Surefire Strategies to Improve Black Friday Email Marketing

Every year, seasonal events create key opportunities for marketers who can capitalise on surges in demand to sell their products or services to an engaged, excited audience.

Black Friday is one of the most significant events for marketers who work in the digital space. It drives sharp rises in online spending, and its popularity shows no signs of slowing down. In 2023, Black Friday spending in the UK reached an estimated £13.3 billion— up 7.3% year on year.

Such a significant spike in online sales presents a golden opportunity for marketers. The rewards can be substantial for those who can rise above their competitors to capture the surge of seasonal interest.

Marketers need to prepare for more than Black Friday; they need a strategy that helps them stand out from the competition and win audience attention during seasonal events relevant to their products or services.

During these busy periods, email marketing provides a direct route to cutting through the noise and connecting directly with your customers to capitalise on their seasonal excitement.

Read on to learn our favourite Black Friday email marketing strategies, which could also be applied to other popular seasonal events like Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

In this guide:

• How to market with empathy to avoid alienating users
• Experiment with new email campaign features
• Is it time to use AI?
• Better campaign timing to maximise engagement
• Tailoring unique subject lines
• Implement better personalisation to connect to customers
• Test urgency-led messaging ahead of the big day
• Recapture that all-important abandoned basket

Black Friday has only been a ‘thing’ in the UK since 2010. Since then, the techniques and technologies associated with email marketing have come on leaps and bounds. You're probably missing out on some key opportunities if you’re still using outdated email concepts for your Black Friday campaigns. 

In terms of ecommerce, new advancements in email marketing provide exciting capabilities such as:

• Create enticing product carousels within the body of your email. This allows you to showcase a range of items and clear pricing/discount details all within a single user interaction.
• Provide additional purchase support through sizing charts or style guides, which a user can interact with directly in the email to select the appropriate product and be taken straight to a checkout. 
• One-click purchasing enables customers to buy your products in a single click. This requires some additional integration but with the right support, you can minimise friction and maximise the value of a customer’s Black Friday excitement by allowing them to purchase in one simple step. 
• Dynamic pricing allows you to configure personalised discounts or promotions based on your customer profiles or segments. For example, you can offer increased discounts for lapsing customers to try and win them back – but also protect profitability elsewhere by not advertising the same discount to regular customers. 

Even trying just one of these techniques helps you stand out and appear more personal and engaged with your audience. However, they rely on correctly setting up the technical steps so your campaigns don’t go out riddled with errors or broken elements. 

To make sure you get things right from the start, work with Jarrang. Our team will help you explore the more technical aspects of email marketing in a way that perfectly integrates with your existing technology and team. 

Once an experimental idea in the realm of Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached a maturity level that every marketer must pay attention to. Trained in vast quantities of data, AI can understand, interpret, and replicate human behaviour and output text, imagery, and other types of content. 

For seasonal marketing, utilising AI can offer a few key benefits depending on how you implement it. 

• AI can be used to help create designs or content, saving your team time and allowing them to focus their expertise where it matters. 
• You can use AI to analyse existing campaign activity and output recommendations or insights to find better times to send content or spot topics or language that resonate with your audience.  
• Predictive AI can help you identify key opportunities in any given moment, with analysis based on customer behaviour and speeding patterns. This allows you to focus your investment and effort where it matters most. 

Most businesses are still only just getting to grips with AI integration. If you can embrace the opportunities it presents and navigate the best ways to incorporate it with your email marketing, you’re poised to reap the rewards ahead of the biggest sales seasons in your calendar year. 

We don’t have to point out that Black Friday is a hectic time for inboxes. And before we even get into what to include in your emails, you need to encourage recipients to open them.

47% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. Subject lines should never be an afterthought—you should create them for every campaign and personalise them where possible.

To make subject lines more engaging, practice some of these tips:

• Keep your subject lines short and snappy. 40-50 characters is more than enough
• Experiment with relevant emojis to add some character to your subject lines, but don’t stuff them in, or it will turn customers away
• Be human and write lines that appeal to emotion, interest or needs
• Try asking questions to engage users better
• You can experiment with being controversial or use subject lines that emphasise urgency/scarcity. However, you need to approach this carefully to avoid alienating your audience. Skip to ‘be cautious with urgency’ to learn more. 
• Use preheader text to clarify any ambiguity in subject lines 
• Experiment with sentence and title case to see which your audience prefers. 

• Try a variety of ‘styles’ like the examples below:

  Urgent

• 1 Week To Go! Don’t Miss Out On Black Friday Deals

• Sale Live! Grab Black Friday Bargains For 24 Hours

  Personal 

• Dave, It’s Your Time To Shine

• Rachel, A Big Thanks From Us For Subscribing. 

  Controversial

• Black Friday Sucks. Here’s Our Better Alternative

• Hate Christmas? Bet You’ll LOVE this. 

  Questions

• Ever Wanted More For Less? Us Too!
• How Do You Feel About Saving Money? 

Remember that brands can use emojis to make their emails immediately eye-catching. They can promote specific offers and discounts to whet recipients’ appetites. Or they can use humour and controversy to offer something a little different to the other Black Friday emails. 

However, the biggest tip for subject lines is to ensure you test variants ahead of your big seasonal campaign. If you notice that your audience is more receptive to a certain style, try to emulate that when the seasonal event rolls around. 

Practice personalisation 

Engagement is key for all email campaigns – but it’s especially important during busy seasonal periods when people are receiving marketing from all your competitors. If you can engage with them personally, you’re more likely to win their custom. 

Before thinking about personalising the content of an email, work on improving your audience management processes. You should be actively pruning and segmenting lists so every contact is grouped into valuable categories.

For example, an ecommerce brand could split campaigns by gender to market specific products to the relevant audience. That’s just a basic example – segmentation allows you to go far more personalised and build lists around certain product trends or preferences. 

To make the most of your email real estate, ensure that as many elements are as tailored and personalised as possible– from subject line to product suggestions, and even local store recommendations. 

This doesn’t have to be a big job as long as your data is in order. By utilising dynamic content, you can create one email which dynamically populates based on the individual’s demographic, behavioural, and purchase data. 

For example, if a recipient has recently browsed handbags, businesses can send emails dynamically populated with the best Black Friday cross promotions on matching outfits or accessories. 

Even if your seasonal campaign does all the work it needs to and you pull in loads of new customers, you may find yourself falling at the first hurdle due to abandoned baskets. 

Abandoned baskets are a problem for retailers. 69.57% of online baskets are abandoned, which equates to roughly 70 out of every 100 customers leaving without purchasing.

And there are many reasons why consumers add items to their basket but never purchase. They may have forgotten, found a better deal, have uncertainties, or they may not trust your brand.

Some of these issues can be addressed by sending abandoned basket reminder emails – but others may take some internal reflection and development. Is your website reflective of your campaign content? Can customers complete a checkout journey without much friction? If they can’t, no email will fix the problem – you need to address it on your site. 

When you ARE confident there’s nothing wrong with your site and customers may have genuinely forgotten to complete their purchase, abandoned basket reminders can be useful. To really make an impact, the emails should include the product’s details and benefits, key information such as delivery times and contact information, and even positive reviews from other happy customers.