Black Friday is a hectic, fast and furious time for email marketers that work in ecommerce. The pressure is on to maximize the revenue potential of the period, hit targets and create positive brand interactions in the inbox. However, inboxes are bombarded with offers, there’s noise, clutter, competition and it can be hard to stand out in the crowd. The first step to Black Friday success is a creative subject line. Make sure your subject line describes what’s in the email but is also bold, and stands out. Once your email has been opened, the content needs to capture attention – you don’t want the opener to quickly scan through and jump to the next email without taking action. You need to stop them in their tracks. So with that in mind, let’s look at how you can add fun, engaging elements into your emails to capture attention and get those clicks. Here’s 3 quick wins for Black Friday emails:
Polls for Black Friday
Polls are a powerful, strategic element to include in your emails before, during and after Black Friday. They’re so good at engaging recipients as they allow them to actively participate in the email content rather than passively consuming it. This interactivity captures their attention and makes the email experience more enjoyable. Including a poll, or variety of different polls, in the lead up to Black Friday will give you an opportunity to gather interest data ahead of time too. Asking openers to tell you what they’re interested in shopping gives you valuable, relevant information that you can use to personalize content over the Black Friday period. Including the vote percentage elements over categories increases click throughs; openers see that others are engaging and they want to have their say too. That results in more click throughs and in turn gives you more information to better tailor future campaigns and to make data-driven content decisions.
Click Counter
Click counters are a brilliant social element that you can leverage to display the latest engagement on a piece of content in your email. Showcasing the number of clicks on a product, banner or specific offer introduces social proof, trust and a sense of urgency into the inbox. If a piece of content has lots of clicks, others will automatically be drawn in and click on it too. Over Black Friday, click counters are really useful to add interesting, eye-catching content. Showing the number of openers shopping featured products or offers isn’t widely seen in emails so it catches your eye and encourages you to stop and read the content. One of my favourite use cases is to show the number of clicks on each product on offer in an email and to also show the cumulative number of people shopping from the entire email in the hero image. Don’t forget that you can use visibility rules to hide the click number element until it reaches a high enough number.
Data Canvas
A really quick, easy way to pack a punch in your content is to sprinkle personalized images, powered by Data Canvas, throughout your emails. The simplest place to start is with name personalisation. Add the opener’s name creatively into your hero image, call to action or in a unique way to make the content feel special. In the Design Lab add animation to your Data Canvas element to make it really pop – names that fly in, flash, pulse or fade are sure to catch attention.
