3 Black Friday / Cyber Monday Email Marketing strategies that generated $1 million.
Congrats guys. You did it! Q4 is over. The dust has finally settled from a wild Black Friday / Cyber (BF/CM) Monday season.
Now that we’re out of the eye of the storm, I wanted to take a moment and share three winning email marketing strategies that brought in $1 million for two clients and that can help you make some major dollah bucks in 2023.
Asking your email list to sign up for Early Access deals.
If I had to pick one strategy to implement in 2023 for Black Friday/ Cyber Monday. It would be this:
Instead of blasting your entire email list about your sale, ask people to sign up if they want early access, and ONLY send emails to this list.
This strategy is counterintuitive, and really hard for most businesses to implement. If you’re running a huge sale then you should tell EVERYONE so you have the best chance of scooping up all the sales.
Right?
Right?!
Wrong.
A furniture client I worked with has an email campaign segment that is around 60,000 emails. A few weeks prior to launching the early access sale we sent 3 emails to their entire list asking them to sign up if they wanted early access for the Black Friday sale.
We had about 4,000 people sign up for early access, a humble 6% of our total email list. But that tiny percentage gave us some gigantic results.
We sent 8 total campaigns to the early access sign up list and generated $155k in revenue and $38 per person on that list. After sending 8 total Early Access campaigns we opened the sale to the entire list. As you can see below the Early Access List punched well above it’s weight. The list generated almost 10 times more revenue per person than when we sent the Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale to our entire list.
This little list punched way above it’s weight.
Let's break down why this strategy works so well. Email marketing is permission based marketing. Meaning our customers and prospects are giving us permission to send them ads.
With an early access sign up list, we’re taking this strategy a step further by asking people to raise their hand, and pre-qualify themselves as interested buyers. The people that raise their hands are the mythical, molten hot, super engaged segment of our email list.
These people are going to be actively looking for your email, and marking their calendar for your sale. They’ve made a micro commitment, and even better, they might mentally set aside that cash for your sale instead of spending it elsewhere.
This self-selecting sale strategy (yeah, that was slick alliteration…), helps us cut through the insane volume of emails sent during Black Friday and snatch sales away from our competitors while also letting us sleep well at night knowing we are emailing people who want to buy from us.
Now, on to Strategy #2 which is really just expanding Strategy #1.
2. Hype up your sale and create excitement.
Most e-commerce businesses are awful at building excitement for a new product launch or a sale. Usually it goes something like this.
Spend weeks planning the sale and pick a date
Waste an unnecessary amount of time designing an email and frantically going back and forth over tiny ego edits.
Blast your email list and go full throttle on paid media.
Breathe a sigh of relief.
This is a lazy, white belt level marketing strategy that still works, but we can do a hell of a lot better if we steal a page from the film and TV industry.
No one builds excitement and hype for a launch better than Hollywood. Before a new movie or show they start teasing their fans relentlessly. Short trailers, cryptic posts on social media, interviews with the actors. They get fans so hyped up for the launch date that people will stay up until 3am just so they can be the first to binge watch the new season of Stranger Things.
Let’s take a look at how we can apply this to email marketing and get our list pumped AF for our sale or product launch.
If you’re paying attention we actually implemented teasing in Strategy #1 above with our emails asking people to sign up for the BFCM sale.
But let's say you procrastinate your sale, or you’re just really opposed to only emailing a tiny fraction of your list, (no judgements here). How can you generate some hype?
Let’s take a peak at how I did this with another client during BFCM.
This client reached out to me for help with a BF/CM email strategy at the last possible minute. We had to create and execute their email marketing strategy in just a few days, so we couldn’t set up the Early Access Sign Up list.
But rather than half-ass the sale and just send one spray and pray email blast, we sent one teaser campaign to the entire campaign segment barely 24 hours before our Black Friday sale went live.
The email went something like this:
Hey Guys,
Heads up that tomorrow we're giving our customers our best deal of the year. Plus another special surprise.
No ugly sweaters this year. Give your friends and family a gift they'll actually love!
See you tomorrow AM!
Teaser emails work best as simple, plain text emails and should take you about 20 minutes tops to create, and send.
These emails work really well because we’re creating a little mystery and getting people curious. “Wow, the biggest sale of the year PLUS a surprise? OMFG I can’t wait!”
Now, I had to coax the client to send out a teaser email as they were worried it would dilute the impact of the sale launch email.
Which it didn’t.
Myth: Teaser emails dilute launch email performance.
True, the teaser email had a better open rate, but that launch email had the impact of an asteroid smashing into Earth and blasting piles of gold into outer space.
If we’d had more time to plan out our Black Friday strategy, I would have sent out at least 3 teaser campaigns starting a week in advance. Using multiple teaser campaigns has a compounding effect because not everyone reads their emails at the same time. So by sending multiple teasers we’re making sure everyone gets a chance to hear about the sale and get all hot and bothered.
So as we head into 2023, try sending out a teaser campaign for your next sale. I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.
Last but not least Strategy #3
3. Send More Emails That You Feel Comfortable
One of the biggest fears e-commerce companies have is spamming their email list with too many emails. They’re worried everyone will unsubscribe and the most valuable asset of their business will be destroyed.
I totally get it. A good email campaign cadence for most ecom businesses is usually 2-4 emails a week.
But when we arrive at BF/CM you need to step out of your email comfort zone and pump up the volume.
Last year my outdoor gear client sent 2 emails. One on Black Friday and one on Cyber Monday. Those two email campaigns did just north of $150,000. Not too shabby.
But I had a pretty good hunch we could do better. A lot better.
This year I convinced them to get aggressive and send a lot more emails. All told we sent 10 emails, generated $340,005 in revenue and increased YoY sales by 78%,
Who dares wins.
Especially when it comes to BF/CM email volume.
Look, November is the time of year when you need to get over your fear of sending too many emails.
Yes. People will unsubscribe and your email list might even shrink a little. That’s a scary thought for a lot of marketers, but a necessary cost of making a boatload of money.
My outdoor product client sent 10 total campaigns, 8 more than the previous year, and generated $350k, a 78% YoY increase.
My furniture client sent 37 campaigns, 11 more than the previous year and generated $650k, a 33% increase.
When it comes to email marketing the number of campaign sends is almost always the most important metric to focus on if you’re trying to make more money. This is even more important during Black Friday / Cyber Monday when people’s inboxes are being flooded.
If you’re looking to make 2023 your best year yet for email marketing then implement these above strategies and I’m positive you’ll be on the right track.