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Black Friday Email Marketing Tips For WooCommerce Stores

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WooCommerce is great at a lot of things, but email marketing isn’t one of them. -- Antoni Watts

Don’t rely on built-in WooCommerce emails for your upcoming Black Friday sales campaign – or any of your email marketing campaigns, period.

WooCommerce is great at a lot of things, but email marketing isn’t one of them. Yes, it can collect email addresses when your customers register an account or create one at checkout. But you really can’t do much with your email list apart from sending them basic transactional emails (e.g. new account, processing order, completed order, refunded order, reset password, etc.).

The good news is that there’s no shortage of email marketing platforms that seamlessly integrate with WooCommerce. Features and pricing vary from one provider to another, but at the very least, choose a platform that offers user segmentation and email automation. Doing so will allow you to send the perfect Black Friday deals to the right group of people!

One such platform is Blue Odin. Designed for WooCommerce sellers, Blue Odin combines user segmentation, email automation, and a user-friendly sales dashboard to help you manage your WooCommerce store. It’s perfect for your flash sales, holiday sales, and Black Friday campaigns – just add your WooCommerce store to Blue Odin and start planning your next campaign!

Screenshot of Blue Odin's homepage hero block

 

Why is it important to prepare for Black Friday RIGHT NOW?

Black Friday falls on 26th November this year. It’s still weeks away, but you need to gear up as early as now.

Here’s why:

  • In 2019, 39% of consumers checked out their email inbox for information on deals and discounts from their favorite retailers (source: NRF). Note that this figure was pre-pandemic but the numbers were already pretty massive even back then…
  • In 2020, unsurprisingly, COVID-19 pushed even more shoppers to go online as many brick-and-mortar stores remained closed. According to Adobe Analytics, $9.03 billion was spent on Black Friday alone, a 20% increase over 2019’s $7.5 billion!
  • This 2021, banking on the success of previous years, giant retailers like Amazon have already started rolling out their Black Friday deals as early as October!

If you don’t act now, your competitors will steal your customers – and all your potential profit from the biggest sales event of the year!

Email marketing tips to boost your Black Friday sales

Apply these tips below and watch your WooCommerce profits grow not only during flash sales but year-round as well!

1) Start collecting email addresses ASAP

The old cliché “the money is in the list” is true. According to Campaign Monitor, a $1 investment in email marketing can generate up to $38 in revenue – that’s a mindblowing 3700% ROI!

Once you get people signed up to your list, you can market to them over and over again at no extra cost. You also have full control over the type of content you can send to your subscribers.

But since no one will give up their emails voluntarily, you will need to get creative with your ‘lead magnet’ to convince them. You can use an eBook, a discount code, case studies, trial subscription, etc. as your lead magnet.

Here’s Convesio’s lead magnet, a free trial sign up form:

Screenshot of Convesio's free trial sign up page

 

Remember, the more people you have on your list, the higher your potential profit on mega sales events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and more.

So, add your email opt-in forms to your sidebar, header, footer, in the middle of your blog posts, and pop-ups, and start collecting those precious email addresses!

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About The Author
Antoni Watts

Antoni Watts

Antoni is the CEO and Co-Founder at Blue Odin, while also supporting the Product Roadmap & Marketing. Antoni has launched several software and ecommerce businesses, and sold his last software company which was managing over $1 Billion a year in sales for Amazon Sellers. Antoni enjoys reading & walks.
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2) Segment your users

Segmentation allows you to offer the right products to the right customers. In the case of Black Friday sales, the more relevant your offers, the more likely they’ll purchase. It’s also far easier to upsell and cross-sell when you know exactly who you’re selling to.
Here are a few different ways to segment your email list:

  • New subscribers who haven’t purchased anything yet
  • Product category / item purchased
  • Number of orders placed
  • Customers who haven’t left a review yet
  • Lifetime value or dollar amount of total purchases made in your store
  • People who’ve added items to their cart but didn’t check out

3) Automate your email marketing campaigns

It’s hard to keep track of every single email you send out. Fortunately, most email marketing tools allow you to schedule your campaigns well in advance, so you can focus on fulfilling orders and replying to customer inquiries on the day of your flash sale campaign.

If you’re using Blue Odin, here’s how you set up your Black Friday email campaign:

Click on the Campaigns List on the left-hand side menu, then click on Add New. You will be directed to the Campaign Editor page, like you see below.

Screenshot of Blue Odins campaign set up page

Fill out the following details:

  • Campaign name – give your campaign a name, e.g. Black Friday sales campaign
  • Customers – select the customer segment you’ve previously defined in the Segments section
  • The date and time when your campaign starts – you can send an email a few days before the sales event and send them a reminder the closer you get to the big day!
  • Email layout – standard is the default layout but you can also choose plain
  • Subject – this is the first thing your subscribers see so make sure it catches their attention!
  • Body of the email – here’s where you write all the info regarding your flash sales campaign. Make sure you state when the offer ends, so they know how much time they have left!
  • Click on Save to publish your campaign.

You can create as many campaigns as you like in Blue Odin, so you can send out different emails to each customer segment.

4) Add a delayed cart abandonment email sequence

Estimates vary, but a significant chunk of shopping carts (as many as 70%) end up abandoned. That’s a ton of potential sales you’re missing out on. But if you set up an email sequence targeting the users of those abandoned carts, you may be able to convince them to check out their cart.

Here are a few tips to increase your abandoned cart conversion rates:

  • Enable WooCommerce guest checkout. Some people don’t like giving out their email address and would rather abandon their carts than sign up for another store account. Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Accounts & Privacy > Guest Checkout. Tick the box that says, “Allow customers to place orders without an account.”Screenshot of WooCommerce's settings page where guest check out is set
  • Plan a ‘delayed’ cart abandonment email sequence the day after Black Friday. Many websites slow down due to the onslaught of shoppers wanting to get the best deals. By delaying your email sequence, there is less risk of your store being slow. This leads to a better user experience and, hopefully, more conversions for you!
  • Be creative with your email subject lines. Your subscribers may also receive a bunch of abandoned cart emails from other ecommerce stores, so make yours stand out!
  • Add relevant testimonials and reviews in your email. Mention how the products they’ve abandoned in their cart helped somebody else.
  • Include related products. Perhaps they abandoned their cart because they’re no longer interested in it. By adding related products in your email, something else might catch their eye and they’d end up buying that instead!

Concluding thoughts

Email marketing goes beyond selling to your subscribers. When done right, it can help build relationships, improve your brand’s image, increase your credibility, and direct traffic to your website (which is great for SEO).

Now, when you’ve grown your email list to a considerable size, you may be worried about your WooCommerce store crashing from the traffic spike every time you launch a flash sale campaign.

Don’t worry, Convesio can help. Convesio can automatically scale from a few orders per hour to multiple orders per second, so whether it’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, or any other special sales event you’re running, your store will continue to perform at its best! Check out Convesio’s WooCommerce hosting page for more information.

About Blue Odin

Blue Odin keeps your email automation, customer data and key business information in one easy-to-use solution.

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About The Author
Antoni Watts

Antoni Watts

Antoni is the CEO and Co-Founder at Blue Odin, while also supporting the Product Roadmap & Marketing. Antoni has launched several software and ecommerce businesses, and sold his last software company which was managing over $1 Billion a year in sales for Amazon Sellers. Antoni enjoys reading & walks.
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