The holiday season guarantees massive opportunities for ecommerce business owners—and how you prepare for Black Friday can significantly affect your revenue. For many ecommerce businesses, Black Friday is the biggest retail sales event of the year. As a result, there’s fierce competition for consumers’ attention and money, and November leads to saturated consumers’ inboxes full of marketing messages. This is where email and SMS subscribers' high rate of engagement and awareness can help you set your brand apart from your competitors. However, you must start early to benefit from Black Friday. That’s because many brands start their Black Friday campaigns earlier each year, so consumers are always ready to spend. So if you start your Black Friday campaigns late, you’ll miss massive opportunities to generate more sales.If you’re searching for ways to capture consumers’ attention, the suggestions and tips below can help you leverage your email and SMS subscribers to reap maximum benefits this Black Friday.
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Why Is Black Friday Important?
Taking advantage of Black Friday can help you boost web traffic and sales. Let’s look at some crucial statistics:
- In 2021, approximately 155 million Americans made purchases on Black Friday, causing retail sales to increase by 14.1% to 886.7 billion.
- In 2021, consumers spent $8.9 billion on Black Friday and $5.14 billion on Thanksgiving, which was a 0.63% decline from 2020.
- Online sales have increased from $1.93 billion to $8.9 billion from 2013 to 2021.
- Across all industries, the average email open rate is 18%, and the click-through rate averages 2.6%. But during Black Friday, cart abandonment emails have an open rate of 34% and a click-through rate of 9%.
This Black Friday will be lucrative for online businesses because consumers will favor online shopping over in-store purchases. There’s a crucial, time-sensitive need for a Black Friday email and SMS marketing strategy that targets your existing customers with the right incentives.
How to Boost Black Friday Sales By Leveraging Email Subscribers?
1. Expand Your Email Lists
Before you email your subscribers, invest time in expanding your email list. This will benefit your overall email marketing strategy, helping you increase your holiday sales and revenue.To boost your email list, follow some popular list-building practices, but be sure to tailor them to Black Friday. For instance, leverage your online form builder to create pop-ups with Black Friday offers to boost your lead generation. To create a compelling Black Friday email copy, you need the following:
- A headline that emphasizes the benefits of signing up for your email newsletters.
- High-quality visuals to make your pop-ups more appealing.
- A clear CTA to capture your audience’s attention, encouraging them to take the desired action.
Also, create a Black Friday landing page with fantastic offers that’ll encourage your web visitors to give out their email addresses. Remember to provide value to your target audience using relevant email copy, high-quality images, and a newsletter signup form that’s easy to fill out.
2. Find Out What Your Email Subscribers Want
Black Friday offers the perfect opportunity to sell various products left in your stock. However, just because these products are in your warehouse doesn’t mean you should start advertising them through your email messages.Before you plan out your email messaging, you must determine what your target customers want. Next, you'll need to track online consumer behaviors, create email surveys for subscribers, and monitor purchasing trends during the holiday shopping season. Determining the most popular items during the holiday shopping season can also help you deliver Black Friday offers that interest your target audience. Plus, that can help you create compelling Black Friday email campaigns to direct your target audience to your online store or retail web pages.
3. Send Early-Access “VIP” Emails
Don’t forget that your email subscribers are your brand’s VIPs. Give them the first dibs at your best offers, information, and the first spot at everything involving limited discounts and offers.For many online marketers, it’s daunting to make this mental switch because they don’t think their email subscribers are “special,” especially when they have a massive email list. But you need to understand that a customer who has given you their email address is more valuable than a web visitor just visiting your site. A great way to understand this is to look at retargeting advertisements. If you wish to retarget a potential customer who has visited your site but hasn’t given out their email address, you have to spend money to promote a deal to them. But marketing the same deal to your email subscribers costs nothing.To incorporate the VIP early access trick in your Black Friday email campaigns, you only need to create an email campaign where you offer your email subscribers an early access link where they can view your Black Friday deals ahead of time. This is a great way to let your customers know you value their ongoing support. In addition, giving your email subscribers early access to exclusive deals and promotions can help reward loyal customers, helping you get Black Friday sales into the air.
How to Leverage SMS Subscribers to Prepare for Black Friday
Mobile commerce is becoming increasingly popular. Adobe reports that 43% of online sales for the holiday shopping season in 2021 were made from mobile devices. Today, mobile devices are a fundamental part of how consumers shop. So, reaching consumers through SMS marketing creates a sense of urgency around holiday sales. Also, research shows that nearly 37% of Americans prefer to get brand communications via text messages. These numbers are higher for young generations—43% of Gen Z and 45% of millennials prefer text messages from brands. Why? SMS marketing is about strengthening connections with your most engaged audience segments and offering them early access to deals and discounts. In addition, because we often check our text messages once we receive them, texts are the best way to send urgent Black Friday offers and promotions. Here are three best practices to help you leverage SMS subscribers to prepare for Black Friday:
1. Create SMS Subscriber Lists Early
Building your SMS subscriber lists must be a top priority. No matter how successful your Black Friday SMS marketing strategy is, your marketing efforts will bear no fruit without a solid list of SMS subscribers.To prepare for Black Friday, you’ll need to establish a solid SMS program focusing on SMS list growth. It will help you build stronger connections with your subscribers before Black Friday. That includes creating a functional welcome series to welcome new subscribers to your SMS list while highlighting the benefits they’ll gain. In addition, these SMS marketing strategies will help you improve conversions and sales during Black Friday as online traffic skyrockets.
2. Personalize Your SMS Campaigns
Effective SMS marketing campaigns deliver valuable content to individual customers at the right time, making segmentation crucial. Fortunately, you can quickly personalize SMS messages through dynamic predictive segmentation based on various actions your target customers are likely to take.Various actions you can track include “placed order,” “started checkout,” or “viewed item.” Using this data, you can create triggered automation like cart abandonment, product review, browse abandonment, win-back, and post-purchase workflows. This allows you to engage quickly with your SMS subscribers depending on how they interact with your ecommerce store, automatically sending them abandoned carts and post-purchase texts.
3. Segment SMS Subscribers
Segmentation gives you a better understanding of your SMS subscribers, allowing you to send tailored messages. However, because SMS messages are sometimes more invasive than email messages, it’s good not to send texts often. Instead, build upon your SMS list of subscribers by focusing mainly on consumer behavior and engagement.Drafting SMS segments allows you to personalize your Black Friday SMS copy to the right customers and avoid losing subscribers. To do that, create an engaged SMS segment to target subscribers who interact with your content frequently. This may include those who subscribed to your SMS list or interacted with your content within the last month. In addition, it ensures you only send text messages to those who want to receive your content. If you use email and SMS, some subscribers may prefer one communication medium over the other. Depending on your subscribers' behaviors, you can segment subscribers who engage with your SMS messages regularly and haven’t engaged with your emails and send them a customized message. For example, because most Black Friday deals are time-limited, ensure you leverage SMS to ensure these subscribers get your Black Friday deals.
Ready to Reap Maximum Benefits This Black Friday?
The shift to online purchases is changing how consumers view Black Friday sales. As we move away from long queues and crowded physical stores during Black Friday, consumers look for holiday deals earlier than ever. By leveraging email and SMS subscribers, you can deliver personalized shopping experiences and reach your target audience at the right time with the right messages. So if you’re just starting with email and SMS marketing or looking to double down on these marketing channels this holiday shopping season, now is the time to do your homework and prepare for Black Friday sales. Schedule a customized strategy call to learn how our experienced conversion experts can help you build and maintain your SMS and email subscriber lists.