Black Friday: The 3 Deadly Sins of Email Marketing

It’s hard to deny that since its introduction back in 2010, Black Friday has become a firmly established event in the UK marketing calendar. Over the years, we have learnt some very important lessons when it comes to creating campaigns for this time. It’s time to discover some fundamental truths about Black Friday campaigns and what we consider to be the three most deadly sins of the email channel - and how you can avoid them.

Bombarding your customers with emails

I’m sure you’ll have heard this one a million times before - don’t send too many emails! We’re all very tempted to ignore this good advice when our numbers are soft and we need extra orders to meet our targets. However, rapidly increasing your email order frequency over a short period of time can damage your deliverability. Spam filters are very sensitive to frequency changes and they’re likely to redirect your emails to spam. If that happens, your sales will stop coming through because your customers simply won’t see your emails. Protect your deliverability and don’t bombard your customers.

Ghosting your newly acquired customers

Black Friday is a great time to acquire new customers. Attractive offers and discounts are a great magnet for those who might have been sitting on the fence about finally purchasing with your brand. A mistake that happens all too often is that brands ignore those new customers after they’ve purchased. Don’t let that happen! Embrace the magnificent opportunity to build long-term relationships with your customers, by nurturing them and sending them personalised, valuable content that introduces them to your brand’s world and helps them understand what you stand for. This way, they’ll stay with you for longer and will be more likely to purchase your full-price products too!

Ignoring your loyal customers

Most Black Friday activities target new customer acquisition and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that - the opportunities are there! However, where most brands go wrong is to only tailor their offers and discounts to new customers, meaning that loyal customers can’t even benefit from the offers. This makes them feel ignored, underappreciated and open to temptation from your competitors’ new customer offers. Ensure that there is always a way for your existing customers to benefit from offers you’re running and that you demonstrate your love and gratitude through exclusive deals just for them.