8 Awesome Black Friday Email Campaigns You Can Steal This Holiday Season

Last year email marketing drove over 27% of holiday sales according to Custora. With this year’s Black Friday set to be the biggest one yet, that number is only expected to rise.

As a marketer and business owner, it can often be difficult to come up with great emails with eye-catching images and actionable copy. That’s why I like to draw inspiration and ideas from other successful marketers and businesses.

I’m going to share eight awesome Black Friday email campaigns that you can steal and start implementing into your business. In each example, I’m going to break down what it is, why it’s so effective, and how you can implement their ideas into your holiday campaigns.

1. The Simple Sale Announcement Email

Subject: Black Friday - 40% off everything!
What it is: A simple but well-executed email from CanvasPop announcing their store-wide Black Friday sale.
Why it works: This email is all business. It clearly announces the sale and has a focused call-to-action. Sometimes, keeping things simple is the best way to go.
How to implement it: Take the simple approach to your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale announcements. Have a clear subject line with the sale discount, and include a call-to-action in your email that brings customers to your homepage or page with the products that are on sale.

2. The Bold Imagery and Animations Email

 

Subject: Don’t wait ’til tomorrow! Take up to 50% off our most popular inventions right now.
What it is: Quirky uses a quirky image animation to announce their Black Friday weekend sale.
Why it works: I don’t often get animated GIFs in my email, let alone one as fun and entertaining as this. This email really stands out from other Black Friday sale announcements that will be barraging customer inboxes.
Also, all the important information is immediately clear. Free shipping, the discount, and the day the sale ends are all there in plain sight.
How to implement it: Start using animated GIFs and very unique imagery in your Black Friday emails, especially if it matches the tone of your brand.
Again, keeping your most important information above the fold is important.

3. The Free Gift Email

Subject: Black Friday + Giving Tanks
What it is: Storq created a free gift coupon instead of offering a store-wide sale.
Why it works: Storq uses Black Friday as an opportunity to increase the average order value in their store. Offering a free gift is an enticing way to get customers to your store on Black Friday.
The email design is also simple and effective. The coupon code really stands out and the instructions are clear and easy to follow.
How to implement it: You can still participate in Black Friday even if your business doesn’t typically discount or you can’t afford to lower your prices. Black Friday gives you a reason to contact your customers, so email them with any offer you can create that weekend.
If you can’t lower your prices, consider offering a free gift with a minimum purchase amount. You can easily do this within Shopify or with an app from the Shopify App Store to help.
Keep your emails simple and don’t overcomplicate your offer. When it comes to copy, less is often more.

4. The Last-Minute Extended Sale Email

Subject: EXTENDED! 50%. Off. Everything.
What it is: Julep extends their Black Friday weekend sale into Tuesday.
Why it works: Not everyone will have the opportunity to check out your Black Friday sale. Extending the sale last-second (and running a sale when competitors just ended theirs) gives customers another chance to purchase from your store.
This email is also effective because it’s unexpected. If you’ve been consistently warning customers about the impending end of your Black Friday sale and then spring a last-second extension, it’s more likely to stick out in people’s inboxes.
Lastly, the email is well designed. The three most important elements in this email contrast well against the rest: “Extended 48 hours,” “50% off everything,” and “use code cyberwow.”
How to implement it: Consider extending your sale and surprising your customers. You can even offer a new discount for the extended sale to get customers off the fence.
Don’t forget to make the most important elements in your email stand out, too. Use Julep’s email design as inspiration.

5. The Black Friday Giveaway Email

Subject: Blacked-Out Friday
What it is: Huckberry turns their Black Friday sale into a giveaway.
Why it works: Giveaways and contests can inject even more excitement into a Black Friday sale. Huckberry is giving their customers more incentive to shop on their site during Black Friday by giving each purchase a random entry into their giveaway.
Huckberry also includes more copy in their emails than most stores. Huckberry is very keen on conveying messages and telling stories in their emails, even on Black Friday.
This email in particular is too long to show in this blog post, but below their Black Friday sale announcement are stories, including the harrowing trip to Antarctica mentioned at the top of the email.
Despite being Black Friday, Huckberry hasn’t changed their established tone. Huckberry continues to deliver interesting stories, even in their most promotion-heavy emails.
How to implement it: Run a contest alongside your sale or give every customer that makes a purchase the chance to win a prize. Check out the giveaway apps in our Shopify App Store to help you put this together.
Finally, don’t diverge from your original messaging or style. If you’ve been delivering great content or stories with each email, that doesn’t need to change for Black Friday. Find a way to weave your Black Friday emails into what you’ve been doing well previously. Make it organic.

6. The Black Friday Humor Email

Subject: Sweats + Shorts = THE SCHWORTS
What it is: Chubbies stays consistent with their tone and branding and uses humor to promote their Black Friday sale on schworts.
Why it works: This email looks a lot different than the a typical Black Friday sale emails. First, the subject line is great. Next, the image of someone lounging on their couch pouring food down their mouth after Thanksgiving is really funny.
There isn’t a lot of copy in this email but it’s still effective at conveying why you need their comfortable shorts. Chubbies also shows you their shorts looking comfortable instead of only telling you that they’re comfortable.
Chubbies also chooses to focus on one product to promote their Black Friday sale instead of announcing a store-wide sale. This is far more effective since leaving customers with too much choice can be overwhelming.
How to implement it: Have fun with your marketing. If it suits your brand, experiment with unique subject lines for your emails and use humorous images.
You don’t need a lot of copy in your Black Friday emails to convey a message. Don’t just tell your customers your shorts are comfortable, show them in an entertaining way.
Lastly, you don’t need to promote several products in your Black Friday email. Promote your Black Friday sale with one product (or a few) instead. Consider choosing your best-selling or most interesting product and promote it on Black Friday to drive traffic.

7. The Scarcity Email

Subject: Woosters Almost Sold Out! Black Friday Prices + Free Shipping For A Few More Hours!
What it is: Greats gives their customers a Black Friday status report on the shoes on sale.
Why it works: Greats uses elements of scarcity throughout the email. “Moving fast,” “Almost sold out,” and “No time to be on the fence” creates a sense of urgency. Even the subject line has urgency in it with “Woosters almost sold out!”.
Of course, Greats’ personality shines through in this email as well.
How to implement it: Learn to create scarcity in your email marketing, especially on Black Friday. Create urgency and use your emails to remind your customers that your sale will be ending. Also, when your products are selling like hot cakes, tell people!

8. The Against-The-Grain Email

Subject: This Is Not A Sale
What it is: Everlane uses Black Friday as a platform to raise awareness and money for workers in China.
Why it works: The subject line is strong and piques people’s curiosity, encouraging them to open the email to learn more. You don’t often get emails on Black Friday letting you know “this is not a sale.”
It isn’t a bait and switch either; Everlane goes against the grain and promises to give 100% of their Black Friday profit to their factories in China to improve working conditions.
This gesture also helps build Everlane’s brand. It also has the chance to be picked up by news sites social media since it’s unique and generous for a time of year where businesses are focused on profit.
How to implement it: If you’re tired of running the same Black Friday sale every year, or your customers have grown to expect the same from you every year, change things up. Consider making this year’s Black Friday all about your customer or someone else in need.
It could be your opportunity to give back a little while also creating a positive brand image for your store.

Over to You

If email marketing isn’t a large part of your growth strategy, take the time to learn why it’s important for your business. If your email list is small, start building it now to make the most out of Black Friday. You don’t need a gigantic email list for your Black Friday to matter, but the bigger your list, the better. With the right amount of engaged subscribers and awesome, well-crafted emails, your business can have a great Black Friday.
Want to crush it this Black Friday? Check out the 26-point checklist I put together to position your store for success this holiday season.
If you have any questions or Black Friday email ideas you’d like to share, leave a comment below. I engage with and respond to everyone.

To View Original Article: https://www.shopify.com/blog/56776517-8-awesome-black-friday-email-campaigns-you-can-steal-this-holiday-season

Retailers, Use These 39 Spring Cleaning Tips For Your Business

03 | 22 | 15            

One of my favorite stories as a kid was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  Whether you saw it in Disney’s Fantasia or read the old German poem, the plot is the same.
 

5 Customer Engagement Best Practices That Will Dramatically Boost Your Business

by: Kathy Caprino

We can find a hundred articles a day online today about “customer engagement” but to me, a good deal of it sounds like lip service – slick advice about how to appear deeply interested in and connected to your customer, and how to “convince” (dare I say “trick”) customers into thinking you really care. “In reality, says Zendesk’s Founder and CEO Mikkel Svane, “many organizations still view customer service as a cost center that is an unfortunate necessity.”

I was intrigued to learn about Svane’s new book, Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business that shares the real-life story of how he and two thirty-something Danish friends started a company in the kitchen of a Copenhagen loft. It’s a modern “making it in Silicon Valley story” that will resonate with founders just getting started to serial entrepreneurs with similar battle scars. It’s a story of people who pursued their dream—and who against a lot of odds had a chance to live it. It’s also a story about growing up—and how balancing vulnerability and curiosity isn’t always easy. Now, Zendesk is an 800-person company based in San Francisco that has made a significant impact on the customer service industry in just seven years, with over 45,000 clients in 140 countries.

Mikkel Svane Photo Courtesy of Zendesk

Svane shares this:
“You often hear this advice heading into marriage: don’t stop working at making the relationship better, and don’t ever take the other person for granted. Learning how to build a great customer relationship is not that different from learning how to build meaningful relationships in our personal lives. The sooner we are able to understand that we are not the center of the universe, and that it is a privilege for us to be in the lives of our customers, the better our company will do.

In my new book Startupland, I chronicle our entrepreneurial journey from three guys in a Copenhagen loft to launching and building Zendesk, a global cloud-based customer service platform. It’s a very personal story about how we started in the early days, but most importantly, it’s about all the relationships that shaped us along the way. These experiences have deeply impacted our company culture and values and how we interact with our customers on a daily basis.

Along this journey, we learned some great tips on how to build better relationships with customers. Here are five of my own customer engagement secrets to help improve your business.”

Svane’s five customer engagement best practices are:

Consider the entire customer experience.

Customers have a much better memory than companies do. The better you are at putting yourself in their shoes and having empathy to see what the entire customer journey looked like for them, the more successful you will be. The customer who was extremely excited and waited in line for hours to buy the new iPhone is the same person who tweets and blogs about it when it breaks. Those two moments are connected, and you must connect the dots.

 

Tip: Did you get an angry email with a customer wanting a return on something? Have your customer service team browse the customer’s public social channels back a few weeks or months to get an idea for their “entire experience.” Maybe they were a brand evangelist just three months ago, or the purchase was a birthday present for their child. It is important to know the context outside of the initial complaint and to understand the entire relationship of a customer to your company.

Recognize the right relationships and adapt.
Not every relationship is created equal. Some friends are great to meet up with at the bars, others are lifelong friends you keep in touch with despite differing geographies, and others simply wave when you pass by. The goal is to have the right relationship with each individual – and being able to speak to each person in a language that resonates with them. This requires becoming skilled at reading people. Figure out how to accept and improve the relationships you have, and say “no” when a customer relationship is unhealthy.

Tip: Ever heard of the book, The 5 Love Languages? The New York Times bestseller posited that people give and receive love in different languages, and that it’s all about making sure two people are speaking the right languages to each other. Although the book is meant for personal relationships, it’s a great concept you can apply to customer relationship building. Each customer is unique and can feel “loved” in different ways. Does one customer care more about the tone to which they are spoken? Or another care less about tone and more about a quick solution? Think about what these categories are and how you can speak the right language to the right person.

Be something actual humans can relate to.
People like talking to humans, not robots. Back in the day, when we were first starting out with the company, we tried making fancy emails that were perfect and without typos. No one responded. Then we decided we would change it up a bit. We’d craft more personal and unique opening sentences. We added spelling errors. Soon, we realized that we were getting a higher response rate. Once our customers saw that there was a human being (and not a robot) writing all these responses, they were more willing to write us back and interact with us.

If you asked any customer to choose between a “bot” that worked behind some virtual customer service desk versus a real, smiling, human being, of course they would choose the latter. It is not just a “nice to have” when it comes to having a personality as a company, it is vital, when customers have so many other choices in the marketplace. Many companies don’t succeed because they forget to be human.

Tip: In every message that you send to customers, leave one line where you add in something unique and personal. Is your customer back in the east coast going through the worst storm of the year? Include a line wishing that they are staying safe and warm this week. Talk to them like you would talk to your friend.

Empower people to do what’s best.

You should always encourage your employees to act like people.  This means giving them the freedom and room to be who they are – listen how they would listen to a friend – or solve a problem creatively, with their special touch. Did you really screw up on an order? Send them a pizza with the words “I’m Sorry” spelled out in pepperoni. I am sure your customer would appreciate this much more than a canned “I’m Sorry” email. Little mistakes or inefficiencies will inevitably occur when you allow people to make their own decisions, but the business can embrace these as the very things that make the business easier for customers to relate to – and ultimately, more human.

Tip: Encourage each member of your customer service team to come up with one thing that is their “personal signature.” Do they love inserting funny GIFs into messages to get a smile from a customer? Do they have one “grand gesture” they can offer if there is a key customer you’re trying to make happy or win back (i.e. spontaneous pizza delivery)? Empower them to bring to the table how they can best help customers in their own personal, unique voices.

Be truly transparent.
Once you lift the veil between you and your customer and they see that you are being real with them, you’d be surprised how much more empathy you will get from their end. People relate to and appreciate organizations that are open and honest. It’s not a perfect world, and sometimes you will not be able to serve up a solution on a silver platter in exactly the way they would want. Give them all the information you have – good or bad – and in a timely manner. We are up against years of people feeling like companies are not on their side and that they are out to get them with hidden fees and confusing return policies. The only way to build the kind of trust that lasts is to show your cards.

Tip: Don’t be afraid to share reasons for a delay in response. Are you understaffed because a team member had a personal family emergency? Share that. Once you show that behind your brand is a team of real, breathing people, just like them, it becomes easier to build a mutual understanding of trust and empathy.
Finally, remember there has never been a more important time for a company to focus on building authentic, real, relationships with their customers than now. For a lot of businesses, building customer loyalty means rewarding repeat behavior. You buy a sandwich five times and you get the fifth one free – but are they coming back because they love your sandwiches and the interactions they have with your employees, or are they coming back for a free meal? Customers are people who have a very tangible experience with your product and brand, and it should be the mission of your company to make sure it is an authentic and meaningful one. The customer voice has never been louder.

To view the original article please visit: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2015/01/19/5-customer-engagement-best-practices-that-will-dramatically-boost-your-business/3/

6 Mistakes that Can Get Your Emails Marked as Spam (Even if You’re Not a Spammer)

                   

You’re not a spammer.

You value customer relationships and work hard to build trust with your customer base.

But even with all the work that you’re doing, you’re still seeing a handful of spam complaints when you send out your email marketing campaigns.

What are you doing wrong?

Because spam reports are often a matter of opinion — someone receives your email, decides it is unwanted, and clicks to “report as spam” — it can be difficult to figure out what you’re doing wrong.

While there’s no foolproof system for avoiding spam reports completely, there are certain warning signs you can watch out for as you prepare to send your next email campaign.

Let’s take a look at 6 common mistakes that you’ll want to avoid:

1. Not asking for permission

People open email from people they know, and they delete or mark as spam email from people they don’t recognize. It’s really that simple.

Permission-based email marketing is the best route to developing long-lasting email marketing relationships. When you ask permission, you’re able to build a list of people who are interested in your business and are excited to hear from you. They’re more likely to open your email, less likely to mark it as spam, and will stay with you longer than contacts that are added without consent.

Asking permission also keeps you in compliance with legislation such the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-Spam) and the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

2. Hiding your identity

Even if you ask for permission, if people can’t recognize that your emails are coming from you, they could still mark your emails as spam.

An easy fix to this problem is to use a familiar from name and from email address. If you have an email address that includes your business’s website, choose that address over one from a personal account.

Another easy fix is to add your branding to the emails you send out. Include your logo in a prominent location at the top of your email and choose colors that represent your business.

3. Sending irrelevant content

Your email content doesn’t have to be bad or offensive to be marked as spam. Often, the worst offense you can commit is to include content that simply isn’t interesting or relevant to the people you’re trying to reach.

Even if people aren’t marking your emails as spam, if they aren’t interested in what you’re sending it’s likely that they will send your emails to trash without giving you a second thought.

Pay attention to what’s working with your audience. Look at your email reports to see which content is getting the highest number of clicks. If you’re still not sure what people are interested in, ask them! You can use an online survey to collect feedback from your audience or update your sign-up form to include options for people to choose when signing up.

4. Breaking promises

When someone signs up to receive your email communications, they do so with the expectation of receiving something of value. If you don’t communicate clearly what that value is — or if they are signing up for one thing and receiving something different — you could be putting yourself at risk.

Give subscribers clear expectations before they share their email address. Let them know how often they’ll be hearing from you, what type of information they’ll receive, and why it’s a good idea to sign up.

Then, set up a welcome email to re-affirm their decision and remind them about what they’re going to receive.

5. Overwhelming your audience

Selling your products or services is an important part of email marketing, but if you’re sending too much promotional material you could be driving some people away.

This is why it’s so important to find a balance in the type of content you send out. As a standard, we recommend 80 percent helpful/informative content and 20 percent promotional.

When you are including promotional content, make sure it’s timely and relevant to the person you’re trying to reach. People are much more receptive to promotions if it helps them solve a problem they are faced with at that time.

Finally, keep an eye on your overall sending frequency. Even emails that are jam-packed with helpful content can be viewed as spam if you’re sending too frequently.

6. Making it difficult to opt-out

Often, people will mark email as spam because they simply want to get off a list.

While it can be difficult to let go, if you have people who aren’t interested in receiving your emails, it’s better to give them the option to opt out than to try to keep them on your email list.

If you’re a Constant Contact customer, there will be an unsubscribe link in every email you send out. Also, make sure to monitor the inbox for the address you are using to send your email campaigns, as many people will reply to your email and ask to be taken off your list.

If you’re focused on providing value to your email audience and are taking the right steps to obtain permission, you’re already on the right track to avoiding spam complaints.

Hopefully these tips help you solve your spam setbacks.

To view the original article please visit: http://blogs.constantcontact.com/avoid-spam-reports/?cc=SM_FB_ConstantContact