BFCM Email Marketing Tips and Tricks

November Email Marketing Newsletter

Welcome to November, and to my brethren growing out their moustaches for charity this month, a very happy Movember to you!

Let’s face it, November is one of the busiest months for ecom owners. I like to think of this month as the ecom equivalent of a hell week.

There’s going to be sleepless nights, unexpected issues will arise, and your mental strength will undoubtedly be put to the test.

But, just like with any hell week, at the end of this month is a nice reward, aka that juicy boost in revenue from BFCM.

In order to become a well-trained ecom warrior, what can be done to prep for this month?

Here’s a few tips to set you up for your best BFCM ever.

Ideas To Implement This Month:

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Adjust Your Flows:

When you have a big sale like this, make sure your flows reflect the wording of your sale and push the urgency factor.

Your standard “10% off abandoned cart email” just won’t cut it when you’re having a sitewide 30% off sale.

Here’s the easiest and most efficient way to do this:

Clone your abandoned cart/browse abandonment/welcome flows.

Adjust the wording of these new flows to talk about Black Friday and mention any codes or order deadlines. I also like to cut down on the delays between emails to target the customer more frequently.

Then when it’s time for your sale to kick off, pause your other flows and activate these new ones.

Once BFCM is over, you can switch back to your original ones (but save the updated ones for future sales)!

The Same Goes For Your PopUps:

Don’t forget about these! I like to keep the focus of the popups on the sale and keep the customer on the site (instead of directing them to their inbox to get a discount code).

You can still have your popups enabled to continue to collect phone numbers/emails, but at the end screen direct them to start shopping with their discount.

Make sure you update the list that this popup will flow into, and direct it to the new Black Friday welcome series you created!

The Power Of The Resend:

Resending emails is a good practice to get into, especially when it comes to any big announcement or special promo that you’re running. Coming up with multiple email campaigns over the course of BFCM can be a daunting task, especially with everything else you’ll be focusing on.

After you send out your initial email, clone it and create 2 variations to send later that day/the following day.

Clone #1 - Non Openers: Update your subject line with a completely new theme. If your first one was “Black Friday Starts NOW”, put a different spin on this one with something like “Make sure you don’t miss this {{ first_name }}” or “Get hero product name for the lowest price ever”

Clone #2 - Opened, Didn’t Purchase: In this email, you’ll need to take a step back. They opened, maybe even clicked your email, but they didn’t make a purchase… what stopped them? Try to think of another angle other than “we’re having a sale” to get them to convert. Did you recently launch some new products, is stock low, is the sale ending soon, can you ship the same day, is there a free gift with their order? Take any of those value props, and include them in that next email to try to win them over.

Subject Line Winners:

One of the easiest A/B tests to set up is a subject line test. If you want to learn more about the strategies we use here at OMG Commerce, listen to this episode of eCommerce Evolution where Brett & I took a deep dive into the topic.

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Here are a few of the subjects we tested out in October and how you can apply them to your emails.

*The / in the subject lines is the break between the subject line and preview text

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#1 - Car Accessory Brand

A.) Join Our Facebook Group

B.) You’re Invited

B was our winner! That variation also had a higher percentage of clicks. Their curiosity was piqued when they say that they were invited to something. They had to know what that something was, so they opened the email to find out.

#2 - Beauty Brand

A.) 17-Free Formulation | Beautiful Nails Without Compromise / Vegan and cruelty-free nail polish

B.) What makes our nail polish special? / 17-Free Formulation | Vegan | Cruelty-Free

B was the winner for this campaign! I like to ask questions, including in the subject lines. Something like “Wait, the Ravens won by how much?!” is much more clickable than “The Ravens beat the Buccaneers 27-22 last night”.

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From a readability standpoint, breaking up quick points with the “|” makes it faster for your customer to digest.

#3  - Holiday Gifts Brand

This test was slightly different from the others you’ve read so far. We were trying out some different sender names to see if the customers responded better to one or the other.

A.) Sender Name = Brand

B.) Sender Name = Owner @ Brand

A was actually our winner here! I would have thought differently, which is why we test things out! 

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Try this out for your brand, I think the results will vary based on how forward facing the owner is. If it was an email from “Twitter” versus “Elon @ Twitter”, those results could have been very different.