Good Morning and Happy Thanksgiving email marketers! I hope this blog finds you happy and healthy and about to spend some quality time with family & friends! While Thanksgiving day is a holiday filled with eating, watching football and catching up with relatives, Friday has become a holiday in its own right. Black Friday has become famous, and in some instances infamous, for the amount of sales and discounts offered by retailers to consumers.
So how do email marketers take advantage of this worldwide sales push? Just like eating Thanksgiving dinner, it involves a bit of restraint and tact. You do not want to bombard your loyal customers with a cluttered email inbox. Instead, you want to make sure that your best sales and deals are presented to them in an organic way.
After over 5 years in the email marketing industry, I have compiled a list of Pros and Cons to special Holiday sales and would love to share what I have learned with you.
Pros:
A Nice Holiday sales boost
If you have been in the email marketing industry long enough, you know that the end of the year can often be a downtime in terms of ecomm sales. People are busier with the holidays and are often purchasing for others instead of themselves. Having a sale centered around a holiday like Black Friday allows your company to pick up a few extra sales that they might not have gotten sending their normal evergreen offers. Since people during this time of year are often shopping for others, adjust your email and sales copy to focus on your customers’ friends and loved ones! Capitalizing on the “gift giving mode” consumers are in during this time can help bring in some extra revenue for your business.
Cross Promotion of your full line of products
If you are like many businesses that have multiple product offerings, this time of year is a great time to expose your customers to your entire line of products. They may have only purchased 1 product from you in the past, but directing them to a sales page with your full line of offerings can help display all that you have to offer.
Building a deeper bond with your customer base
By offering discounts to your most loyal customers, you can help build that trust that is so important in our industry. When you target your best customers with deals on products they are already purchasing from you, you build up your brand reputation in their mind which will hopefully pay dividends when it comes time for them to make a purchase down the road.
Cons:
Inbox Clutter
Since Black Friday has become a global phenomenon, it is safe to assume that a majority of your competitors (and retailers in general) will try to maximize sales on this holiday. That means that your customer base might have an inbox full of offers and deals to pick from. To help your message stand out, it might be most prudent to send emails early in the morning or later at night. Some marketers have even waited until the Saturday or Sunday after Black Friday to send their sales emails. This can help distance your offers from the others that your customers may be inundated with.
Decline in Email Reputation
If you send emails that are pushy in nature, you run the risk of lowering your reputation amongst your IPs and domains. During this time, people are more likely to send messages to spam that they feel are coercive or disingenuous so you must consider this when writing your email copy. The increase in sales you might receive isn't worth the loss of reputation in the long run, so make sure you are clearly communicating your offers to your audience.
While different businesses handle their Black Friday sales differently, I believe it is very important to learn from others as well as yourself. Black Friday happens every year, so continue to fine tune your sends on this shopping holiday until you find a formula that works for you and your customers. The biggest upside to this is that you can always reuse winning copy and offers when Black Friday comes around the next year.