Supercharge Your Black Friday Campaigns With the Power of Marketing Automation

Every year when Black Friday is about to kick-off, retailers arm their teams to get ready to engage a new audience, reawaken inactive subscribers, profit, and try to stay ahead throughout the holiday season.

Black Friday and its ever-growing number of siblings – Cyber Monday, Chinese Single’s Day, etc, are known as ‘buy as much as you can’ days. These special eCommerce holidays make customers pull their spending triggers and splurge.

Amid the competitor noise, how do brands level up to meet the rising demands of customers?

Well, the answer lies in making the most of data to provide the right deals to the right customer, at the right time. Looks like an ideal recipe to build sustainable customer relationships, isn’t it?

Now, when even brick and mortar stores have made the digital shift, the competition among brands is, undoubtedly, at its peak. And because of this, omnichannel marketing is in full swing.

So, how would you keep your pace in the ever-evolving market? Marketing automation comes to the rescue! It keeps your marketing strategy hale and hearty. So, be it 100 visitors or 100K visitors per day, marketing automation will help you lift the weight of customer expectations.

Now, let’s break this concept down into ways that make marketing automation a holy grail for your brand to succeed:

1. Email Marketing Using Different Workflows

According to research, 78% of customers buy from the brand that responds to their query first^[i]. To provide your customer with a quick response, automation can be a mighty ally. It helps you reach out to your prospective customers and respond to their simple to complex queries in real-time.

Here are the kind of emails you can send to them:

• Welcome: To ace your digital impression, go with a well-organized and fully optimized email program that builds a solid foundation for fostering better relationships with your future customers. Introduce yourself, fuel their excitement with your offers, lay your expectations (CTA link that directs the user to a landing page or a ‘Download Now’ button, which directs them to a Whitepaper or Datasheet), and outline your USPs.

Pro-tip – During Black Friday eve, you can take the engagement level up a notch by sharing exclusive sneak peeks with your customers about your attractive offers, products, or services.

• Nurture: Follow the ‘Recency, Frequency, and Monetary’ segmentation mantra. This approach helps you decipher when shoppers made the last purchase, how frequently they shop, and how much they spend. Use the treasure trove of data in your platform to send customers personalized nurture emails during the Black Friday campaign to increase the likelihood of conversion.

Pro-tip – Before the holiday season strikes, nurture your customers by sharing social proof, educating them on how to use your products, and telling your brand story.

• Abandoned Cart Emails: There are several instances of abandoned carts, some folks are just window shopping, some are distracted, and some are browsing. Whatever the reason may be, a timely abandoned cart email is a reminder that would drive your customers back to the website or app.

Pro-tip – Don’t overwhelm your customers, send no more than 3 emails. Also, you can use an omnichannel approach to reconnect with these potential customers via Facebook or Google ads, email, SMS, or banner ads.

2. A/B Testing Emails

For email marketing, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach just won’t cut it. One of your buyer personas may love an emoji in the subject line, but another one could be more inclined towards opening an email with a simple, ‘to the point’ text subject line.

So, how would you find out what actually works?

The best way to find out what kind of email appeals to the majority of your target audience is to put it to the A/B test. You can create multiple two subject lines, pre-headers, email bodies, or CTAs, and compare them to identify which one works to motivate your subscribers to take action.

3. Personalization and Customer Segmentation

Today’s customers expect brands to know what they love and provide tailored content that addresses their unique needs. This is where personalization and customer segmentation comes into play.

To fuel your campaigns with personalization, you must arm yourself with the right data to customize your marketing campaigns. Using customer-defined preferences as a basis for segmentation is a rock-solid way to create email content that wows your subscribers. To do so, give your subscribers a chance to tell you a bit about themselves when they sign up.

With highly targeted, hyper-personalized workflows, you’ll be able to send your target audience the right series of emails and messages around a topic of their interest. You can use dynamic content everywhere to further personalize all campaigns, win customers, and maximize return on investment.

4. Calendar Event Based on The Sale Date

Add a dash of excitement about your upcoming Black Friday sale with calendar events. Give your customers the choice to add the event to their calendar.

Why, you ask?

The calendar would notify the customer when the sale goes live and also act as a reminder, in case the user forgets about it amid their regular hustle-bustle.

5. Behavioral Targeting

To ace your marketing campaigns, it’s key to make decisions backed by data on your customers’ habits. Using web analytics insights, data from websites, mobile apps, CRM, and marketing automation systems, you can create personalized experiences for your target audience.

So, this Black Friday sale, you can leverage behavioral targeting to interpret your customers’ intention in real-time with insights from your marketing automation platform to create hyper-relevant ads and attention-grabbing emails to deliver exactly what your customers are seeking.

6. Drip Campaigns

The essence of marketing is to stay on top of your customer’s mind and not just reach out when you’re trying to pitch a product or service. Whether it is to nurture freemium customers, to deliver relevant content to leads, or to convert a blog subscriber, there is no limit to the kind of awesome drip campaigns you can create with your marketing automation platform. It empowers you to win your customers’ hearts with personalized and relevant content throughout the holiday shopping season.

7. Campaign Analysis

Understanding what works and doesn’t work for you is quintessential to optimize your marketing game for success. The process of analyzing your marketing campaign can be extremely rewarding if you follow these key steps:

• Apply the ‘Reach, Act, Convert and Engage’ (RACE) framework to plan, manage, and optimize your marketing campaigns with data-driven strategies to win more customers.
• Review your campaign objectives and KPIs to make better sense of the data.
• Break down the campaign outcomes by its channels, be it social media channels, paid and organic search, and website traffic.

Conclusion

Keeping up with the expectations of customers during a shopping period as busy as Black Friday is crucial. But what simplifies and streamlines your buyer’s journey is marketing automation.

Now that you know the secret sauce for winning at Black Friday, get cracking on harnessing the power of marketing automation and see how quickly your prospects turn into customers.

And as part of our Black Friday celebrations, we’d love to give you a complimentary evaluation of your marketing automation platform – be it Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, Eloqua, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you name it!

Sign up for your complimentary marketing automation evaluation now to make your marketing efforts stand out this holiday season!

Wish to level up your business with the power of marketing automation? Talk to us.

Statistics References:

^[i] Vendasta