Case Study: Leveraging Email Marketing for Black Friday

As any product-based business will know, Black Friday is an important day that generates massive sales and revenue. It draws in new customers, builds customer loyalty, and encourages purchases for people who needed the extra incentive to buy.

Email marketing can play a large role in making Black Friday an especially lucrative day for businesses. By informing customers about deals, making it easy for customers to click and browse products, and streamlining access to discount codes and gift cards, email marketing is definitely something you need in your toolbox year round–but especially during a big sale like Black Friday.

Email Marketing At Work

One of our clients is a product-based business that operates exclusively online, so Black Friday email marketing requires a lot of strategy, planning, and content creation. That’s why we took a comprehensive approach that included newsletters, updated sequences, and updated pop-up forms to capture as many sales as possible during the busy Black Friday period.

Email marketing is a MAJOR money maker for this client, which generally includes twice weekly newsletters and robust automated sequences–although this month we sent out extra emails specifically for Black Friday. On average, email marketing should make up 25% of total revenue for a business. During November, email marketing accounted for just under 50% of monthly revenue for this client! That’s a number we love seeing.

The Sequence Strategy

This is the first year the client has had every single sequence set up for their business, which includes welcome, post-purchase, abandoned cart, sunset, win-back, and happy birthday sequences. To learn more about these sequences, head to our blog post. Having fully functional sequences up and running is helpful all year round, but it’s especially important during large sale seasons like Black Friday.

In fact, we were able to update the welcome and post-purchase sequences specifically for Black Friday to include messages about the biggest sale of the year. We also updated the pop-up form on their website to encourage people to join the list to get details about the sale. And the sale was big–the client offered 40% off, plus a $15 gift card sent to their inbox after purchase.

To make the $15 gift card easily accessible to customers, we customized the post-purchase sequence to include a unique gift card code that was delivered to the purchaser right after they placed their order. The smooth and seamless delivery of the gift card ensured a positive customer experience.

During November, these automated sequences generated over $7,000 for the business! Keep reading to see more incredible data from the newsletters we created in November. 

The Newsletter Strategy

We’ve been working with this brand for the past four months, engaging and growing the list of subscribers. The client has been growing their email list for the past 3+ years and has around 8K subscribers currently. Since August, we’ve focused on providing high-quality newsletters that subscribers look forward to opening, and we’ve seen great results.

We try to make this client’s newsletters stand out from other emails in their customers’ inbox. We do this by designing eye-catching graphics and using attention-grabbing subject lines to get subscribers interested. As a result, the client’s average open rate this month was 47%–which is considerably higher than the industry average.

For Black Friday, we sent out 13 newsletters over the course of 18 days. Although this was on the higher end–sometimes customers can feel bombarded by emails–there were only 200 unsubscribers during this period. Each newsletter on average generated over $900, for a total of almost $13,000.

In fact, this client’s email marketing generated more than $20,000 total this month. Email marketing truly is a long game–it takes time to grow, nurture, and engage your audience. If another brand started an email list last month, they definitely wouldn’t see results like this!

Where We Go Next

We absolutely love how successful this client has been this month, and we can’t wait to continue seeing bigger and better results down the line! This client saw a big boost in sales thanks to Black Friday, but there’s tons of potential for more growth in upcoming months, too. 

For e-commerce businesses, consistent and quality email marketing is truly a game-changer. It really will help you tap into new sources of sales and work to increase conversions for customers at different points in your marketing funnel. It always helps your business to maintain an active and engaged email list that is eager and interested in buying from you!

Looking to get started with email marketing? Whether you already have an email list or are wanting to get started building one, we’ve got your back. Get in touch with us and we can help you build an email marketing system that takes your business (and sales!) to the next level.