9 Biggest Email & SMS Mistakes to Avoid For Black Friday Cyber Monday 2024
Did you know that in 2023, over 50% of all sales during Black Friday came directly from email marketing? Yes, you heard it right—many of our clients generated more than half of their revenue through email campaigns and flows last holiday season. This staggering statistic is a testament to the power of email marketing, proving it's a channel you simply can’t afford to overlook this year. As the holiday season approaches, it’s time to gear up and set yourself up for email marketing success to maximize your sales potential.
For eCommerce marketers and business owners, the holiday season can be overwhelming, with so much riding on this crucial period. Email marketers, in particular, have a significant responsibility—building anticipation, growing a subscriber list, and converting that list into loyal customers when it matters most. It’s a unique window where email marketing strategies differ greatly from any other time of the year.
The truth is, this season can get chaotic, and everyone is racing against the clock to execute their best marketing efforts. That's why planning ahead is key to staying ahead of the curve. Having worked with numerous brands, we’ve witnessed firsthand the most common mistakes that can make or break a Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) campaign. So, to help you avoid these pitfalls, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the 9 Biggest Email & SMS Mistakes to Avoid for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2024.
By following this guide, you’ll ensure your holiday marketing efforts are strategic, effective, and ready to convert your subscribers into holiday shoppers. Let’s dive in and create a roadmap to your most successful BFCM yet!
What we'll cover:
1. Not planning early enough
In email marketing, early planning is the key to executing a smooth and efficient campaign when the big day arrives. Ideally, you should begin mapping out your holiday marketing strategy as early as mid-August or early September. This proactive approach allows you to leverage what worked in the past and identify areas of improvement for this year’s strategy.
Start by reviewing your previous years' performance—what campaigns were successful, and which ones fell short? Use these insights to establish clear goals and the steps needed to achieve them. By the time your holiday buildup kicks off in late October or early November, you’ll have all your assets—content, campaigns, messaging, and creative—ready to go. This enables you to be proactive instead of scrambling to react when the holiday rush begins.
The earlier you begin the planning phase, the more organized and efficient your efforts will be, allowing you to capitalize on every opportunity the holiday season presents. Begin brainstorming ideas, collaborating with your creative team, and laying out a comprehensive plan now, so you're not overwhelmed when it's time to bring your vision to life.
2. Take risks to stand out this holiday season
Playing it safe can be risky, especially during the holiday season when standing out is crucial. This is the time to push boundaries and differentiate your brand in a crowded market.
- Zig When Others Zag
Ask yourself, “How can I zig when everyone else is zagging?” During this competitive period, being different is often better than striving to be the best. Adopt the mindset that boldness and creativity can help your brand rise above the noise. Your motto for the holidays should be “different is better than best.”
- Send More Emails
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is holding back on email frequency. While one email a day may work throughout the year, this strategy falls short during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With inboxes overflowing, your email could easily get lost. Step out of your comfort zone and increase your sending frequency.
Recommended Strategy: Send three emails per day on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and two emails daily on the Saturday and Sunday in between. This ensures your messages have a greater chance of being seen amidst the holiday clutter.
- Leverage Best-Performing Subject Lines
Use your highest-performing subject lines to grab attention. Revisit subject lines that previously led to high open rates and consider incorporating fun elements like emojis to make your emails stand out.
Remember, this is the time to “play the hits” and use what has worked in the past.
- Borrow Ideas from Other Industries
To truly innovate, borrow ideas from other industries and adapt them to your brand. For example, if you notice a cosmetics brand using live shopping feeds on Instagram, consider implementing a similar approach and promoting it through your emails. The key is to align these borrowed ideas with your brand’s identity, making them feel fresh and unique.
Look at what women’s cosmetics brands are doing. So many are crushing it in terms of innovation!
- Communicate Early and Build Anticipation
The most successful brands communicate early and build excitement around their holiday offers. Start hyping up your deals in advance to engage your audience, even if you’re not running specific offers. This prevents confusion and helps you manage sales more consistently throughout the season.
- Create Scarcity with Limited-Time Offers
You can also offer limited-time products as they are a unique concept too. In this, you offer something only available in a scarce time window and let that scarcity drive action.
People tend to get the exact offers repeatedly during the holiday season; scarcity and limited-time offers play a vital role in bringing the audience to your brand by interrupting the pattern they are getting.
3. Not adjusting creative
Using the same branding during the holiday season as you do year-round can be a missed opportunity to connect with your audience. Just as brick-and-mortar stores decorate for the holidays, e-commerce brands should refresh their creativity to capture that festive spirit.
Consider jazzing up your email headers with holiday-themed elements or adding seasonal touches to your designs. You can also update your popover designs specifically for the holidays, making your emails feel more engaging and aligned with the season. These small touches will go a long way in resonating with your audience and setting the festive tone.
If your email header is consistent across all your universal blocks, consider adjusting it programmatically within your universal template. This simple tweak allows you to customize your automation effectively and gives your emails a fresh, festive feel throughout the holiday season.
These small adjustments may seem minor, but they go a long way in getting your audience into the holiday shopping mindset. Think of it as priming them to spend more!
Another crucial aspect is ensuring message relevancy. Tailor your content to align with your audience's needs and preferences, so they receive offers that truly resonate with them.
To add urgency, consider including countdown timers in your emails. Use them sparingly—just one or two can be effective—but they act as reminders, encouraging your audience to take action before the offer expires.
You may also include a callout to the sales and the promotions you will do on Black Friday and Cyber Monday in your automation. As we mentioned, these can be done more effectively on the universal content template in Klaviyo.
4. Not varying messaging/offers/experience
Not varying your content means repeating the same thing and failing to make your campaigns feel special and unique. As a savvy marketer, it’s essential to avoid sending the same message repeatedly in your Black Friday email marketing.
Play the Hits and Recycle Content
So, how can you keep your content engaging as we approach Black Friday and Cyber Monday? The key is to put your best foot forward and play the hits. Reuse content and emails that have performed well for you throughout the year. Recycling your top-performing content is an easy way to reignite excitement and engagement during the holiday season.
Design Engaging Popovers
You can also design eye-catching popovers on your website to lead visitors directly to your holiday sales. This quick and effective method not only highlights what's on sale but also encourages existing customers to become more active and engaged.
- Create a holiday collection
For your existing purchasers and loyal customers, consider offering something special this holiday season. Curate a unique holiday collection featuring your best products. This approach is like the "low-hanging fruit" technique—presenting a selection of products that are easy for them to purchase during the holidays.
- Open up your email list
The holiday season might be the right time to expand your email list. Consider re-engaging unengaged subscribers, but do this sparingly—perhaps at the start and end of your biggest promotions.
As I often say, diving too deep into your unengaged segment is like trying to find a partner at the last call in a bar—the chances of finding the right match are slim, though it can occasionally work. However, making this a habit can be problematic.
When targeting this segment, plain text emails tend to be more effective, ensuring strong deliverability and clear calls to action. Just remember, venturing too far into this unengaged list could end up being a dead-end experience.
- Adjust the trigger flow
Adjusting your trigger flows' timing can be a game-changer in your holiday email marketing. If your usual abandoned cart trigger is set to 3 hours after checkout starts, consider reducing it to 1 or 2 hours during the holiday season to prompt quicker action.
During this period, it's okay to be a bit more aggressive with your email strategy since there’s a lot of competition for attention. By shortening your trigger times, you’re more likely to recapture potential customers while they're still in the shopping mindset, helping you guide them through to purchase.
5. Not optimizing calendar
One of the most common mistakes e-commerce businesses make is not optimizing their calendar and planning for their Black Friday/Cyber Monday push.
As a business, it is essential that you have your calendar planned for November and December so you can get the most out of it.
From November 1st till New Year’s Day, you can categorize your calendar into before, during, and after. Let’s have a look at how!
So, let’s talk in the context of the present year, 2024.
- November 1st
An ideal calendar should start on Friday, November 1st.
So, from this day, you should be getting people onto your VIP list and getting them opted in. This is so they can be prepared to mentally plan how much they are able and willing to spend on you or your products.
You can also offer one or two things, a week or two ahead of time, as some incentive in a particular category. That could be marked down in a special promotion, which will only be available in that window. You will make the early birds happy and give yourself some cushion to get BFCM.
- The week leading into BFCM
This is the time when you’re going to want to play the hits, something we talked about earlier. This is when you must ensure your audience is focused and engaged with your brand.
Another beneficial and practical thing to do with your VIP list is that you can also connect to them through SMS. Open things up for your list by connecting to them by different means. This is also one of those times of the year when SMS messages and emails should complement each other. It would be a good practice to send both of these back and forth but aligned and smoothly.
- Thanksgiving!
Now, let’s move to the day right before Black Friday. This is when you should be opening things up a little early on, maybe Wednesday or Thursday.
Thursday would be the day everyone would think about the turkey they’re going to have or the sales they can see on their mobile! So that’s going to be a fine time to open things up so everybody can do their online shopping.
- Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Now that the actual day is here, let’s discuss how you will do it.
Don't shy away from sending emails more frequently during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, even if it feels a bit uncomfortable at first.
A suggested approach is to send three emails on Black Friday, two emails each on Saturday and Sunday, and then up to three emails on Cyber Monday. This is just a guideline—adjust your schedule based on your industry and audience needs.
While sending multiple emails might seem excessive, remember that inboxes are overflowing during this period. This increased frequency is often the only way to ensure your message cuts through the noise and reaches your audience.
- Post-BFCM
Now that Black Friday Cyber Monday hype and chaos are over, you don’t have to go radio silent afterward.
Find ways to communicate afterward. Keep sending them updates about your top products of the year. That would be a good practice at the end of the year. It would be valuable to your audience. It will not burn them out if you’re still sending them good content.
Leading into December, you should continue to push hard from the 1st to the 15th or so of the month, leading up to the free shipping deadline.
- Post-Dec. 25th
And then, after Christmas, following December 25th, you can start with New Year offers like a pre-New Year campaign where the cutoff is New Year’s Day.
Everyone starts tightening their belts on New Year's Day, but following the holiday, everyone has gift cards and cash they want to blow on things they didn’t get.
This strategic approach to your holiday calendar can be incredibly rewarding. If you manage to drive a second purchase from even 10% of your holiday buyers—once in November and again in December—the impact can be significant. For example, converting 1,000 holiday purchasers into 1,100 means a big jump in sales volume during this crucial window.
6. Treating everyone the same
Another mistake we see people making is treating everyone the same and not having a strategy for segmenting their email audiences.
It is essential that you send a different message to everybody. Only some pieces of content or promotion are relevant to everyone.
- Relevancy
As mentioned earlier, relevancy is key. Ensure your messages are customized and contextualized to your customers' needs. For example, if one customer is shopping for themselves while another is buying a gift, tailor your messages to reflect these different intentions.
Connecting your content to the context of each customer's situation goes a long way and requires minimal extra effort.
- VIP list
To avoid this mistake, include a targeted question during your VIP list sign-up process. Offer early access in exchange for this data, and use it to ensure your messages are highly relevant and tailored to each subscriber.
- Segment and exclude
Your VIP list is invaluable for segmenting your audience based on preferences. It allows you to identify those who’ve already made a BFCM purchase, so you can exclude them from further BFCM promos and avoid overwhelming them.
Give these customers a brief break, but re-engage them with a bounce-back automation later to encourage a second purchase within the holiday window.
7. Not training their audiences
Remember when we discussed stepping out of your comfort zone and sending more emails? It’s crucial, especially during the holidays.
However, jumping from zero to forty emails in a month isn’t the way to go. Avoid coming on too strong—gradually warm up your audience before the sales season. Start with engaging emails to get them accustomed to hearing from you more often, encouraging them to open and interact.
Make sure your approach is consistent and smooth, not abrupt, to avoid coming off as transactional.
8. Not aligning with other marketing activities
As a savvy marketer, you know that consistency is key—your email marketing should seamlessly align with your SMS, social media, and website during the holidays. This creates a holistic and unified experience, ensuring customers engage with your brand with clarity and confidence.
Early planning is essential for coordinating with various teams across your organization, allowing you to maximize both your marketing efforts and customer experience.
9. Freaking out on November 10th
The most common mistake marketers make during Black Friday is freaking out around November 10th and getting stressed over nothing.
You've worked hard to plan and execute a strong holiday promotion, but it's natural to feel nervous as the season kicks in.
What’s not okay is losing your cool—it's about trusting the process and helping your team do the same.
Remember, in the U.S., people often wait to buy essentials like toilet paper between October 31st and BFCM. Sales might be slower in early November, but the holiday surge will more than compensate for it.
Trust that you’ve done your best. You’ve spent months preparing, and now it’s time to stick to the plan. Be comfortable with the discomfort, stay ready, and now, you’re about to pop the balloon and see a big blowup in sales.
Conclusion
In this article, we've covered the nine most common mistakes marketers make during the holiday season. Here’s a quick recap of what to avoid in your Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing strategy:
- Not planning early enough
- Playing it safe
- Neglecting to adjust creativity
- Failing to vary messaging, offers, or experiences
- Not optimizing your calendar
- Treating everyone the same
- Not training your audience to expect more emails
- Misaligning with other marketing efforts
- Freaking out on November 10th
By avoiding these nine mistakes (or at least most of them), you'll be well-prepared for a successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Remember, it won’t be perfect—things will go off track, but that’s why the last point is crucial: don’t freak out. Embrace the process, have fun with your campaigns, and make the sales you’ve been preparing for all year.
If you have any more questions in the meantime, feel free to reach out or let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to give your feedback, too!
