Black Friday: It’s Go Time!
No, this isn’t a joke.
We know—it’s only July, and Black Friday isn’t until November 29.
But you can laugh all the way to the bank, if you prepare for shopping’s biggest day correctly.
Craving a slice of the $10 billion dollar pie? Yep—$10 billion. With a “b.” That’s how much shoppers are estimated to spend on Black Friday in 2024, up from $9.8 billion in 2023. And while it might not taste as good as a warm, gooey pecan pie, there’s no way anyone would turn down a piece of that.
So, pull up a chair, get cozy, and let our Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Jessica Levinson, walk you through how you can prepare to win BFCM by leveraging email and SMS as part of your multi-channel marketing strategy.
3 Months Before:
- Lock In Your Promotion: Black Friday is not the time to wing it. Review past performance, recent top-selling products, and your business goals to align your best possible offer, then confirm your website and supply chain are prepared to take on the task.
Stress test your site to ensure it can handle some TikTok star shouting out your promo, and ensure it’s optimized for speed and performance, so you can get folks from your PDP to purchase with as few clicks and in as little time as possible. There will be no shortage of deals from your competitors, so you want to make sure you don’t lose out on sales if prospects run out of patience.
Ensure you have enough of your most popular products in stock to fulfill a high volume quickly, and have a contingency plan in place if you sell out before you intend to. Email and SMS can be crucial pieces of this strategy due to the real-time communication they offer. Be sure to set up a Low Inventory automation to really layer on the urgency, or leverage a Back-In-Stock flow for any products that sell out ahead of or during BFCM.
- Drive List Growth: Savvy shoppers know that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are on the horizon—not just businesses. Given this, it’s not uncommon to see softness in Q3 as shoppers wait for those big deals in Q4. But laying the groundwork now can pay off big time in just a few short weeks.
Stay ahead of rising CPMs on social media—thanks to both Black Friday and Election Day—and grow your list early with a little help from your paid and organic marketing channels. Then leverage email and SMS to retarget those subscribers when your deals go live.
Use your email or SMS platform to create a landing page and trade opt-ins for email and SMS marketing for exclusive early access to your Black Friday sale or another juicy incentive, like an exclusive promotion just for your subscribers.
- Don’t Freak Out: Overwhelmed already? 😉 It’s a good thing this is what we do (and we do it really well—like multiple-award-winning, millions-upon-millions-in-revenue well). If you need some help ahead of Black Friday, we can make it happen. Get in touch and let’s get to work.
2 Months Before:
- Audit Your Email & SMS Programs: When you’re close to a brand, it’s hard to envision how things look from the outside. When’s the last time you put yourself in your customer’s shoes? Create a burner email address, open an incognito browser, and head to your site. Sign up for email and SMS and see what happens next.
What does that journey look like? How quickly are your Welcome automations firing? Were they received? Did the content match the offer on-site? If you come back to the site in a day or two and add something to your cart then leave the site, are you retargeted? What if you just view products and leave? Does the journey look different during November than it does during a period of time when you’re not offering your biggest deal of the year?
Deep dive into your email and SMS automations and ensure core flows are in place, firing correctly, and landing in your inbox. Look at your campaign cadence and how that overlaps with your automations, too. Are you communicating too much? Not enough? Is the messaging correct for the goals you’re trying to achieve? Better yet, does the content as a whole meet the needs of your subscribers? Are people even getting your emails?
Aim to optimize absolutely everything—your segmentation, your sending cadence across your campaigns and automations, your creative—ahead of Black Friday to provide the most beneficial experience for your subscribers, and to keep your email deliverability and sender reputation in good standing ahead of the most critical time of the year.
- Re-engage Dormant Subscribers: Not everyone who is on your email or SMS list is going to engage with your brand forever—or stay on those lists forever either. However, it’s common knowledge that it costs less to retain a customer than it does to acquire a new one. So, if there was ever a time to get them to come back and engage, it’s ahead of Black Friday and your best promotion of the year.
Given how inundated with messaging they’ll be on the day itself, it’s best to reach out a bit further in advance and attempt to win them back, so you’re not just another unread message being sent to their Trash folder on 11/29.
Look to your email and SMS platforms and the zero- and first-party data available within them to identify high-value targets to re-engage using RFM analysis—recency, frequency, and monetization metrics. Then, use a multi-channel approach to retarget these subscribers across email and SMS—and even paid media, if you have room in your budget.
PS: This is also a great time to clean your list of low-value subscribers, like those who have hard bounced or have never engaged with your emails or SMS messages—or those who don’t re-engage during this winback period. It’ll not only help with your list health, but it can help keep your costs down, too, on some ESPs and SMS platforms.
1 Month Before:
- Confirm Your Calendar & Targeting: This is where the fun really begins.
Dig into your performance data from last Black Friday and identify what worked and what didn’t, then pair that with your recent peak times for opens, clicks, and conversions across your lifecycle and retention marketing channels to inform how often and when you should be communicating with your subscribers on email and SMS.
Keep in mind that different subscribers can and will tolerate different frequencies. Look at each subscriber’s level of engagement, preferred marketing channel, purchase history, CLTV, and more to identify levels of intent and craft corresponding personas and targeting strategies accordingly.
You don’t want to over-communicate with a low-intent subscriber or under-communicate with a high-intent one, and you certainly don’t want to speak to both the same, or at the same frequency. - Launch Your (Early!) Sale: Shoppers can’t wait for the big day and if they’re on your email or SMS list, they shouldn’t have to. With more and more retailers beginning their Black Friday promotions right after Halloween, it’s not uncommon to see “Black Friday Preview” or “Early Black Friday” splashed across e-commerce websites and social media.
If going wide with launching that early doesn’t feel right for your brand, you can still get in on the action with email and SMS. Roll out the red carpet and make your subscribers feel like VIPs with early access to your sale with an exclusive code, or layer in several smaller promotions, like single-item discounts or gifts with purchase ahead of the big day.
If someone is giving you their email address and phone number and all of the high-value data that comes with it, you should look to reward them appropriately for doing so, and there’s no better time than during BFCM, when they’re already keen to shop.
Week of Black Friday:
- Check Your Work, Then Check It Again: Before the “Turkey 5” kicks off and you toss your bird in the oven, ensure everything is set and scheduled—then check it again.
Check your popups and other opt-in sources and ensure they’re feeding into your email and SMS platforms correctly. Run through your email and SMS automations from start to finish and ensure timing delays, filters, and triggers are set and working correctly. Check the segmentation in your campaigns, your campaign content, and send times—and, most importantly, don’t forget to hit “Schedule.”
Then, as things start to roll out, check in on your deliverability, engagement, and conversion metrics across email and SMS. Quick pivots might be needed, and a backup plan should be at the ready (hint, hint: see the Low Inventory and Back-In-Stock automation callout above and the “Be Ready for Anything” section below). - Be Ready for Anything: One of the best things about email and SMS is how quickly you can use the platforms to pivot.
Is there a site glitch happening? Not hitting your sales numbers and don’t have a fully designed email at the ready to layer in urgency at the end of your sale? Want to extend your sale on a whim?
You can leverage plain-text email campaigns or SMS campaigns, if and when you need a little extra push. They come together in minutes, not hours or days, and can be hugely impactful for driving conversions and getting your subscribers the information they need at a moment’s notice.
Day of Black Friday:
- Panic: Just kidding.
- Cash In: Not kidding.
Ready to craft your winning BFCM strategy on Email and SMS? This is just the beginning. Let’s talk.