Black Friday and Cyber Monday Email Marketing Shopify and BigCommerce

10 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Email Marketing Tips

With Black Friday 2023 on November 24th, if you haven’t started preparing your email marketing campaigns, drop everything and start now. The latest Black Friday sales numbers for 2022 show that expenditure for this shopping holiday has rebounded following 2021’s dip. Total online sales hit $9.12 billion, the highest amount ever recorded. 

According to Custora, approximately 25% of all orders came from email marketing, while social media drove a dismal 1.7% of overall sales. Email ended up costing less too, as the average CPM cost on Facebook ads more than doubled from November 1st to Cyber Monday.

Though email marketing’s stats are impressive, holiday success with email marketing still requires proper strategy and planning. With so much money up for grabs millions of retailers across the globe will be competing for space in the minds and inboxes of consumers, requiring your store to put your best emails forward. We’ve put together 10 tips to help you do just that.

1. Segment Your Subscribers

If you haven’t already done it, now is a great time to do a thorough clean and segmentation of your email list. Before you start preparing your email campaigns, segment your list by frequent buyers, infrequent/holiday shoppers, and non-purchase subscribers. Adding your subscribers into these 3 segments will help determine the frequency of your sending as well as the content you choose to include in your emails.

2. Retarget Old Holiday Shoppers

Just because a subscriber doesn’t purchase or engage with you all year doesn’t mean they’re not interested in your products. The holidays are a time for giving and they may only be interested in your products for a friend or family member. Leading up to sale days, email personalized product recommendations to these subscribers based on their past purchases, browsing behaviour, and email clicks.

SmartrMail Product Recommendation Emails for Shopify and BigCommerce

3. Check in with non-purchase subscribers

For subscribers who have yet to purchase from your store, there’s no better time for them to make their first purchase than the holidays. Because you have no data on their past purchases or preferences, email them your store’s best sellers in the lead up to holidays.

If the season passes and they’ve yet to engage with your emails, it’s time to consider removing them from your email list. Not only will this improve your deliverability, it’ll lower the price you’re paying on most email marketing apps.

4. Reward Loyal Customers

The holidays are the time to treat your most loyal customers. Consider giving them early access to holiday sales, so they spend their budget and you get a head start on the competition.

When emailing product recommendations, they’ve likely already purchased your stores best selling items. Instead include new products and hyper-personalized recommendations based on past data you’ve collected.

Urban Outfitters Loyalty Cyber Monday Email

5. Warm Up Your List

As Black Friday draws closer, inboxes will start to fill up and your open rates will likely decrease. Start building excitement for your sale at least a month in advance with sneak peaks of on sale products and details on stock quantity and shipping times.

Black Friday Sneak Peak Email

6. Conduct a Mobile Sales Funnel Audit

In 2015, for the first time ever mobile surpassed desktops with 54.4% of all shopping traffic on Black Friday. That number will only increase this year, so ensure every step of your mobile sales funnel is functioning correctly – from your emails to your checkout. 34% of sales came from mobile devices last year, the last thing you want is a bad mobile shopping experience pushing away a third of your revenue.

7. Use Original Subject Lines

Stealing “The Best Black Friday Email Subject Lines” won’t work on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Just take a look at the spike in volume of email subject lines including the words “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” Be original, tell your subscribers what they’re saving on, and the benefits of ordering from you.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Email Marketing Subject Lines


Source: SendGrid

Subject Line Examples:

“40% OFF ALL WINTER WEAR – TODAY ONLY”

“Perfect Christmas Gifts – ALL 50% OFF”

“Free Shipping on All Orders – Black Friday Only”

8. Send an Abandoned Cart Email Series

Cyber Monday cart abandonment reached 80.1% in 2015. With the best online deals of the year happening on Cyber Monday you can’t blame your customers for shopping around.

Good news is that savvy ecommerce marketers can recover up to 63% of abandoned carts with abandoned cart emails. One email 12 hours later likely won’t do it with the increased traffic in your subscribers inbox. By using SmartrMail’s free abandoned cart emails for Shopify and BigCommerce you can send up to 3 emails follow up emails within 24 hours. 3 emails allow you to mix and match different offers and copy to pin point what emails are winning your customers back. We recommend sending these 3 abandoned cart emails to get recover the most sales.

Kate Spade Abandoned Cart Email

9. Send Multiple Urgent Emails on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

No matter how much your customers loves your store, you’re going to have to fight for their attention on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Sending one email simply isn’t enough – millions of retailers of across the globe will be filling up inboxes, and a single email will either be lost in the noise or quickly forgotten. Send 2 emails to pre-purchase subscribers and up to 5 to loyal customers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Remember to create urgency by counting down the hours left in the sale.

Urban Outfitters Black Friday Email Sequence
Herschel Cyber Monday Email

10. Use a Reliable ESP

You can spend hours designing and automating your emails, but it all doesn’t matter if your emails aren’t ending up in your customers’ inbox. Email blacklisting is highest during the Holiday season as retailers ramp up their email marketing. To avoid deliverability issues it’s best to warm up old emails a month before and to choose a reliable ESP. If you’re using SmartrMail theres no need to worry, as our team regularly monitors users and any spam complaints that come in, giving your store higher open rates and industry best deliverability.

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