By late summer most retailers are already underway with their Black Friday plans. This year is no exception…
It’s likely that the focus will still remain online rather than in the shops as more of the UK population has ordered online since the pandemic. Online allows retailers to showcase products earlier in the day and out of hours, and for trigger happy consumers to browse hundreds of potential purchases right from their own home prompting immediate bargain hunting even before breakfast.
It’s the perfect relationship. Black Friday started offline, but was really made for online.
Back to this early planning thought though… While we look at the calendar and think about just how many times and how many different ways we can contact our customers over that weekend, we can in fact forget about what we normally put in front of our customers and prospects.
By this I mean all the automated journeys previously set up, running alongside business as usual, working hard and generating the most satisfactory conversion rates and revenues for your brand.
However, are they still applicable in the same format during this popular purchase period when all you want to do as a marketeer is scream SALE, SALE, SALE! BUY, BUY, BUY!
The answer of course, is yes, and there are plenty of ways you can optimise these campaigns to fit in with your bigger Black Friday plan.
Timing and campaign set up
Think about the frequency or time you send your automated messages to ensure they match the shorter sale cycle and changing customer behaviour over the Black Friday period.
Increase the frequency of all abandonment campaigns.
Competition is rife, especially during Black Friday. Consumer habits are thwarted by instant gratification. Maybe a quick check elsewhere to see if they could find a better deal?
Normal browsing behaviour is intense and condensed into a shorter timeframe so your automated comms, especially your abandoned content needs to follow a shorter automated journey to bring them back to your site to guarantee that purchase.
Implement an abandoned site email
One of the best ways to get your engaged customers returning to site without them adding to basket or viewing a specific product.
Apply follow ups where these are missing
Follow up messages can drastically increase your conversion rates. Such an increase for so little effort. 30% of abandonment revenues come from follow up comms.
Review delivery rules for this period, adjust or remove them completely in some case?
Ask yourself, does the priority still apply during the Black Friday weekend? Is it still important that a customer only receives one email a day?
Have you previously set their expectation and asked the customer if they want to partake in Black Friday marketing? Some will love it, some will not.
Ways to elevate your automated campaigns to make them stand out in the inbox
Use interactive content
Such as countdowns to delivery cut offs, maps for click and collect and carousels to showcase more products and promote more interaction with your campaign.
Video can increase engagement and conversion rates by a whopping 80%. If a picture says a thousand words then video says a million?
Use dynamic content everywhere to further personalise all automations with browsing and basket content
Change the menu header according to browsing activity. Make every inch of content count. Mix and match but make it relevant to each individual. Don’t forget your transactional and service emails with this in mind too.
If your platform can support the function you can dynamically include or exclude marketing content into your service messages depending on the individual’s permission.
With open rates of around 50% the transactional channel is definitely not to be ignored and presents a great opportunity.
Add in review content
80% of your customers think that customer experience is as important as the actual products that are sold.
Good feedback deserves talking about therefore so feature this in all prominent automations before Black Friday hits.
RedEye has a fantastic integration with Trustpilot whereby clients can ask their customers for individual personalised feedback post purchase dynamically from any email campaign.
Add social proofing
Using integrations such as Taggstar in your automated campaigns can also bring in a sense of urgency and social approval.
Presenting the consumer with ‘98 people are looking at this now’ or ‘56 bought in the last hour’ can encourage sales and reaffirm good purchase taste in the buyers’ minds.
Get creative with subject lines
To mention BF or not to mention BF that is the question? Get creative and add in humour. ‘Oh no, not another Black Friday email!’
Expanding your the reach of your automated journeys
Automate a multi-channel approach
SMS can create an immediate response for example. When the offers clock is ticking its important to message the customer base via as many channels as possible for max reach.
Adopting a multi-channel approach you can be sure to increase conversion by at least 7%.
Implement a dedicated short term customer journey for all new sign ups during this period
Do everything you normally do for a new customer, but do it in a 1/3 of the time. Introduce the brand, nurture the new sign up as quickly as possible to get them on board and purchase a first and a second time.
We hope several of the above ideas will spice up your automated journeys this Black Friday. No reason you can’t make them work harder for you and optimise the full opportunity this Black Friday and into the New Year.
