Black Friday Email Tips: 8 Ways to Boost Sales

This blog is part of our Web Bureau Black Friday series, learn more about: 

Top 5 tips to SMASH your Black Friday sales targets 
6 Powerful Black Friday SEO Tips 
Increase your Black Friday PPC Sales With Our 6 Powerful Tips 

Digital Marketing involves an ever-growing number of tools and platforms. TikTok, Facebook, Google, Insta, Video Content, Blog Content, PPC ads, the list is endless. 

And while the likes of TikTok and Meta get the marketing headlines, there’s one stalwart that quietly but consistently keeps doing an incredible job; email marketing. 

The benefits of email marketing are clear; for every £1 you spend on email marketing, you generate £42. 

And the beauty of email marketing is that it’s pretty immune to all the major concerns facing modern digital marketers; algorithm tweaks, organic visibility and moves towards more interactive content. 

Despite being considered ‘old school’ in marketing terms, email marketing is still growing and will reach 4.3 billion users by 2023. 

So, how can you leverage email marketing to create big wins over Black Friday weekend? 

Here are our top Black Friday email tips to make Black Friday 2022 memorable for all the right reasons. 

1. Grow Your email lists.

Did you know that email subscribers spend 138% more on average than non-subscribers? 

With that in mind, your most important tactic is to prioritise building your audience; the more you have, the more potential sales you could make. 

In our popular Black Friday guide, ‘Top 5 tips to smash your Black Friday sales targets’, we spoke about how using a leading email marketing platform like Klaviyo can generate additional sales at a very low-cost point.  

Make signup forms, buttons, and marketing collateral visible to customers to grow your email list. 

Add a signup button to the header and footer of your website, in the check-out process, and the signature of your company’s emails. 

2. Clean your email list before Black Friday.

Whether you have 100 newsletter subscribers or 100,000, you’ll only want the subscribers who are interacting with your company. 

After all, 25,000 highly engaged subscribers are much better for your bottom line than 100,000 subscribers who never open your emails. 

So, while it might seem counter-intuitive, letting go of people who haven’t opened or clicked on your emails in a long time is the right way to go. 

Cleaning up your email lists will serve a dual purpose; you can stop bothering people who aren’t interested in what you’ve got to say and improve your email deliverability rates by only emailing people who are already engaged. 

3. The Power of Pop-Ups. 

Up until a couple of years ago, pop-ups got an awful rap and were frowned upon by companies. 

Most eCommerce companies hated and blocked them.  

That is until companies realised the power of the pop-up. 

Sumo says the average conversion rate for all pop-ups is 3.09% and that some pop-ups see conversion rates as high as 50.2%. 

That means for every 100 visitors to your website, you could enjoy between 3 and 50 new email subscribers. 

So, we’ve convinced you of the power of the trusty pop-up, so what’s the best way to use pop-ups? 

We recommend pop-ups encouraging users to sign up for your email list with an enticing offer. 

That offer could be as simple as “15% off your first order” or “exclusive early access to our Black Friday sales”. 

Exit pop-ups are also an unsung hero in digital marketing. 

It’s a reasonably straightforward idea; when someone is hovering over the big X button or indicating they’re about to leave your website, a pop-up appears, encouraging them to sign up for your email list. 

4. Review last year's Black Friday performance.

Modern marketing is awash with insights that help you learn from past campaigns to improve current and future ones.  

If you ran Black Friday email campaigns in 2021, 2020 and 2019, look back at the data for each, compare and contrast and spot any hidden gems worth pursuing for Black Friday 2022. 

In particular, review last year’s analytics to see what subject lines performed best and the CTA buttons that converted the most. 

Reflect on what email designs and creative lengths performed the best in recent years. 

Now, armed with the knowledge of what worked in previous years, you can refine this year’s Black Friday email campaign. 

5. Conduct competitor analysis.

Not all of your competitors are worth keeping an eye on. 

However, there’s no shame in seeing what your most successful competitors are getting right and replicating their tactics.  

Milled.com is an excellent website for competitor analysis, as it collates all brand email campaigns in one place. 

Once you’ve found your competitor's best emails, pay particular attention to the type of content they’re using and what CTAs they’ve used. 

Identify the frequency of their newsletter, the times and days they sent their newsletters, the type of discounts they used etc. 

6. Consider what content you’ll use.

Content in all its guises (blog content, video content, infographics, tutorials etc.) is vital to your Black Friday email campaign’s success. 

Whatever type you choose for your emails, be honest in your marketing. 

As Klaviyo succinctly puts it, “Shoppers can smell fake marketing from a mile away.” 

Make sure all deals are easy to understand.  

Say so in the email if you’re offering a free product with a particular spend. 

Make all your offers exciting for new customers; a 1% off a £100 spend isn’t going to set the pulse racing as much as a 25% off discount that includes free shipping. 

7. Segment your sends.

You might have 10,000 email list subscribers, and you can bet every single one of those is a unique person at a different stage of their life. 

As a result, email segmentation is always a recommendation you should implement. 

Segmentation allows you to tweak your messaging to different subscribers based on whatever criteria are most important to you. 

For example, a clothes retailer might segment its list based on age, gender, and location. 

An online pet store might segment its subscriber list by the type of pets owned (dog, cat, bird etc.). 

It aims to ensure you’re sending relevant emails to the right people at the right time. 

After all, sending an email to a cat owner about a price reduction in bird food won’t get you any sales. 

Other segmentation ideas might be for VIP customers, where you send them early access to promotions. 

You might consider SMS opt-ins where you also provide early promotion access. 

Browse abandonment emails are growing in popularity and efficiency, so why not try sending your segmented customer list a custom gift guide based on what they viewed or what they didn’t buy? 

And what about last year’s loyal customers?  

Could you perhaps send them an early access promotional offer to reward their loyalty? 

8. Email Automation.

The beauty of email automation is that it works for you day and night and lets you focus on other parts of the business. 

To achieve this seamlessly, you should ensure you have a welcome cart email workflow that will offer incentives. 

Those incentives could include discount codes, free shipping incentives, early access to sales etc. 

Setting up your Cart Abandonment email workflow is also a good idea. 

Offer customers appealing incentives such as Free P&P, coupon codes, early access to new products etc. 

If you need some help in the lead-up to Black Friday, contact our expert digital marketing team by calling 028 9073 1190 or emailing us at info@thewebbureau.com.