You don’t need someone to tell you that Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping events of the year, but as one retailer among many, how do you draw in customers? The trick to mastering Black Friday and Cyber Monday is to find a way to make your emails stand out in your customers’ overflowing inboxes.
Let’s look at some great examples of Black Friday emails and do a deep dive into how you can make their tactics work for you.
Best Black Friday advertising campaigns
From offering exclusive deals to making use of appealing graphics, the best Black Friday email campaigns grab — and hold — customers’ attention.
Astro West
Most brands are so focused on Black Friday sales that they forget that the shopping holiday is tied to Thanksgiving.
This Astro West ad stands out because it starts by thanking customers and then positions the sale as a form of gratitude. It has some great lines, including “You help make Astro West more than a business: you make us a family,” which create a bond with readers and lead to an authentic feel compared to ads that are solely about the sale.
Apple
Waiting until Black Friday to send your campaign’s first email is often too late. Using a drip campaign is an excellent way to generate interest before your sales. This email from Apple does an outstanding job of clearly outlining the brand’s upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.
Another thing this ad does well is offer an additional gift card for shopping directly through Apple. For a brand that sells through multiple other channels, like Walmart and Amazon, sending this extra incentive ahead of time can help capture more sales through its website and stores.
Soundstripe
Urgency is a key tactic to use for Black Friday sales, but it can come across as too aggressive if you’re not careful. Soundstripe does a nice job of subtly creating a fear of missing out (FOMO) by using the words “biggest sale of the year.”
As ecommerce has ballooned, shopping holidays like Prime Day and Singles’ Day sometimes outshine Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This ad makes it obvious that the best deals for Soundstripe are now.
With 40% or more of consumers regretting past Black Friday bargain buys, this tactic reassures buyers and can help them feel better about a purchase after the fact.
Margin
Similar to Soundstripe’s email, Margin’s campaign makes it clear that its Black Friday deals are the best ever because it’s the only sales event it does during the year. Margin also makes a smart choice by encouraging customers to take advantage of the low prices and buy in bulk. The email goes on to suggest that the sale is a fantastic time to stock up on products for the year or buy gifts for friends and family.
These suggestions come across as friendly reminders that help customers save money. As icing on the cake, the brand advertises its seamless online shopping experience. Instead of requiring a promo code, sales are applied automatically, and customers get free shipping.
The Washington Post
When’s the last time you bought something for 99 cents? You had to think about it, right?
The Washington Post knows that a 99-cent price tag is going to capture attention and put it front and center in this Black Friday email. Leveraging a bold color, large font, and dark background keeps the reader focused on the strongest selling point. From there, a note that the offer is only available for a limited time adds subtle urgency.
Everlane
Matching your Black Friday offers to your brand’s ethos is one way to create a memorable and effective campaign. Everlane’s brand is all about ethical clothing production and transparency with buyers. For this Black Friday campaign, it leaned into this mission and connected with customers’ desires to give back by making a donation to help U.S. farmers with each purchase.
What’s great about this email is that it makes customers feel that they’ve done something good by buying from this brand. This type of campaign works incredibly well around Thanksgiving, as shoppers are focused on gratitude and community. Not to mention, it’s going to come across as authentic and unique compared to ads and emails that are solely pushing consumption.
Ray-Ban
Tailoring your Black Friday campaigns to different customer segments makes it easier to craft messages that really resonate with each group, which goes a long way toward improving conversion rates and driving revenue during the sale.
In a world where new customers often get the best treatment, using Black Friday to give some love to your loyal, returning buyers is a smart play. Ray-Ban made use of this strategy by offering exclusive deals to existing customers in The Ones community.
The early access encourages people to stay members and drives sales before the actual holiday by making subscribers feel special.
Adidas
With 40% of consumers planning to complete their holiday shopping between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s a terrific opportunity for brands to position their products as gifts for friends and family.
Adidas took full advantage of the gift-buying aspect for this campaign and made sure to include free expedited shipping to ensure items arrived before the holidays. For a seamless shopping experience, it included visual links to popular gift categories in its online store.
Hims
Let’s face it. Your email is not the only one customers will get on Black Friday. One of the best ways to get customers’ attention is to focus on the essence of what makes your brand unique.
One brand that knows exactly who it is and makes it work for it is Hims. Hims is all about normalizing health challenges and making a personal connection with customers, which it achieves by using a lighthearted sense of humor and playful double entendres like the one in this Black Friday campaign.
If humor works for you, it can be an effective tactic to outshine the other brands popping up in your customers’ inboxes.
Moment
This Moment campaign is another example of creating urgency and stoking FOMO without being too aggressive with language or visuals. Using the heading “Deals this good won’t last forever” highlights how good of an opportunity the sale is and starts an internal countdown in readers’ minds.
It also uses phrases like “don’t miss your chance,” “supplies are limited,” and “get your order in ASAP” in the supporting text to underscore the urgency. The language is balanced by calming colors and a simple design that make the urgent phrases come across as good advice from a friend rather than a salesperson shoving discounts in your face.
Udemy
This Udemy email is another excellent example of how you can leverage segmentation to make your Black Friday campaigns come across as personal, rather than looking like every other mass email blast.
The brand targets different segments based on their educational interests, such as software and IT. By saying, “Students interested in Web Development also took these Programming Language courses,” Udemy is telling its subscribers, “Hey, we know you and we’re only going to send you recommendations that are relevant to your interests.”
If your brand caters to a wide range of customers and interests, segmentation is a must, especially on Black Friday. It’s a fantastic way to narrow down a vast product catalog into a few curated items that resonate the most with each group.
Kidly
Taking the time to craft a visually compelling email is one way to level up your Black Friday campaign game. Moving elements, such as GIFs or videos, go a long way toward capturing a reader’s attention and making them curious about what you have to offer.
Kidly sells children’s products ranging from clothes and shoes to toys and travel accessories. This email uses fun imagery and a play on words to capture the cute and aesthetically pleasing characteristics that set the brand apart. The falling snowflakes invoke the idea of holiday gift-giving, while the shifting penguins subtly create a sense of excitement and encourage readers to “Click now!”
Columbia
Taking segmentation one step further and leaning into personalization is one of the best ways to elevate your Black Friday ads. In a sea of generic messages, you’ll be able to stand out as the brand that really gets your customers.
Columbia’s Black Friday email nails the use of personalization by letting one single product be the focus. The language in the email makes it read like a friendly reminder you might get from a store associate who knows what you like. The use of click-to-reveal builds curiosity and encourages readers to engage, while providing additional recommended items with pricing details helps tease how good the discounts are.
Pulp & Press
Abandoned cart emails can work really well for Black Friday by re-engaging subscribers with a product they already showed interest in. In this campaign, Pulp & Press playfully reminds customers about forgotten items and demonstrates a sense of humor by saying, “Yes, we’re sending you the sign to buy.”
The lighthearted nature of the copy and the imagery makes this highly relevant and targeted email feel low pressure, which can be a tough balance to achieve on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
How to make your Black Friday marketing campaigns stand out
If you want to make the most of this holiday shopping season, here are some best practices you can implement today to level up your campaigns, stick out in the inbox, and drive more Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales for your business.
1. Be super clear
Before we get into the fun stuff, rule number 1 is to always be clear. The one thing you need to communicate is the details of your Black Friday deals, namely the discount amount and the date range of your sale.
Doing so creates excitement around the sale and makes for a better purchasing experience overall. It’s also helpful to highlight any additional benefits you provide, such as complimentary shipping, expedited shipping, or free gifts with purchase.
2. Opt for subtle urgency
“Subtle urgency” may sound like an oxymoron, but it just might be the secret to winning over more Black Friday shoppers. On a popular shopping holiday where people are prepared to be inundated with promotions and ads, you want to be able to create a sense of urgency without crafting emails that feel like they’re shouting in your customers’ faces to “shop now!”
One way to achieve this is by pairing urgent language with calming imagery and graphics. This works well for brands that are focused on pleasing aesthetics. Some other tips include focusing on curiosity and teasing the sale by crafting a fun email without using product imagery. This gives readers some incentive to click through to your website to see which items are discounted.
3. Start campaigns early
Getting a headstart with your email campaign helps you build excitement, make your brand top of mind with consumers, and avoid the inbox overflow on the day of the sale.
Sending emails ahead of time means you also get the advantage of encouraging earlier purchases before customers set a budget. Using an email automation platform to set up drip campaigns can help you stay organized while you beat the rush.
4. Leverage bulk buying
Bundling products together or advertising the benefits of buying in bulk is an excellent way to increase sales volume. For Black Friday, you can structure your promotions so that buyers get a bigger discount when they purchase more.
Another way to encourage bulk buying is through the language of your email campaign, whether it’s mentioning gifts to give or stocking up while prices are at their lowest.
5. Create a gifting guide
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are significant gift-buying times for Christmas and other holidays. If you want to increase average cart volume, embracing this trend is super effective. Not to mention, creating gifting guides for your products positions you as a brand that helps take tasks off your customers’ plates by making holiday shopping easy.
For ecommerce brands, make sure you clearly communicate that your products will arrive on time for the holidays. You may even want to incentivize shoppers with free expedited shipping for all products or carts that meet a minimum amount requirement.
If you have brick-and-mortar stores, let customers know if you offer buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) options or link to a map of locations where they can shop in person to ensure they have all their gifts ready by the holidays.
6. Optimize the mobile experience
The days of people lining up outside of a Best Buy or Target for hours before opening on Black Friday are dwindling. In 2023, 40.5 million Cyber Monday shoppers made purchases from their phones in the U.S. alone.
To make the most out of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, ensure that your emails are mobile optimized, especially your CTA buttons. Using a responsive design will ensure that your campaign looks compelling on screens and devices of all sizes.
7. Focus on giving
Giving is literally in the name of the U.S. holiday before Black Friday — “Thanksgiving” — and it’s in the spirit of holidays with gift-giving coming up. On a holiday that focuses on abundance and gratitude for what you have, it’s natural for many consumers to also think about ways to give back to others.
Aligning charitable campaigns with your Black Friday efforts can make both of them more impactful. While customers are bombarded with emails from retailers trying to get them to buy something, being the brand that focuses on giving makes you stick out.
8. Use segmentation and personalization
If you want to get your best email ROIs this Black Friday, it’s time to go beyond the basics. At the end of the day, it’s impossible to craft copy that hits home for everyone on your email list.
A marketing automation platform can help you leverage advanced tactics like segmentation and personalization that level up your campaigns and create emails that really resonate with each subscriber in your target audience.
Some powerful segmentation strategies to try this holiday season include product preferences, purchase history, and personal interests. For personalization, we recommend using relevant user data to customize each email, leveraging dynamic content, and trying AI product recommendations.
9. Pay attention to design
At the end of the day, your shoppers are living in a visual world. For Black Friday campaigns, it’s not enough to find the perfect copy and offer your biggest discounts. Your email has to be visually appealing and have elements that can hold a reader’s attention.
Understanding email design best practices, from image and video use to font and color selection, can take your campaign from just another message in the inbox to a memorable brand moment. One easy way to start improving your design is to use professionally crafted email templates as a base and then customize them to fit your brand.
Make your brand stand out this Black Friday
One thing that makes all of these top-tier campaigns exceptional is that they take the best practices above and make them work for their brand. Ultimately, the best Black Friday marketing strategy is one that aligns with the elements that make your brand unique.
GetResponse MAX can help you create engaging emails and automate delivery to maximize the ROI of your Black Friday campaigns. Book a demo today.