts with social media is one of the best black Friday email marketing strategies.

Social media has massive networking and high engagement rates and it can help you with brand visibility and awareness. 

To understand its relevance, here are some useful social media statistics:

• Instagram holds an 84% engagement rate.
• 55% of people use Pinterest to make a purchase.
• TikTok has become increasingly popular among teenagers.
• Snapchat has an engagement rate of 80%.

These stats clearly indicate social media boosts engagement. All you have to do is to follow a few easy steps to leverage them for your email strategy and the first step is adding social media buttons! These buttons will link back to your social profiles, letting your subscribers connect with you.

Moreover, you can also make dedicated email campaigns for Black Friday giveaways and employ user-generated content to boost your brand’s buzz!

Although, social media isn’t the only channel you can utilize to incentivize your subscribers to act. Other effective channels you can integrate with email comprise SMS marketing, Referral marketing, and Influencer marketing.

6. Go beyond your Black Friday Weekend deals

Extend your Black Friday marketing deals past Cyber Monday. But don’t go beyond 48 to 72 hours only and extend it to Christmas. Ensure that you maintain your promotions’ scarcity and exclusivity during the extension.

Your Black Friday email campaign – to inflate sales – should be eye-catching and to the point.

In this way, the customers who missed the chance to avail of your Black Friday promotions can still buy from you at discounted prices.

By now, customers seeing your emails would be relatively easy. Most of the offer emails have already been pushed. After Black Friday, there is a great chance that the email inboxes of your potential customers will be more tranquil. Hence, the more chances for you to beat others.

7. Don’t Forget to add Your Signature

Make sure you have a unique voice for your emails, as it helps you stand out amongst the crowd and be recognized in the inbox. It’s important during a busy period like Black Friday. Your contender will use more or less the same tactics with discount percentages.

There’s no ideal way to craft the perfect Black Friday email. The idea here is to make sure that your customers identify you when they receive your email. We recommend that your brand’s uniqueness (logo, style, voice, subject lines, images) is visible in your promotional emails. It will improve your chances of grabbing your reader’s attention.

8. Make Your CTAs Valuable

Your CTA buttons are the most crucial aspect of your Black Friday email marketing campaign! To make them compelling, you have to keep a few things in mind:

• Color: Your CTA buttons should be bright enough to stand out amongst the background color. Make sure you use red, yellow, blue, or green to entice attention.
  
  
• Placement: Set your CTAs above the fold to improve your click-through rate. Moreover, you can use the inverted pyramid model to guide your subscriber to take action after realizing your email value.
  
  
• Copy: Utilize actionable language to facilitate clicks. Emphasize your value proposition but keep it between two and five words.

9. Create Automated Workflows 

Automation made it easy to perform complex tasks. Therefore, with the help of automated workflows, Black Friday email creation should become easy. Therefore, if you want to target your Black Friday shoppers with personalized messages and offers as per their needs, you have to use the potential of marketing automation.

This robust feature is ideal for setting up sequences that will be delivered to the right person at the right point. To leverage it, you will need a cutting-edge email marketing automation service that offers workflow builders, triggers, and pre-made recipes.

Some of the most prevalent sequences that you can implement to strengthen your Black Friday email strategies include:

• Website engagement messages: Make sure you target shoppers with a VIP deal after checking precise pages and products on your website.
  
  
• Upsell/Cross-sell sequences: When customers purchase from your online store, you can target them with different Black Friday deals on relevant items. This way, you can employ your one-time shoppers and encourage them to purchase more.
  
  
• Special offer reminders: You can create an email series to remind subscribers of your exclusive holiday offers for better sales.
  
  
• Abandoned cart emails: Create a dedicated cart abandonment sequence to restore your lost revenue, targeting your abandoners with Black Friday deals and free shipping.

10. Create a sense of urgency

It is another one of the important best black Friday email marketing strategies to get customers thrilled about your sale items. So,  write a copy that shows urgency. Building a sense of urgency or scarcity in your Black Friday marketing prompts buyers to take action.

One reason behind creating a sense of urgency is that it helps capture attention. For instance, in a flooded email box, an email that stands out and leads to a sense of urgency is more likely to be seen than an email that doesn’t.

You can prompt customers to act now rather than wait. By showing a limited-time discount or exclusive access to sale items, customers will feel driven to take advantage of your Black Friday deals before they disappear.

You should exhibit what quantity is left when you showcase your product as scarce. If you own 10 pieces, show that only 2 are in stock. Also, notifications of others looking for the same product or purchasing that product will significantly impact it.

11. Reward Your Loyal Customers

 Rewarding your existing customers and subscribers with additional incentives is a great way to promote your sales. You can show early bird discounts, sale items, free shipping, or a combination of all three to your email subscribers.

Also, boost that you reward your subscribers with incentives to motivate your website visitors to convert into your email subscribers. 

Likewise, you can reward your loyal, long-term customers with exclusive deals, gifts, or a buy-one-get-one-free offer. Rewarding your email subscribers and loyal customers will help you build up your brand exponentially. It will also help you grow your customer’s lifetime value.

12. Don’t forget your buyers after Black Friday.

It’s amazing that you can sell numerous products on Black Friday. But, a customer’s worth to your brand evolves over time. You want to turn those one-off buyers into loyal, lifelong customers.

An analysis by Shopify notes that customer lifetime value is the lowest on holidays like Black Friday. It revealed that for a whopping 64% of retailers, shoppers obtained during Black Friday or Cyber Monday have a lower lifetime value than shoppers obtained at any other time of the year.

Therefore, follow up by mailing a quick thank-you email, a customer service survey, or requesting feedback on their experience. You’ll be enhancing your customers’ experience, which can pay off in prospective dividends.

By reaching out to buyers, you demonstrate that your brand truly values their business and that you’re determined to provide a positive customer experience.

13. Keep Track of your performance 

Once you are done with everything and have started sending your campaigns, it’s time to observe their performance using the platform’s reporting and analytics feature. From your open rate to your conversions, you must track essential key performance indicators (KPIs) to check whether your campaigns are performing as expected.

Most crucial email marketing metrics to track during the holiday season:

• Email open rate: Low open rates may suggest that your subject lines aren’t converting enough. Therefore, you need to tweak them to improve their performance.
  
  
• Click-throughs: Check whether your copy and CTAs reach your goals. A high CTR indicates that your value proposition and CTA resonate with your subscribers.
  
  
• Bounce rate: Make sure you track your soft and hard bounces to learn why your campaigns don’t reach your audience. Pay close to this metric, as it will allow you to detect potential email deliverability issues.
  
  
• Unsubscribe rate: A high unsubscribe rate implies that your campaigns are not fascinating enough or your audience considers them spam.

Take Away

Black Friday is a major shopping holiday that falls after the Thanksgiving holiday. It is considered to be the biggest shopping day of the year. As a result, Black Friday email marketing campaigns significantly boost online sales and maintain brand reputation.

On Black Friday, many retailers make huge leaps in their email marketing campaigns. Some of these campaigns have been running for years and have been very successful.

When customers are expected to buy new products and take advantage of seasonal discounts, brands need to get them excited to open their wallets and make purchases. One of the best ways to do this is with email marketing emails.

The best way to plan a successful email campaign for Black Friday is to start early. You can change the program as the day gets closer, but you will fail if you do not have a solid strategy in place from the start. It is important to strategically pick the right campaigns to boost sales and create brand loyalty.

With NotifyVisitors, leverage black Friday and boost your sales. If you want to know more about it, schedule a free demo.