How did your Black Friday promotions perform last week? It looks like another year of revenue growth for Thanksgiving weekend. NRF is reporting a 14 percent increase in the number of folks who shopped from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday. Shoppers also spent 16 percent more than last year.
I still question the incrementality of all of this. Black Friday used to be about creating genuine urgency. Just a few years ago, brands gave away scarce offers that were time-limited to Friday only. Now, at a minimum, brands extend their offers through the weekend and some advertise “Black Friday” for months at a time. How many emails did you get with the subject line, “Black Friday Starts Now”, outside of the actual day? This author of this New York Times article thinks we should just give up and call it “Black November”
So sure, overall volume continues to increase YoY. But, are we adding any net new customers during this time? Or are we selling to the same customers at a lower margin, who would have purchased earlier but decided to wait for the steep discount? The brands that I connected with (and saw getting lots of free press) were the ones who turned Black Friday into an opportunity to give back.
Which strategy is more profitable over the longer term?
Speaking of discounted pricing, good things happen when you connect high intent prospects with relevant catalog change events (like price or stock change). So, we wrote an article on how to build out your automated price drop trigger. Let your customers know when they can get a better deal on items they’ve expressed interest in, but haven’t purchased yet.
Then we analyzed thousands of abandoned cart emails that were sent to us. Not surprising: 68% of D2C brands are sending triggered abandoned cart emails. Surprising: 54% send only 1 email.
For the research, we studied every important facet of successful abandoned cart email programs (offers, timing, frequency, humor, animation, call to action copy, subject line copy, + more) and aggregated all of the data for you.
Read the 2019 abandoned cart email report →
We just launched a new integration with the team at Poplar. You can now trigger direct mail sends from any Rejoiner automation. Just reply to this email if you want to try it out.
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