Happy November!
The month of November is upon us which marks the beginning of the shopping season, and with Black Friday round the corner we have come to approach that time of the year where every business wants to be noticed and loved by both – leads and customers, putting the pressure on marketers to make it happen.
Afterall, us marketers are the ones to serve our valuable brands to the public, ensuring that the marketing operations run successfully with a smooth flow. This becomes significantly vital during this super-hectic period specifically in the B2C world as we swim closer to Black Friday where all businesses are determined to maximise their sales, trying their best to capture as many leads and customers as possible through powerful marketing strategies.
A core element within our marketing arsenal is email. This is a direct form of communication between you and your lead where you are given about 20-seconds to introduce yourself and capture the attention of the recipient before they decide to hit the delete button. Therefore, the importance of making your email look its best and stand out from the rest of that monotonous inbox list is crucial. First impressions weigh a tonne – trust us!
5 Comes Before 20
We established that you have about 20-seconds to entice the reader before they pace to the delete button – but what comes before this? As we approach the final quarter of the year, inboxes get busier with promotional emails of all sorts as businesses prepare for Black Friday, Boxing Day, and Christmas campaigns. There needs to be a pull to make that reader open the email in the first place. What can grab the recipient’s attention towards your email in their lengthy list of promotional emails?
Before the big 20-second countdown, comes the assessment of the subject line where you have approximately 5-seconds to grasp the attention of the reader as this is what they use to determine whether the email is even worth opening.
Once you pass this stage, it is safe to say that the recipient reckons you’re not too bad! And that is where you receive your 20-second bonus for the recipient to judge your true worth through a 20-second skim through your email.
These 5-seconds are to be used extra cautiously as they are very precious. They can make or break the entire relationship. Just be sure to keep it short and snappy, stating the purpose of your email.
Black Friday is an extremely popular time for shopping as it marks the beginning of the shopping season, therefore appeals to most B2C’s as retailers enter their peak sales season. As the public is on the scout to grab the best deals possible, the B2C world must embrace this opportunity and grab the attention of their recipients embedding a Black Friday deal into their subject line.
You can assess the effectiveness of your subject line using our Subject Lines Live tester by clicking here!
Inviting Visuals
Applying attractive visuals to your email is a powerful and well-known eye grabber of those readers. The content inside the email is the dominant factor, but the visuals that surround the content also hold reasonable value.
If you are sending a themed email such as a newsletter, construct a default newsletter design that reflects your company well. Use the company signature colours to invigorate a crisp and uniform the newsletter theme. Embedding specific themes for the distinct types of emails that you send is the perfect strategy to finetune your email game, and ensure they are best presented.
If you are sending an email about a particular occasion, infuse the occasion into the email by designing such visuals that directly reflect it.
For example, if the theme of your email is Black Friday, infuse a Black Friday theme into your email visuals, so that when the reader opens the email, they instantly notice something different, something unique, something significant. With just a glimpse of the email, they should be able to receive the ‘Black Friday feels’ from it.
Tweak it with Personalisation
Personalisation can take you a long, long way as it helps you stand out from the rest of a recipient’s inbox list. Sometimes, the simplest alterations can make the biggest differences such as addressing an individual by their name. So don’t be afraid to take your salutation up a notch through applying personalisation by greeting the reader with their name instead of a basic salutation of ‘Hi’ or ‘Hi there.’
Optimise your email personalisation strategy by integrating browser behaviour within your emails, using dynamic emails to their best.
Analyse the behaviour of your website visitors, then ping them a personalised email according to their identified interests through their browsing history. Talk about what they like rather than what you like. This is the ideal first step to nurturing that lead.
During the Black Friday season, sales revenues are rapidly boosted with the use of product recommendations and exclusive discount codes. Therefore, embedding personalisation using similar product recommendations according to the search history of the website visitor can be very effective. Even an exclusive Black Friday discount code just for them as a gesture of your appreciation could spark that relationship and take the journey a long way.
Available Exit Option
No matter how strong your subject line is, how pretty your email looks, or how valuable your content inside is, some people will simply just not be interested. This is in fact an inevitable matter, and we must respect the decisions of these individuals. This does not have to mean you aren’t doing business right, it just means that they are not looking for what you have on offer at the minute – and this is absolutely fine.
To respect such circumstances, we must have a clear withdrawal option presented in our emails so that if recipients are not interested, they are able to unsubscribe.
Giving recipients a straight-forward withdrawal process remains a core element of excellent customer service, so do not hesitate in displaying this option for them.
Email Up Your Marketing Practices
During this symbolic period where shopping reaches its peak, the pressure falls onto marketers as businesses are set on maximising their leads and sales. There is no better time than this peak shopping season for marketers to adopt an AI marketing strategy within their marketing practices. Being an AI marketing automation platform, our goal is to ease the pressure on marketers especially during busy times such as now, by taking off some of the weight from your shoulders, giving you back your valuable time to spend elsewhere.
Our all-in-one software can build the perfect journey for your customers by sending across the right message at the right time, allowing marketers such as yourself to build and automate your email campaigns.
What better time is there than now to fire up personalised and automated emails? Steady on now! You don’t wanna fall behind on the shopping vogue, especially at this time of the year!