How to Launch a Successful Black Friday Marketing Campaign

How create a successful Black Friday marketing campaign

1. Create campaign goals

Creating goals will prove easy once you analyze last year’s campaign results. Here are the three things you need to pay attention to:

• Traffic. Where did it come from?
• Conversion. What was the reason behind it?
• Other campaigns. Check how email traffic compared to alternative campaigns (for example paid search)

There’s another thing you need to ponder upon (especially if you can’t answer beforementioned questions because it’s your first campaign) is:

• Trends. How can I utilize current trends to my advantage?

2. Optimize for mobile

76 percent of Black Friday emails were opened on a mobile device.

Now that you have your goals established, you need to take care of the technical side of things. Is your newsletter optimized for mobile? There’s no successful Black Friday marketing campaign without responsive design.

Please note: don’t confuse optimized for mobile with mobile-friendly, as the latter won’t display everything perfectly. Mobile friendly emails aren’t able to adjust fonts or layouts, which doesn’t translate into a good reading experience. After all, you don’t want your subscriber to delete your newsletter, because it wasn’t displayed properly.

3. Add a Killer Subject Line

Let’s face it: you won’t be the only one who will send out Black Friday emails. The thing is that many customers judge the book by its cover (or judge the newsletter by its subject line).

With the rise of emoji in social media, you can safely place an emoji or two in the subject line. Many brands still fail to include them, so it’s your chance to stand out and consequently, launch a successful Black Friday marketing campaign. Beneath you’ll find some sample emojis. Just make sure they match your company and the theme of your newsletter.

However, if you’re hungry for more, check out this blog post to find more inspiration.

10 most popular emojis on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in 2016.

If you aren’t sure which subject line will incentivize your customers to click, go for multivariate A/B testing. This feature enables you to test up to three subject lines (as well as from name and newsletter content). Send an A/B email to, let’s say 30 percent of your customers. Once the newsletter software analyzes the open rate and CTR, it will automatically send the best performing variant to the rest of your email list. Learn more about multivariate A/B testing here.

4. Send Out a Black Friday Template

You might be tempted to tweak your current newsletter template, but going for a ready-made holiday template isn’t time consuming and it will come across better. If you’d like to get a free Black Friday template, simply click here.

5. Set up Reminders

Time pressure motivates a lot of us. Some of your subscribers might be in two minds about a certain product, so make sure that you create a segmented list of contacts who haven’t purchased anything on the sale day. Then, send a gentle reminder about limited time-offers. Make sure your newsletter features beautiful images that will help you sell.

If you’re afraid that it takes too much time to copy and paste product information as well as the formatting itself, use the 1 click product transfer feature. It will allow you to transfer all product information (images, information, price etc.) into your newsletter. Plus it will take care of the formatting. Learn more about 1 click product transfer here.

6. Send out Abandoned Cart Emails

While some subscribers might be undecided about making a purchase, others might start adding products to their basket… and never make a purchase. Most likely something urgent interrupted shopping, and then your products are forgotten. Therefore, you can send out abandoned cart emails to gently remind your customers about abandoned items. Here you can learn more about automated newsletters.

7. Recommend Products

People love if you help them save time. Check out subscriber’s purchase history to craft tailored newsletters so that they don’t need to spend hours checking out different products. Tailored newsletters are key to success in any case, especially when it comes to a creating successful Black Friday marketing campaign.