BFCM 2024: AI-Powered Email Marketing Strategies for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Success

Discover ultimate email marketing strategies for BFCM 2024. Learn how to use AI to segment your customers, personalize recommendations and elicit repurchases, to boost sales this season.

Retentics

Nov 08, 2024

BFCM 2024: AI-Powered Email Marketing Strategies for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Success

Contents

1. Strategies to Plan Early Campaigns Start early, with emails featuring promo codes, exclusively for your loyal customers. 2. Leverage Your Most Loyal Customers during and after BFCM Before Black Friday, segment your customers for greater efficiency and maximum impact.3. After Black Friday, Retain Newly Acquired Customers 4. Steps to Optimize Your Email Formats What will be the CTA that will target your buyers?Operate email template A/B testing to find the best one for your brand Boost Your BFCM Sales with Effective Email Strategies

BFCM is coming. The hottest question we hear from DTC owners is: how should we send Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails to maximize sales? 🤷‍♂️

With the holiday season fast approaching, numerous brands are ramping up their preparations. Competition for discounts and product offerings will be fierce on the day itself. To stand out, it’s essential to develop strategies that will make your products the top choice for customers.

Based on our experience, here are the ultimate strategies for the upcoming BFCM season, which include: sending early emails with promo codes, leveraging your loyal customers during and after BFCM, retaining newly acquired customers, and finally optimizing your email formats. With this guide, you’ll be ready to make the most of the holiday season. 📝

1. Strategies to Plan Early Campaigns

Start early, with emails featuring promo codes, exclusively for your loyal customers.

For a successful Black Friday campaign, Retentics’ advice is to give early access to promo codes, to customers that are loyal to your brand, via early bird emails within a week ahead of Black Friday. The key is not necessarily to offer deeper discounts, but to give them notifications exclusively.

To break this down into two steps, you must first accurately identify your audience through customer segmentation; second, craft an impactful message for your teaser.

A. To begin with, here are tips for segmenting your customers:

📍First, if your brand utilizes loyalty programs, send tailored messages according to each tier.

📍Second, if you don’t, by segmenting your audience and by listing buyers who engage the most with your brand, identify your loyal audience.

Typically in e-commerce, loyal customers are defined by how much they spend within a specific period. Our team, however, strongly recommends scoping your customers’ entire purchase history to gain a more accurate picture of loyalty.

For instance, let’s consider a coffee brand comparing two customers: Customer A spends $40 on coffee each month for three years, while it is Customer B’s first three months using this brand, spending $150. If comparing these two customers’ recent activity for three months, Customer B may appear to be a relatively more valuable customer. But by looking at their full purchase history, it could be shortsighted to say so.

So with Retentics AI, we cluster our customer companies’ buyers using RFM analysis, which stands for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary, along with additional data on the number of product categories purchased. This enables us to more accurately analyze past data and identify your brand’s most loyal customers.

B. Now, let’s discuss what to offer in your teaser.

When targeting loyal customers, what should you offer in your teaser? Even if your messages don't always resonate, their loyalty to your brand remains. However, your results will be outstanding if your communications truly connect to them.

Based on our team’s experience with our customer companies, we’d like to suggest your messages be clear and genuine to your audience. Highlight how you view your loyal customers as VIPs, or you could develop a clear concept for your event that could set your brand apart from others.

2. Leverage Your Most Loyal Customers during and after BFCM

Before Black Friday, segment your customers for greater efficiency and maximum impact.

While it might feel tempting to send extra emails to every customer on your list during the promotion period starting from BFCM and follow-up events, it’s important to consider the resources required to maintain engagement with all customers. Moreover, repeated discount promotions can lose their impact once the initial rush of BFCM excitement is over.

Instead, Retentics recommends focusing on your most engaged customers, which is where customer segmentation comes in again. By segmenting your audience ahead of Black Friday, the first step is to identify customers who are highly engaged with your brand.

If you’re ready, here is how to leverage and engage your most loyal customers during and after BFCM:

A. During BFCM: offer a minimum order requirement

Loyal customers typically have a higher average order value (AOV). By identifying these customers before BFCM through segmentation, you can target them with special offers that encourage even larger purchases.

For example, during the promotion period, you could send them an email suggesting a minimum order requirement to unlock exclusive discount coupons. Since these customers are already inclined to spend more, this type of offer can entice them to make additional purchases, boosting both AOV and total revenue.

B. After BFCM: increase loyalty with exclusive post-promotion events

Once BFCM is over, it’s important to keep the momentum going with your most loyal customers. This segment should be prioritized with exclusive events or special promotions designed to deepen their loyalty.

For example, you could host a VIP event or offer a private sale for loyal customers, rewarding them with personalized coupons or early access to new products. By showing appreciation to this core group, you reinforce their relationship with your brand, turning them into long-term advocates.

3. After Black Friday, Retain Newly Acquired Customers

During the promotion period, your brand likely experienced a significant influx of new customers acquired through performance marketing. Even if you've provided them with an exceptional buying experience, the work doesn’t stop there. To maximize retention after Black Friday, it’s crucial to develop an email strategy that keeps these newly acquired customers engaged with your brand.

From our experience, one of the biggest challenges for e-commerce brands is ensuring that first-time customers make repeat purchases. This is because these first-time buyers often represent the largest segment of the total customer base of the brand, making them critical not only for driving revenue but also for gathering valuable data and optimizing flows.

Klaviyo offers a basic flow, the First Purchase Bounce Back Flow, designed to target these one-time buyers and encourage them to make repeat purchases. It’s one of the most commonly used flows for this purpose.

Despite this popularity, many brands still struggle with retaining first-time buyers. Why is that? 🤔

When we first spoke with some of our customers, many believed their email flows were performing well with Klaviyo’s default setup. But what was important was to take a close examination into the logic of the flows, where our team found ways to optimize and unveil revenue that could be easily missed by Klaviyo’s.

Klaviyo’s approach to addressing this issue has a serious drawback: automated emails targeting first-time buyers are sent immediately after the initial purchase, recommending additional purchases.

Klaviyo’s basic FPBB Flow, sending emails immediately after the first purchase

This can overwhelm recipients, leading to disengagement rather than encouraging repeat purchases.

What Retentics did differently was incorporate our own predictive logic to forecast when each buyer is most likely to make their next purchase and send tailored emails at that optimal time. With these expected purchase timings provided by Retentics AI, based on each product and each brand’s business traits, our customers could utilize a more optimized flow to better fit the specific patterns of their buyers.

Retentics’ FPBB Flow with the date trigger from Retentics AI

4. Steps to Optimize Your Email Formats

What will be the CTA that will target your buyers?

In your email, a call to action (CTA) is the prompt encouraging users to take a specific action such as moving to the purchase page.

While Klaviyo’s email formats are user-friendly, their designs can be uniform. During the busy Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, when your email recipients receive a myriad of messages, you need strategies to optimize your email format to make them more compelling and engaging. This is why as Black Friday arrives, it’s crucial to think creatively about enhancing your customers’ purchasing experience.

Our suggestion is to tailor your CTA buttons to align with your brand category and the characteristics of your products.

Based on our team’s experience, here are the key characteristics of our customer companies’ products:

Age Group

Different products may appeal to specific age ranges.

Example: Baby products

Design or Color

If design is a major purchasing factor, consider adding purchase links to each block with product images.

Example: Jewelry

Gender

If your products are categorized by gender, you could include blocks that lead to each category.

Example: Apparel, Occupational Wear

Product Characteristics

You could add hashtags that explain the products’ key characteristics so that buyers could be informed about the product advantages and tell if the product would be apt for them.

Example: Cosmetics, Skin Care Products

Discount Rate and Maximum Discounted Price

Highlighting prices is especially effective during promotional seasons like Black Friday.

Operate email template A/B testing to find the best one for your brand

Actually, even if you’re sure that a specific change in your email format will have a positive effect on sales, you can’t be sure until you see the results for yourself.

Our team’s experience also has shown that every part of your email template should be tested through A/B testing to ensure it's fully optimized for your brand and product offerings. That’s why we always recommend and assist with running these tests, especially for customer companies who face challenges setting them up on their own.

We’d like to share some examples of A/B tests we’ve gone through:

1. Leveraging timed coupons to enhance engagement ⏱️

Especially during BFCM, creating a sense of urgency can drive your audience to act quickly.

While timers have traditionally been used in promotional campaigns, where every recipient sees the same countdown, we took a different approach. Instead of using a universal timer, we tested adding personalized timers to email flows featuring time-limited promo codes. This allowed us to create a unique countdown for each recipient, triggered when they open the email or opt into a special offer.

2. Design to highlight discounted prices 🏷️

During big sales and promotions, emphasizing the discounted price can encourage customers to act fast. By testing various email designs, we could determine the design that best drew attention to the discount and made the pricing more appealing.

3. Adding hashtags that can inform product features #️⃣

While investigating ways to optimize product templates, we found that Klaviyo’s basic formats were not enough to accentuate the product’s characteristics and merits. To address this, we added hashtags that could inform important product features. With simple yet informative key points, these hashtags could convey product benefits in a way that resonated with the audience and drove more interest.

4. Adding brand storytelling to strengthen identity 📖

There were cases where our customer companies had a story to their brand that set them apart. To emphasize their brand identity, our team designed a section in their emails that could represent their story, which could help them connect on a deeper level with their audience.

Boost Your BFCM Sales with Effective Email Strategies

With the holiday season approaching, implementing effective email strategies is essential for boosting your sales during BFCM.

We Retentics specialize in driving customer repurchases through AI triggers designed for various flows, including Replenishment, Win-back, and the First Purchase Bounce Back Flow. And based on our insight and experience, our solution will help you identify the most suitable customer segments, predict each individual’s next purchase cycle and personalize product recommendations, which we believe are key to fostering long-term customer loyalty.

With this guide, enhance your Black Friday email strategies with Retentics and get ready to make this year’s holiday season most successful!