Black Friday is around the corner! How to prepare your email campaign effectively?

Black Friday is coming on the 23rd November! Are you excited about boosted sales? Prepare with us and nothing will surprise you. In this blog post we will show you how to prepare your mailing campaigns to be sure that every message was sent effectively and delivered at right time to every contact.

There is still a couple of weeks until Black Friday, but preparing earlier definitely pays off. On this day everyone wants to reach their customers and propose the best offer. Last year 25 million emails were sent from SALESmanago system on Black Friday! To compare, the number of emails sent on this specific day can be four times higher than on a normal Friday.

This is how previous Black Friday in SALESmanago looked like:

Black Friday is the perfect opportunity to increase your sales. On this day the number of purchases rises about 35% in comparison to a regular Friday. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your customers and is the perfect solution in this situation.

This year we have prepared a short guide for our customers to help them plan the campaigns. Follow our tips and you’ll enjoy the rising number of purchases instead of worrying about sending some mailing on Black Friday.

Firstly, the CONTENT

Think for a moment what would you like to offer your customers. A 25% discount code? Or maybe free shipping or a gift with every transaction? Does it include all the products or only a selection? Remember that the deal should benefit both sides.

Then consider how to announce the bargain. A short slogan will be a better choice than an extensive article. On this day your customers will be flooded with emails, so don’t overwhelm them and provide short information that they can digest easily. This way they will remember your offer better.

And if the inboxes will be full… The subject! It must stand out if you want the email to be opened among hundreds of others. Do you know that 65 characters in the email subject are considered to be the perfect amount? Moreover, it’s better to avoid the overused catchphrases such as “PROMOTION” or “SPECIAL OFFER”. Think out of the box, catch the users’ attention and add a captivating preheader (find out here what a preheader is and what other tricks you can use to increase the open rate).

When you have the texts ready, prepare the images and start creating the email. You can use our Drag&Drop Email Designer that’ll help you to create a message quickly and easily. And if you don’t have any ideas for the design, our 153 ready-to-use email templates will come in handy.

Secondly, the CONTACT BASE

Your email is ready? Great! It’s time to prepare the contacts you want to send it to. If you already have all the contacts in SALESmanago, decide if you send the message to all of them or if you use the segments and personalize the offers, delivering different versions of the message to the recipients.

If you decide to import an external contact base, you should prepare the file earlier and put the contacts in the system with an adequate tag so it will be ready in the moment of sending the message. If you need help with preparing the file and importing it to SALESmanago, read this. You should prepare your database a few days before Black Friday. It’s not a good idea to postpone it until the last moment because the system will be dealing with a higher amount of processed data.

If you plan to use advanced filters (filtering by details as well as by tags) to select contacts while addressing the message, you can do it in advance in the section CRM/Contacts list/Manage Contacts and apply the filters to create one tag with the contacts you want the message to be delivered to.

And thirdly, SCHEDULING THE MESSAGE

As we have said it before, Black Friday is the day when everyone wants to send emails to their customers. We do all that we can to prepare our servers and send your messages as quickly as it happens on every regular Friday. Nevertheless, it won’t hurt to help them a little, for example scheduling the message to be sent in advance so it will wait patiently to be executed on the selected time, filtered by all the conditions, prepared for every contact. If you want to send the message on Friday, schedule it in the system on Thursday afternoon, and set the time of sending at early morning hours. This way all the messages will arrive on time to your customers, and they’ll be able to read them and plan their shopping in your store.

Remember that the customers prefer to know what surprises await them on Black Friday. Why shouldn’t you inform them a few days earlier, so they’ll have more time to choose your offer before their wallet will be emptied in the shopping craze.

To sum up:

Prepare the email and test it.
Make sure that you’ve tagged the contacts properly and have prepared the database.
Schedule the message a day before the date of sending.
After scheduling the campaign, check again the configuration to avoid any mistakes.
When the sending will be in progress, we will monitor it.
See the statistics sprout up!

Black Friday is celebrated every year after the Thanksgiving day. It’s the day that officially opens the season for holiday shopping. It’s a real feast – many stores let their customers shop at very tempting prices. Black Friday 2018 will take place on November 23. Bear in mind that, the Monday that follows Black Friday, known as Cyber Monday, is the day of sales in online stores.