Black Friday tips: How to be well prepared

Each year, we at Copernica share tips about sending emails during Black Friday. Actually, this year is no different from previous years: make sure you prepare well.

This year, we want to emphasize the importance of personalization even more: because the email landscape has changed somewhat.

Email clients (Microsoft Outlook, Google Gmail) are implementing increasingly strict rules for accepting emails. As a result, it’s becoming more challenging for you as a sender to land in the right inbox of the consumer. We particularly see that non-personalized bulk emails end up in the spam folder more quickly. And that's exactly what you want to avoid in the lead-up to Black Friday.

Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do to prevent this: Is your database up to date? Is your content relevant? But most importantly: do you interact with your customers? Interaction, meaning the consumer opens, clicks, or responds (positively) to your email, ensures that the receiving email client is more likely to classify your sending reputation as trustworthy.

So how do you ensure interaction with your emails? The key word is personalization. Simply starting your newsletter with "Dear Peter" or "Dear Trudy" won’t cut it anymore: consumers now expect a personalized experience.

This year, try to email in a personalized and targeted way using as much data as possible (previous purchase behavior, clicks, website behavior). This will increase interaction, which is good for your sending reputation. And in the run-up to Black Friday, you can’t start this too early. Because as soon as you suddenly start sending more emails around the holidays, you’re more likely to end up in the spam folder again.