Killer Black Friday & Cyber Monday Email Sequence

Killer Black Friday Email Sequence

It’s time to start thinking about that Black Friday email sequence you’ve been talking about doing but putting off.

I’m going to show you how to not only launch a killer Black Friday email sequence but automatically hit your non-buyers with a Cyber Monday sale extension that extends the offer.

In an ideal world, you’d have another offer to give your entire audience for each sale.

But we don’t exactly live in an “ideal world,” now do we?

As Tim Ferris would say, “The best diet is the one you stick to”. So let’s give you a Black Friday email sequence that’s easy to actually implement because sales you make are better than not taking advantage of both events.

What’s Black Friday?

The history of Black Friday goes all the way back to 1952.

But, even if the official credit goes back to the ’50s, it didn’t really become “a thing” until the early 2000s.

I remember when it first started really taking over retailing. It was actually kind of fun at first because the crowds weren’t so big or seemingly deranged to throw away a week of their life over a $100 savings.

At the time, most retailers had taken over the “Black Friday” term to mean the first day of the entire year that they finally tipped over from red (losing money) to black (making money).

Even as a kid, hearing that retailers were losing money from January 1st up until Thanksgiving here in the United States was a terrifying prospect.

Thankfully, Black Friday is now co-opted by online retailers. So it has become another reason to launch a special offer for your audience, no camping in parking lots needed.

What’s Cyber Monday?

If Black Friday felt a bit like a made-up reason to sell stuff, Cyber Monday seals the deal.

It would appear that the first reference to Cyber Monday was in 2005. While this particular event was an invention of marketers as an excuse to give discounts, consumers don’t seem to mind since they benefit from the deals.

So if no one gets hurt, what’s the harm?

You generate some quick revenue; your customers get a great deal.

Why Do I Need a Black Friday Email Sequence?

If you want to participate in the billions of dollars being exchanged around Thanksgiving, then you need a Black Friday email sequence – end of story.

Even if you’re business isn’t seasonal, this is when the rush of holiday dollars comes out in a hurry.

No matter if you’re a brick-and-mortar company or online only, a strong Black Friday email sequence is going to help you drive sales for your products and services.

One thing that is unique about Black Friday and Cyber Monday is the brevity. The very nature of the “sales holiday” is that they are shorter than standard sales.

When we ran more traditional 48 or 72-hour sales, we would find that over 50% of our sales would come in the last few hours. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’re just fitting the marketing into a smaller window.

So I highly encourage you to consider emailing several times towards the end of the day (a push to the close).

If you can get consistent about your offer, you’re going to find success.

The Power of Scarcity

One of the biggest levers for a successful Black Friday email sequence is scarcity.

When there is a limited supply or limited time to get something – people will react. This forces them to make a decision NOW instead of putting it off for some other time.

Just think about the last decision you made for something that was limited.

The classic Nintendo when it first came out in a limited run?

Sold out everywhere in minutes. (Quantity scarcity)

The price of water at a major sporting event?

Absurdly expensive. (Place scarcity)

The car salesman who’s behind on his quota at the end of the month?

He’s eager to make a deal and hit his numbers. (Time scarcity)

Each type of scarcity is super powerful because it forces the prospect to decide something right now. As humans, we’re very good at putting off purchase decisions until a later time or day.

Pulling on the various scarcity levers will dramatically increase your conversions by forcing a decision now.

In the case of a really great Black Friday email sequence, you’re likely focusing on time scarcity because the flash sale is limited to RIGHT NOW. But it may also be quantity-limited, which is common with retailers.

When you limit quantity AND price, you create a super attractive price you can advertise, but you limit your hit to margin and/or losses by capping the number of units.

Killer Black Friday / Cyber Monday Framework

Okay – so you understand how insanely powerful scarcity is.

And now, you’re ready to start mapping out your next Black Friday email sequence.

I’m going to break down the three things you need to include in order to be successful.

#1 An Offer Your Audience Cares About

This may seem silly to even mention, but your offer has to be relevant to your audience.

If your audience is all about health and fitness, giving them a discount on Krispy Kreme isn’t going to cut it.

Often times the easiest thing to do is take your best-selling product or service and find a way to make the offer a no-brainer for anyone who has been considering a purchase before.

Another worthy option depending on your business, is “more of the good stuff”. This works when you sell something that is consumable, where you can offer past customers a great repeat purchase option.

#2 Ability To Discount, Bonus or Both

All good deals do a great job of tempting prospective customers to buy when they were considering before. If someone is interested in a new TV but hasn’t purchased it yet, they are in the market. They need something to tip them over the edge.

Discounts are a common way to stimulate a purchase, but some business owners worry about training their customers to only buy when things are on sale.

Another option to stimulate a sale is to offer a bonus. Instead of discounting that TV, you might include a free soundbar and BluRay player with purchase. You’re stacking value that doesn’t normally exist to get them across the finish line.

Ideally, you want to stack a discount AND some bonuses.

Maybe your product is only 20% off instead of a more aggressive 50%, but it comes with extra pieces of training, software or some other deliverable that adds complimentary value to the core purchase.

#3 Automatic Follow-Up Black Friday w/Cyber Monday

I’m always surprised when I see how many business owners and marketers ONLY run a Black Friday sale OR a Cyber Monday sale. You should be running both!

The easiest way to accomplish this is simply to re-open your Black Friday offer for Cyber Monday for anyone who missed the first offer because their inbox was flooded or they weren’t *quite* convinced yet.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still advisable to do at least one of the following:

Add a fresh “frequently asked questions” section

If someone showed interest thanks to your original Black Friday email sequence but didn’t buy, then they still have objections that you need to answer.

Frequently Asked Questions or “FAQs” are a great way to anticipate the questions holding back your prospects. Take a look at the replies you get to your emails, questions in support, etc. These are a great place to start when crafting your FAQ’s, and should be a hint in the areas where you need more.

Don’t hesitate to overbuild this section either. You’d rather someone be able to find the answer to their question and feel like you’ve really thought something through vs. walking away.

Provide an additional case study

Do you think anything is more compelling to a prospect than another customer telling them how happy they are? Testimonials are extremely effective because they are often relatable and offer a differing point of view than you as the product owner.

Testimonials can also often be leveraged into a full-blown case study about the success of a customer who used your product or service. Show your prospect the kind of transformation they can have by becoming a customer.

And yes, transformations can be as simple as “comfortable at home watching the Super Bowl on my new TV”.

Try to not overthink this one. Just give a great example or two of happy customers and their successful outcomes.

Come up with at least one added bonus

This is one of my favorite ways to present something differently is with a new added bonus.

I love this method because it’s often easy to find something you’ve already included in some training and simply position it differently. You might have a relevant interview, another customer case study, or a “behind the scenes” footage that can all add to the experience.

In some cases, if you overdid the content for a piece of training, you can simply reposition it. For one of our products, we did a relevant interview with an industry leader. The interview was available to everyone, but we didn’t advertise it on the sales page.

(We avoided promoting it on the sales page because it was already a pretty extensive product).

However, it made for a perfect “flash bonus” item to call out to those on the fence. The content was already there; everyone already got access to it. The only difference was positioning it at the right time for a maximum return.

Our Automated Black Friday/Cyber Monday Campaign

Black Friday email sequence top level overview

In order to accomplish our goal of putting all contacts through a sale for both days, we’ve stacked them into a single sequence using smart delay timers.

As a result, you have your Black Friday email sequence properly spaced out from the Cyber Monday email sequence.

Overview of the Black Friday email sequence auto-launch

To pull this off, all you’d need to do is add contacts to this sequence the week of Black Friday. Just create the tag you want to use and create an automation rule like this:

How to setup your Black Friday email sequence kickoff

Then, do a search for the audience you want to see this campaign and apply the tag you created.

The delay timers will automatically wait until Friday to send the first two emails and Monday to send the next two emails. If you look at the bottom of the screenshot above, the sequence is listening for the “Black Friday Customer” goal to be met.

Configuring that goal looks like this:

Black Friday email sequence customer goal

So the tag that gets applied to satisfy this goal is part of the fulfilment sequence.

During fulfillment, we remove the prospect tag and apply the customer tag. The customer tag is what trips the goal completion and stops the auto-sale sequence from sending any more emails.

Black Friday customer email fulfillment sequence

Of course, you might need to add more here for your product fulfillment.

Some of you may be doing fulfillment by having your cart add the customer to a membership site. Others may have additional tags you want to include during the “apply tag” action.

Either way, this is a very flexible foundation to start with.

Steal This Campaign In a Few Clicks

So you’re ready to launch your very own Black Friday email sequence with automatic Cyber Monday follow-up?

Fantastic! The bottom line of your business will thank you.

Getting this setup isn’t that hard now that you have the framework and blueprint to work from. It’s more a matter of just knocking it out and watching the sales roll in.

Now, if you want to run this exact campaign, you have two options.

#1 Clone Into Your Campaign Refinery Account

One of the features our customers tell us they love the most is the ability to access our library of proven campaigns. If you see a campaign you’d like to use (such as this one), you can clone it to your account in a single click.

Super powerful, and so fast that you might ask yourself, “Was that it?!”.

Start by making sure you have access to Campaign Refinery by going here.

Then, simply navigate to “Campaigns”, click on “Campaign Library,” and filter down to “Sale” campaigns.

This particular campaign is called “Black Friday / Cyber Monday Flash Sale”.

Click the copy button, and the entire campaign, including the email copy, forms, and automation rules, will be instantly cloned into your account. All you need to do now is edit the names of the tags to match your specific product and offer.

Without question, using Campaign Refinery is the biggest time hack you can do to shortcut your way to success.

#2 Download Our PDF and Configure Yourself

Even though we’ve poured our blood, sweat and tears into making Campaign Refinery exceptional, we know everyone is at a different place in their business.

You might just not be ready to make the switch, even if it expedites your execution and delivers better results.

But even if we haven’t been able to convince you of all the benefits that come with being a Campaign Refinery customer, we want to make sure you walk away with something that makes you more money right now.

Just click here and tell us where to email you the PDF of this campaign.

The PDF version includes all emails and tells you what delay timers we used, plus some suggested things to try for other timer options if your tool supports a more granular approach.

However, the PDF download can’t:

  • Automatically create your forms for you
  • Generate your tags for segmentation and triggers
  • Create your automation rules in a single click

We’re excited to see how many of you run a more effective sale by stacking the two shopping holidays. Personally, I’m most excited for those who were otherwise going to skip this opportunity to now get results.

That’s basically like playing with house money.

If you’re interested in more campaigns like this, we encourage you to check out our free Facebook group called “Marketing Automation” where we regularly share campaigns as well as tips and best practices.

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