Yep, it’s that time to start preparing for Black Friday Cyber Monday, along with every other Direct To Consumer Brand. For good reason: according to Shopify, consumers spent $20 billion during the event in 2021, up 21% from the previous year.
As the name suggests, it is a time when brands will make or break their financial year…..ideally enough revenue to get “in the black” of profitability.
The only challenge is that every ecommerce brand is fighting for the same attention and wallet share.
In the effort to grab attention and cut through the noise, you can use your email and SMS list to your advantage – channels that you own and control.
With ten weeks left leading up to November, you can create a significant competitive advantage right now by building up your customer data profiles and ability to personalize offers.
In this post, we’ll get into how you can create this advantage for yourself by:
- Building your list
- Capturing customer data
- Understanding what your customers want
Step 1: Build Your List (With A Quiz)
Email marketing is going to be the critical way to communicate with customers and future customers during the Black Friday Cyber Monday chaos.
You will see a 40x greater efficiency at acquiring new customers from email rather than Facebook or Twitter. And 6x greater likelihood of click through over a tweet.
It is a direct communication channel with your customers, which is critical when everyone is trying to get shoppers to their website.
Once you have have an email address, you can:
- Prime customers for upcoming exclusives and discounts
- Educate customers on the brand and product in a methodical sequence
- Send exclusive discounts
- Encourage existing customers to buy again
How can you build your list?
You can definitely use classic opt in forms, whether at a pop up:
Or at the footer:
However, there are shortcomings with these options:
- Dilute brand equity: When you immediately share a discount with a shopper, you are discounting your brand, undermining brand equity, and training shoppers to expect a discount. Not to mention, this discount directly eats into profit margin.
- No customer information: Not all leads are created equal. An email is great to allow you to communicate directly with customers, but there is no context to WHO the contact is, WHAT they are interested in, WHY they signed up.
- Lower Opt in rate: Email opt in rates are around 2%. And they have continued to decline over the years.
The solution: send cold traffic to a quiz.
This allows you to create an engaging and fun customer experience.
You get to learn about customer’s needs, interests, goals, and challenges.
And you can dramatically improve your opt in rate, like Teelixir 2x their opt in rate by sending traffic to a quiz instead of their traditional email capture tactics.
Here’s an example of an ad that creates curiosity and intrigue to drive customers to the quiz landing page:
Step #1a: Enrich Your Existing List
Even if you already have an email or SMS contact, you may want to use the time before Black Friday Cyber Monday to enrich your email audience.
This will help you know what type of content to send, what offers and messaging is most relevant, and how you can personalize their shopping experience.
There is significant upside in generating revenue from personalizing your BFCM offers.
Remember that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
You can use a quiz to enrich your existing contacts.
Here’s an example from Harry’s: an email sent to their existing list in order to learn more about their customers
Simply create a dedicated landing page with the quiz, and send an email to your email list to complete the quiz.
You will have to have a strong incentive and offer in order for the list to complete it, but when they do, you have a treasure trove of data with which to segment, personalize, and target your offers.
And do not be shy about asking for more customer information from them. 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience.
Now that you have this data stored in your email platform, you can begin the magic of segmenting your list !
Step #2: Segment Your List
Segmentation has a huge impact on improving your email’s open rates and click through rates.
The key to effective segmentation is to understand who you are sending to. And the greater the segmentation and targeting, the greater the revenue per user.
Here is some simple data to show the uptick in email engagement, with a simple takeaway: the more narrowly targeted the list of recipients, the better the engagement.
There are some great ideas and examples on how to segment here, including: seasonal shoppers, VIP customers, Hasn’t purchased (but engaged) and more.
Here are some ways that they recommend to segment your list:
• target 5% or less of the full email list,
• defined by two or more conditions,
• include specific recipient behavior, and
• define the timeframe of the recipient behavior.
The zero party data gathered in your quiz offers helpful dimensions for you to further segment:
- Challenges
- Goals
- Preferences
- Interests
- Habits
Step #3: Personalize Your Emails
Lastly, when someone receives your email, you want it to be relevant and specific to their interests. This will increase the relevance and ultimately the efficacy – to help customers do what it is that you want them to do…add to cart and purchase!
Klaviyo and other modern email and SMS tools allow you to create dynamic emails that are unique to each recipient. This means that you incorporate information that you’ve gathered about your customers into your emails.
And this is the perfect use for the data that you’ve gathered in the quiz!
Here are a few ways that you can personalize the emails:
- Dynamic personalization – Klaviyo makes it easy to insert the Custom Properties that each message is personalized. For example, if you want to use their first name, which is a simple question gathered in a quiz, then you can simply insert the Custom Property
You can do this personalization in your subject line as well, to help you stand out from the crowded inboxes of Black Friday Cyber Monday.
- Add Dynamic Product Recommendations
If a customer has taken a Prehook quiz and recommended a product at the end of the quiz, Klaviyo will capture the recommended product along with the custom properties in their account.
This means that you can build flows around the recommended product and make a compelling email about the benefits of the product specific to the quiz responses.
You can add different Event Variables related to the Prehook Product Recommendation, including the Product Title, Image, Price, URL and more:
See more here for how to personalize your Klaviyo emails with dynamic product recommendations.
Conclusion
The success of your Black Friday Cyber Monday campaigns will depend on how well you can cut through competing noise and present a compelling and relevant offer to your potential customer.
This relies on having an understanding of your customers – WHAT they are interested in, WHY they need it, HOW their life can be improved.
Take this time now to build your list, enrich your customer profiles and increase your likelihood of success!