Creating impactful BFCM marketing campaigns that drive subscriber engagement—and most importantly, revenue—is every marketer's goal for the next couple of months.
As time leads up to Black Friday though, this gets increasingly difficult. Email marketing will get more and more competitive, as send volumes will continue to rise to their highest annual levels. In fact, email send volume will skyrocket 192%, and it’s expected to peak just before Black Friday & Cyber Monday.
When it comes to succeeding in this year’s ultra-competitive holiday email marketing environment, audience segmentation and content personalization are critical. Integrating AI into your messaging workflows is the easiest way to access both. Tidio’s Black Friday & Cyber Monday Stats infographic is a testament to this fact, stating that:
“Throughout Cyber Week 2023, artificial intelligence played a crucial role in driving $51 billion in global online sales by delivering personalized promotions, recommending products, and providing chat services powered by generative AI.”
Thanks to the sophistication of generative AI over the last year, it’s expected that these types of tools will drive even more revenue and efficiencies for brands’ BFCM marketing.
Backstroke’s email subject line generator—and our soon-to-be-released AI email generator—are two AI message tools, both driving 31% more revenue per send. They’re powered by our proprietary access to 10k+ B2C brands’ data, which we’ve broken down across 4 charts below. Glance through them to see what competitors will send in their BFCM marketing campaigns, then try out the Backstroke Sandbox toolkit yourself to try something new and supercharge your holiday email marketing messaging.
BFCM Marketing Chart: Most Popular Offers & Sales
Many of the best email subjects for the upcoming holidays contain special offers for subscribers. The rub is that specific offers are sent so frequently between now and Cyber Monday. So let’s look at Cyber Monday, in particular, to see what brands are offering subscribers. The data informs us that subject lines focusing on “last chance” themed messages are sent 391% more than “extended offer” themed messages on that day.
Interestingly, subject lines that promote “extended offer” messaging are the least frequently sent.
What can you do with this insight? Understanding what’s popular to send on specific dates—and what offers may be oversaturing your audiences’ inboxes—can inform a more nuanced and stand-out BFCM marketing strategy.
If an offer like “Last Chance” is extremely popular for competitive brands to send, you should probably try offering something else! Backstroke’s Trends Lite Dashboard analyzes creative choices that are trending across several industries. That way, your holiday email marketing efforts can offer something a bit more compelling.
BFCM Marketing Chart: To Emoji? Or Not to Emoji?
Let’s look at a few other creative trends and choices brands opt for in their holiday email marketing messaging. When it comes to emojis in messages, we have uncovered a bit of a surprise. Subject lines with zero emojis are sent 1,810% more frequently on Black Friday than subject lines that include emojis. Who would have thought?!
When brands do include emojis in their subject lines on Black Friday, the 🖤 emoji is the most frequently used. On Cyber Monday, the 🚨is the most frequently included.
What can you do with this insight? Any audience’s moods and creative preferences can change by the day! When crafting effective email subject lines that’ll cut through all the BFCM marketing noise, selecting custom audience attributes in the email subject line generator can clue you into what visual aspects of messaging can catch peoples’ eyes . . . even in their crowded inboxes.
BFCM Marketing Chart: Most Common Emotions in Messaging
Thanks to rapid advancement in natural language processing (NLP), AI can really get us. In fact, Backstroke’s email subject line creator is powered by a combination of technologies that help email marketers get their subscribers, too.
Its analysis of this year’s BFCM marketing sentiments shows us that anticipation is the emotion that shows up in inboxes most frequently on Black Friday, specifically. It’s sent 338% more than subject lines that feature surprise as their primary emotional sentiment.
Fear is the second-most commonly used emotion, proving that many retailers try to inspire some serious FOMO in their messages.
What can you do with this insight? Try to strike a different emotional cord with your subscribers. We suggest trying sending subject lines that focus on surprising, trustworthy, or joyful emotions within their copy. Our quick guide shows other ways to stand out in inboxes with 3 tips!
BFCM Marketing Chart: ALL CAPS vs. no caps vs. Partial CAPS?
Of course, BFCM marketing is underway. Beyond the big key shopping days, holiday marketing campaigns are already running, having gotten consumers warmed up to products and offers as far back as Sept. 1. This means that data and AI can also inform us of what creative content is trending across the Pre-Black Friday weeks. For example, let’s look at email subject lines in the weeks leading up to BFCM and examine how brands incorporate capitalization of letters throughout.
From this data analysis, we see that pre-Black Friday messages are written in Title Case most often. In fact, they’re sent 3,594% more frequently than messages using all lowercase letters. Subject lines in ALL CAPS (a favorite of the Baby Boomer generation) and no caps (a favorite of Gen Z) are much more rarely sent.
What can you do with this insight? There are countless ways to segment audiences, and therefore, there are countless ways to personalize messages for them! The chart above reveals some creative opportunities available for marketers to jump on right now, and having a thorough understanding of age segmentation in audiences reveals an even greater opportunity to market to various age groups. Deploying holiday marketing email campaigns backed by this type of information is critical to success this holiday season as segmented messaging campaigns have 14.31% higher open rates and 101% more clicks.
Of course, creative insights for AI messages and subject lines are only a small part of the story. Our new full-scale AI email generator will help brands carry the perfect blend of creativity and data across their entire holiday email marketing efforts. This new release goes beyond subject lines and pre-headers to create optimized email campaigns, including layouts, copy, and image placement.
