Whether you’re an email campaign expert or novice, this is your reminder to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday…. yesterday. Email campaigns can get overlooked in a world of digital marketing that loves the flash of Facebook, Instagram, and online ads. But forgetting about email marketing is a big miss for your business. Even if you are a small business, using email gives you a direct line to your customers. Trust us when we say, your sale has a better chance of being seen in an inbox than on Instagram.
Black Friday Sales:
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are popular sale points in the year because people are looking for great holiday deals. If you opt not to do a sale at this time of the year, we think you’re a little crazy because you may be missing out on big business. This year, because of supply chain issues and an accelerated holiday shopping season, you do have the option to bump your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales forward. Holding sales earlier may be beneficial to your small business because you’ll be competing with fewer companies for your customers’ attention, and you’ll be getting to the sales first.
But whether you plan to offer a sale early or at the traditional time, you need to start planning now. Because you should have been planning months ago and now it’s almost too late. Maybe you just didn’t know. Maybe you’re incredibly lazy. But this kind of mean paragraph is here is the harbinger of doom. Your time is now. Start planning now.
Solidify in advance what products or services you want to discount. There are tons of discounting options including BOGO sales, price reductions, and spend more, save more sales with progressive discounting.
Once you decide what kind of sale you’ll be holding, pick the product. Pick product that you can easily fulfill and that works great for holiday gifting.
And once you have all of those details nailed down, start creating campaign assets. Make sure you have graphics for all of your social media sites and for your email. Include all of the sale details in the email and have the fineprint accessible to anyone with questions. We recommend sending an email at the beginning of the sale and a reminder email on the last day of the sale at a bare minimum. If your sale is only 24-hours long, send an email at the start of the sale and when customers have 6-12 more hours to shop.
Your email shouldn’t be a stand-alone marketing tactic, it should be tied in with your marketing strategy on every other platform.
If you have never made an email campaign before or haven’t opened your email provider in a minute, here are a few pro-tips for making an effective email marketing campaign:
Email Lists:
You don’t own your Instagram following. You have no control over your Facebook likes and follows. But you do have complete control over your email list. Getting together an email list is an old-school hunter/gatherer situation. As you slowly collect email addresses of customers and potential customers, you put your business in a great place to keep in contact with people who love your product.
You can collect emails through giveaways, on your website, by offering freebies or by collecting them in your store. You cannot collect emails by buying an email list from some sketchy website. This is a terrible idea. This is something terrible business owners do, and you’re not a terrible business owner. This will bring terrible results and have business-crippling repercussions. Don’t do it.
Email is not archaic. It’s not a marketing method that’s going the way of the world anytime soon. And building an email list is the first step in making sure that your email strategy has a chance to work.
Email Providers:
If you are new to the world of email marketing, you are going to need an email provider. You can’t just blast a handful of business emails from your personal Gmail account. That would be weird and honestly a little creepy.
MailChimp, Klayvio, and DotDigital are a few popular email service providers. And while Klayvio is a personal favorite around here, you can make a lot of these platforms work for you. Picking an email platform should be based on cost, functionality, and the size of your email list. We do recommend talking to a few fellow businesses to see what providers they have loved and haven’t loved to get a good feel for what might work for you.
Subject Lines:
Subject lines and pre-header text are really important for an effective email campaign. Your subject line needs to be grabby, catch the interest of your customer, and give them a reason to open the email. An unopened email left to rot and die in an inbox does your business no good.
On Black Friday and Cyber Monday, your subject line is going to need to be extra catchy because your email will be competing with lots of other sale emails. If you have previous email A/B testing to go off of, play off of subject lines that have worked well for your audience in the past. Maybe even catch your audience’s attention with a few relevant emojis.
Call To Action:
Keep your Black Friday emails short and to the point. Whether you send two emails or twelve over the course of the sale (we don’t recommend sending twelve), you’re going to want to get right to the point because no one is opening a sale email to read about the history of your company.
Highlight the deals at the top of the email, provide details in some brief body copy, and then give consumers a call to action. Use a shopping button in your email to give them a clear place to click that will take them right to the sale page on your website.
Emails are like life in general. Most of the time, people take the easiest path — the one of least resistance. So the more straightforward and easy you make your sale, and your sale email, the easier it will be for people to give you lots of their money. Which is kind of what you want, right?
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