The popularity of Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns has prompted many brands to extend the promotional period to the entire month of November.
As a result, global email send volume is increasing dramatically and is expected to grow by 25-30% this year, according to a survey by Validity, a provider of email marketing and data quality management solutions.
A fair balance must be found for brands
This increase poses two major challenges for brands.
On the one hand, the enormous commercial pressure leads some of them to indulge in bad practices, such as
It damages their reputation. with major email providers such as Gmail and Microsoft, as including such clients means a low response rate and the possibility of falling into spam traps (old addresses used by these providers to identify senders sending messages without consent), explains Guy Hanson, VP Customer Engagement at Validity.
Aside from that, Consumers are tired and at best, unsubscribe from the various programs and become lost contacts.
At worst, they resort to reporting messages as spam, a very negative indicator for email providers who find email filtering increasingly difficult as the complaint rate increases.
They also monitor the rate of emails being deleted and rate this data as negative as well, although not as negative as a report such as spam.
These challenges can mean that brands are finding it difficult to reach consumers during this time. However, this depends on the campaign being run the balance to be found between the volume of mailings and best practices.
Indicators to watch closely
“If we look at last year’s data, we can see that in the two months leading up to the BF/CM period, open rates averaged 26-27% and click-through rates averaged 5-5.5%.
These dropped to around 22-23% and around 3.5-4% respectively over the weekend in question. However, we must be careful how we look at this data as it is not entirely negative.
In fact, 5% of 10 million emails (in a normal month) equals 500,000 clicks and 3.5% of 15 million = 525,000.
So it’s not just about percentages, because most senders measure their success by the total number of visits to their pages. So there must always be a balance between volume and best practices.
However, if a campaign expects higher send volume and the number of opens/clicks decreases so much that overall traffic decreases accordingly, then this is clearly a worst-case scenario for a campaign. brand,” says Guy Hanson.
8 tips to better manage your email campaigns
Faced with this reality, Validity offers 8 recommendations for running an email campaign during this strategic period:
#1 – Use high quality data
It is important to do a basic cleaning exercise prior to this trading period to maximize the number of good email addresses to use.
this makes possible reduce bounce and get a better ranking with email providers.
#2 – Avoid full base sends
While it may be tempting during such critical business hours, messaging inactive contacts is not good for brand reputation, nor is it profitable.
However, there is a portion of the inactive that we can call “strategic” who may no longer be interested in email but continue to consult the brand’s website.
For these, deleting the list would not make sense, rather try to include them again for example by checking whether the email address is the one mainly used.
#3 – Schedule broadcasts with bandwidth in mind
Even large email providers struggle with bandwidth and throughput during this time, which can result in tighter filtering, heavier volume throttling, and sometimes stopping sending NDRs (because they use more bandwidth).
Most senders schedule their broadcasts at specific times, e.g. 10:00 AM or 11:00 AM, and 70% of all traffic occurs within the first 10 minutes of every hour.
Ideally, therefore, it is preferableSend messages 15 to 10 minutes earlier (e.g. 9:45am or 9:50am) when competition is less.
#4 – Stand out in crowded inboxes
In addition to being able to differentiate itself by arriving sooner, the brand can also use tools such as BIMI certificates that allow the logo to be displayed, or use pre-header text (the second line of the subject) to maximize the chances that the email will be read.
It is also not recommended to use heavy images.
On Black Friday you have approx. 3 seconds convince Subscribers to read a message.
Then it’s important to think about how to make the brand stand out: for example, if your color is green, make it a “Green Friday” that stands out more.
#5 – Encourage subscribers to create wish lists
In this way, they only receive offers for products that really interest them.
The offer to prepare baskets before the promotion period, like Camaïeu did last year, can also be strategic.
#6 – Offer a break
Many consumers need to take a step back from brands.
In addition, senders could give the opportunity to slumber temporarily for a period of time, which is ultimately more positive than permanently unsubscribing or registering a spam complaint.
#7 – Rate the responsiveness of the seller
Considering that an effective e-marketing strategy will generate more traffic, the sender’s website must be ready to meet the demand.
Therefore, before you start preparing a campaign, it’s important to verify that you have sufficient customer service resources to handle inquiries and sufficient fulfillment capacity to process and deliver orders.
#8th – use feedback loops
Advertisers tend to care more about open rates and clicks than complaints, which is very damaging to their reputation but also to the hygiene of their base.
Feedback loops thus make it possible to collect feedback on emails marked as spam and then take the necessary action by rethinking the targeting or content.
This opening time of the seasonal peak at the end of the year is the ideal opportunity for brands to get closer to consumers.
An email marketing strategy that takes into account the needs of the target audience and prepares the sender for an increase in demand will help brands achieve their goals…
