Black Friday and Cyber Monday B2B Email Marketing – What and When to Send?
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Black Friday and Cyber Monday are great ways for businesses to connect with consumers and grow sales by the end of the year. When you send email marketing campaigns to business-to-business (B2B) audiences, such as: For example, to cannabis license holders, there are some unique aspects that you need to consider that can increase your chances of success.
However, one thing that won’t change with email marketing on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is the process that leads to success:
- Build up anticipation
- Create a sense of urgency
- Prove the value of your messages and offers
Your vacation campaigns must do the three things listed above or they will fail. Building the excitement, capitalizing on the fear of missing out (FOMO), setting a finite timeframe for action, and proving that trading your audience is getting something that is really worthwhile is critical to generating engagement and conversions in Black Friday and Cyber Monday Email Marketing Initiatives.
Essential Steps to Get the Best Black Friday and Cyber Monday Email Marketing Results
Before you start writing and sending email campaigns for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, there is some prep and planning you need to do. In particular, there are a few key steps you should take to ensure that your campaigns are optimized for the best results. Let’s take a closer look at each one.
Warm up your domain
If you’re using your own domain to send your marketing email messages and want to increase the frequency or volume of campaigns you send out over the holidays, then you should definitely warm up your domain first.
The reason for a domain warmup is simple. Email service providers (ESPs) – like Google, Outlook, Apple, etc. – use your send history to determine whether you’re sending messages that others actually want or whether you’re sending spammy, unwanted messages. If you’ve been sending a certain number of messages on a consistent schedule on a regular basis for months and suddenly sending a series of messages to larger lists or on an irregular schedule, this unusual behavior can be misunderstood as spam by ESPs.
With that in mind, you should improve your sending frequency and volume (depending on your vacation email marketing plans) so that your ramped up sending patterns don’t look out of place to you. For example, you can turn up your volume and frequency every week or every few days before sending your vacation email.
You don’t want your vacation messages to be moved to spam folders just because you didn’t warm up your domain and ESPs “warned” you that you are sending more frequently and to larger lists.
It should be noted here that some email experts believe that it may make sense to send fewer messages during the 2020 holiday season to protect your domain’s reputation. In a recent webinar, Mailgun’s email experts warned that given the pandemic quarantines and more people working and shopping from home this year, the number of email marketing messages, those broadcast in the last two months of the year are expected to rise significantly over the other years.
As a result, there may be too many messages for recipients to open and edit. As you know, ESPs see a lack of recipient engagement with your messages as a sign that you are not sending content that people want, and this could affect the future deliverability of your email campaigns. With that in mind, you should closely monitor the recipient’s engagement with your vacation messages and adjust your shipping schedule as needed.
Define your target groups
Who do you want to connect with and who is most likely to be interested in your Black Friday and Cyber Monday news and deals? It is imperative that you create buyer personalities and effectively segment your lists to get the best results for your campaigns (and stay out of the spam folder).
The key to email marketing success at any time of the year is getting the most relevant messages to the right audiences. To do this, you need to create small, segmented lists.
Remember, email inboxes get bombarded with messages during the holidays. To stand out from the clutter, you need to send messages and offers that deliver more value than any other time of year. People expect more value, big discounts, etc. during the holidays, so be strategic and make sure that your messages and offers will delight your recipients rather than bore them.
Plan your schedule in four phases
It’s important to consider your recipients’ schedules when sending email to B2B audiences during the vacation. For example, if you send messages to cannabis license holders using the email marketing tool in the Cannabiz Media License Database, are they actively working and actively checking their email inboxes on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
If not, then you need to get creative with your email campaigns. Consider promoting Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday Week to ensure you have the opportunity to connect with people when they are at work and are more likely to see your messages. This strategy requires you to spread your email marketing schedule over the entire month of November instead of focusing your mailing schedule on a few days or a single week of the month.
Regardless of how many days or weeks you plan to message, you need to include content in your messages that follow four phases for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing to be successful. These four phases are:
- Formerly a teaser (e.g. Black Friday is coming or Cyber Monday is coming)
- Coming soon / Sneak Peek (e.g. here a little insight into Black Friday deals)
- Now / hurry up (e.g. Black Friday discounts start immediately)
- Last chance / time is running out (e.g. only 2 hours left to receive your Black Friday sale prices)
In particular, you need to test out your special Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals early to build excitement and keep adding excitement to your upcoming news. When Black Friday or Cyber Monday hits, create a sense of urgency with now / rush and last chance messages.
Submit your campaigns at the best time
Thinking about when B2B recipients are working and viewing their business email messages is only part of deciding when to send your vacation campaigns. You also need to consider your full mailing schedule and the optimal days and times of the week to send each campaign.
To choose the best days and times to send your messages, use the Best Time of Day heat map in the Cannabiz Media License Database to identify the day and time that the campaigns you sent in the past were have experienced the greatest commitment. As shown in the image below, the best times and days to send messages for this sender are displayed in dark blue.
Cannabiz Media’s custom heatmap tool is extremely useful in ensuring that your messages have the highest chance of being seen, opened and read.
Important information about Black Friday and Cyber Monday B2B email marketing
If you use the tips presented in this article, follow the four stages of the schedule to add excitement and urgency, and send relevant messages that recipients believe will be valuable to them, you should get high levels of engagement and results from your Achieve Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing campaigns.
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