BFCM Email Marketing Campaign - Do it Right!

Do I have to say it again? Black Friday) and Cyber Monday is so close, taking place on November 24 and 27 this year. And it will not be a good idea if you forget to set a perfect email marketing campaign seriously. Let’s start working now and see how sales can rocket this big holiday shopping season. In this article, I hope you can notice to some main ideas:

• Why BFCM Email marketing campaign is essential?
• What to do to boost your subscriber list
• Start BFCM early sales
• Optimize your subject lines
• Create urgency in your Black Friday email campaigns
• Send cart recovery email series

1. Why BFCM email marketing campaign is essential?

According to the NRF, well over 150 million people purchased during BFCM shopping season. In comparison, the NRF report indicated that there was a significant increase of 3 million people in the number of shoppers on Black Friday 2015. Plus more than 120 million shoppers on Cyber Monday, there was a total of well above 270 million people who shopped over the 5-day period. Besides, shoppers spent nearly $13 billion through Cyber Monday shopping period for Thanksgiving. In addition, according to ADI, Black Friday online sales undergoes a dramatic annual growth of 21.6% while that for Cyber Monday experiences a steady rise of 12.1% year over year.

In 2017, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales is predicted to exceed even those figures. Hence, if you want to boost sales on these vibrant shopping days, make sure that you have the best preparation for BFCM email marketing campaign. Below are some main steps that you should follow to achieve it

2. What you do to boost your subscriber list

Having an online store or online shopping channel seems to be a must in this digital era, and through these channels, a list of potential customers should be built. The more contacts you get, the more successful your email campaign will be. To get a high-quality subscriber list, you should take advantage of the contacts you got from your old customers and try to improve the urgency and offerings for your products. This task should be done before BFCM sales.

Your newsletter signup forms, for sure, should be designed beautifully with an eye-catching design to catch your visitor’s attention. Also, the content of the box must be changed to concentrate on the upcoming BFCM offers. The positions to place the banner are also important. Normally, homepage, product or category pages are the most popular sites which attract more views from visitors, so you can put your promotion advertisement there, with a note that only subscribers will get special offers from your store.

If you want something more intense, a landing page created to grab visitors’s emails is always the best idea. However, doing this also means you have to invest more time and effort to generate great content for the page. Otherwise, let’s try another way which is much easier. Investing in advertising campaigns will work, Facebook Ads or Google Ads are the most popular. However, be wise when you set up an advertising campaign.

3. BFCM early sales

All marketing campaigns need time to work. It’s obvious that you shouldn’t promote your BFCM sales on Black Friday or Thanksgiving. Instead, the sales should run 1 week or at least a couple of days earlier and the information about the sales should be noticed to your subscribers from November 1. One of the reasons for this is that your customer’s email inboxes will be flooded with tons of promotional emails, and the possibility for your mails to get read seems to be lowest.

4. Optimize your subject lines

4.1 Use a question

Using a question to be a subject line is a good idea as it can stay in your subscriber’s mind longer than other normal titles. A question also makes your audience curious and excited then open your mail to get the answer. I can suggest a very basic question like: Do you miss this big snip this Black Friday? In this title, you announce your big snip to customers and also imply that they can miss it.

4.2 Use ‘How to’

Pretending like you want to help your loyal customers to get something done, when it comes in handy to the subscribers, they just don’t hesitate to open your mails. For example, in this holiday shopping season, let’s send a promotional e-mails with the title like How to save money this shopping season? To price-conscious people, it will be like asking the right question.

4.3 Personalized subject lines

One week before the campaign launch, you can use Avada Email Marketing Automation to send information to potential customers about an upcoming campaign before your competition. With advanced tools to automatically send emails to customers, you can absolutely get this done with ease. Personalized titles including recipient’s name will make the receiver feel like that email is sent for his/her personally. Also, using personalized subject lines make your subscribers feel they are cared.

4.4 Use powerful words

You know what? Languages are miracle, and if you know how to use it, they can bring insanely effective results. Let’s look at the chart below to see what happens when you use your language well:

Also, 5 terms which performed the highest click rates and open rates on Black Friday and Cyber Monday are:

4.5 Use numbers

Numbers always present things better than just words. You can raise curiosity inside your subscribers’ head if you give out an interesting figure. The key to success with this formula is the number you use. If you are suggesting effort a reader needs to expend (like steps in a process for instance), then using a low number works better as it suggest the process is quicker and easier. However, if you are providing value to the reader (like a number of ways to increase email subscribers) then a higher number will work better as it increases the reader’s perception of the value your email will provide them.

4.6 A/B Testing

Tips are tips. In reality, there are various factors affecting the open rates, and sometimes, you just can’t even control all of them at all. Hence, A/B email testing should be run before you start each email campaign. After many times, you will finally learn how to set up an optimal subject line for your promotional emails.

Read more:

• Best Thanksgiving email subject lines - Avada
• Best Halloween Email Subject Lines - Avada

5. Create urgency in your BFCM email campaigns

If you never have an idea of creating urgency in your BFCM email campaigns, you should reconsider it. For instance, you can introduce a timer so that your subscribers will be more conscious about the limit of great deals they will be offered. Hence, if your customers are in a good mood to purchase, they will try to do it immediately not to miss the chance.

6. Send cart recovery email series

It’s really common when your subscriber opens a promotional e-mail, reads it and forgets afterwards. Even when he/she is interested in the offers, the email can be lost somewhere and impossible to be found. As a reason, consumers’ inboxes are always filled with a bunch of emails everyday, so customers need more than one reminder. Otherwise, you can’t expect that a purchase will be finished after only one email.

Last year, Soundest analyzed data from 15,000 brands and discovered that sending a series of 3 cart recovery emails resulted in 131% more orders compared to only sending one cart recovery email. Also, cart abandonment is a big problem that retailers have to deal with. Cart abandonment rate can reach up to 80% as many difficulties or problems encountered by shoppers in the checkout. Approximately 66% of buyers will abandon their carts and, unfortunately, never come back and complete their checkout. This figure can be converted in a huge amount of money which is running away from online stores. According to a research, a merchant can drop millions of dollars each year due to cart abandonment.

Default Magento allows online stores to get notified about abandoned carts and to email customers about this. However, doing this manually can be time-wasting and increase workload for store admins. Luckily, by equipping this Magento 2 Abandoned Cart Email extension for your store, you can recover abandoned orders and bring dollars back to your store.

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