Seven CRM Best Practices to be Ready for Black Friday 2018.

Francesca Bonavita

Now that you have a had a chance to think about Black Friday and how to get your customers’ and prospects’ attention, let’s look at what the best practices are when rolling out your campaign.

Segment your database from the most active in terms of email opening rate to the less active for a better deliverability. Make sure to regularly clean your database by removing people that unsubscribed, for whom your emails go directly to spam or hard bounced emails. Since your communication for Black Friday will be done using your full database, you’ll need to test this campaign with a small group first to not damage your deliverability. Think about dividing your audience to space out delivery by segment, with a sending per hour, for example.

Adopt the funnel principle, which means that your email campaign will start with a general message “Black Friday: where will you be next November 23^rd?” to a more specific message “the Fashion standout for 2018/2019 Fall/Winter seasons will be the oversized sweater, a product star for Black Friday on our website and in-store!”. You will tell a story to your readers and they’ll want to know what’s coming next. Don’t hesitate to create an expectation by giving them the date of your next email.

Adapt the content of each of your emails to a specific target. You need to write scenarios for your campaign by offering different content according to your reader’s profile as you will have specific objectives for each of your segments. For example:

To your prospects and occasional clients, tell them a story, highlight your Black Friday best sellers and remind them of the wish list option available on your website.
To your loyal clients, go beyond “classic” content and offer them an experience. You can invite them to a premiere Black Friday sale on Thursday evening to give them choice and make them feel privileged. They will for sure be the ambassador of your Black Friday sales with their entourage and on social networks. You will not only entertain your relationship with this segment of clients but also reach new prospects for the D-day. You can also offer them access to the online sale before everyone else.

Differentiate yourself from the competition by working on your email subject. It must be attractive and impactful but not too pushy to make your audience want to know more by opening the email. Create a short subject with 30 characters max so it won’t be cut-off by the device used (computer, smartphone, tablet). Use punctuation and emojis to express emotion and get noticed.

Use Calls-to-Action sparingly. We encourage a key message per email, so no more than one call-to-action per email. You better choose the right one! Ask yourself what your reader is expecting from your email and give them a call-to-action that’s answering it. As same for the subject of your email, the text in your call-to-action needs to be punchy. Ideally, it must indicate a specific action and include a sense of urgency.

Do A/B testing on 10% of your audience by customizing the sending hour, the sender name, the object, the email’s structure, the call-to-action, etc. Anything that seems important to you. Analyze the different KPIs: open rate, click rate, conversion on your website and unsubscriptions to identify the major trends of an optimized email for your target. Be careful, however, for an effective A/B testing:

Only test one parameter at a time or you won’t be able to tell which one is responsible for your email’s success or failure;
Multiple tests: the more you do, the more you’ll have statistics and the more you can optimize your future emails;
Send all your tests at the same time to have more accurate results possible (except if you are testing the sending hour, of course);
Use the data from the results more than your instincts.

Recover abandoned carts and people who opened/clicks on your previous emails by configuring the option to send them an email before the launch of your campaign. It will help you avoid useless stress on D-day but most of all, these three segments are people interested in your offering. It is worth trying to send them a personalized email, so they can go further in their experience with you making a purchase.

More articles and tips are coming soon about this subject. So until then, if you want some personalized advice, feel free to contact our team.

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