It’s not even Halloween yet and I’m already seeing Christmas items on display at retail stores. This got me thinking, when do most people start shopping for the holidays? It turns out about 29% of shoppers start their holiday shopping before Halloween. With that thought in mind and knowing that Halloween is just a couple of weeks away, if you haven’t already, it’s time to start planning for Black Friday.
But where to start? Here are 3 quick tips to help with Black Friday success:
Design For Mobile
The thought that Black Friday is a day for in-store shopping, while Cyber Monday is for online shopping is outdated. On Thanksgiving Day last year, mobile devices drove 52% of all US internet traffic and mobile traffic on Black Friday was just shy of 50%. Black Friday mobile sales accounted for 27.9% of total online sales (source).
Nearly two-thirds of Americans have smartphones and for many of those folks, their mobile device is the primary way they access the web (source). With so many people viewing emails and accessing the web on their mobile devices it is imperative that your site and emails are mobile responsive. This way, no matter if someone is viewing your information on a laptop, tablet or smartphone, they will easily be able to shop your site.
Ensure that you test your emails to be confident that they render appropriately across a variety of smartphones and tablets.
Same Day Remailing
Remailing is one of the cheapest and fastest ways to drive revenue. Remailing is simply sending the same message again, but with a different subject line. Typically remailing is done to non-openers of the original send and the remail is sent anywhere from 2-7 days later.
While I wouldn’t recommend same day remailing on just any day, Black Friday is a day where this makes a lot of sense. In order to stand out in the inbox, not only should you make sure your subject lines pop and your offers stand out, but you need to make sure that you stay at the top of the inbox. The inbox is about to get really noisy with all of the upcoming holiday promotions and your email could easily get missed simply because it’s buried under a ton of other promotions.
This is where same day remailing comes into play. Some retailers remail up to 10 times within one day on days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I think that’s quite aggressive. If you’ve never done same day remailing before, take a more conservative approach and send two or three times that day instead of 10.
For example, if you send at 6am, send again at noon and one more time at 6pm, but with each remail be sure that you segment out those that have already converted from an earlier send and change the subject line for each send to something that instills urgency. Ex:“Hurry, only X hours left for Black Friday deals”
Make Creative That Stands Out
Sure it’s Black Friday, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun and go colorful with your creative. One thing I notice in my inbox regularly with Black Friday promotions is that they are usually very heavy with the use of black and white. Here are a few examples from years past that highlight what I am referring to:
Think of ways you can celebrate the Black Friday theme without going all black and white.
Here’s a Black Friday email example from Too Faced Cosmetics that strays from the common black & white creative and would be more attention grabbing because of that.
Other ways to grab attention in the madness is to use animated gifs or include video in your emails. You’d simply have a screenshot of the video that when clicked would take the subscriber to the landing page with the video which would automatically begin playing. You can see here how American Signature Furniture incorporated video into their Black Friday promotions:
These are just three ideas that can help, but there are many, many tactics marketers use to get a leg up during Black Friday. What unique tactics have you been impressed with in past years?
Looking for even more ideas, sign up for a complimentary consultation with a WhatCounts strategist and learn about 45 campaigns you can send this holiday season to reap huge returns. Learn more here…
