The Email List Strategy You Need For an 8-Figure BFCM Season

Question — what’s the one high-priority marketing metric that you need to tune-up your email list strategy for the BFCM 2020 sales season?

The answer — open rates!

Why? Because the more people open your emails, the better your chances of making a sale!

Let’s say you have a list of 100,000 contacts with an average open rate of 10% and a 10% click-to-sale rate. Increasing your open rate to 20% would mean doubling your revenue!

You can also get a lot of valuable insights just from analyzing your email open rates, like:

• The level of interest your customer base has towards your brand and your products. How engaged are your customers with your brand? This also includes how they perceive your brand and the quality of your emails, products, or services.
• Do customers see your emails as relevant sources of value? Do your customers see your products as things they must have? The answers to these questions can mean the difference between making a sale—or failing to sell.
• The quality of your email lists. Open rates can tell you if you’re emailing the right people. Or if you’re sending the right emails to the right people at the right time.

Improving Email Average Open Rates

So how exactly do you go about tuning up your average open rates?

An Email List Strategy is essential for maximizing your emails’ revenue potential this BFCM!

Bring out the full revenue potential of your existing lists by re-engaging with your inactive customers.

With some advance preparation, you’ll have fully active lists ready by the time the big sales week rolls in. Your lists will be filled to the brim with active customers, so you’ll be able to maximize your email sales during THE most profitable sales event of the year.

Best Practices to Boost Your Email List Strategy

When is the best time to start re-engaging customers?

To be blunt... YESTERDAY. But don’t worry, there’s still time.

If you start reengaging your inactive customers before Q4 starts, you’ll have an up-to-date and active list you can engage with once the BFCM chaos begins. That’s definitely better than sifting for active customers during the chaos, right?

Here are some action items you can start with to boost your list optimization:

1) Create a Winback Flow or Reengagement Flow

Here’s the basis of what you need to do:

1. Create a segment of subscribers who have not engaged with your brand in the last 60 days.
2. Create a re-engagement sequence flow, with the trigger “not engaged in the last 60 days.”

And here’s how your flow should, well, flow:

1. After 60 days: Email #1— It’s been awhile + Discount
2. Wait 2 Days: Email #2— Discount + Deadline or Reminder their discount is expiring soon.
   • Give them an opportunity to opt-out of the list if they no longer want to hear from you. It’s better for recipients to opt-out instead of keeping too many inactive emails on your list.
3. Bonus tip: You can add a short brand promise message above your Unsubscribe button to remind them why they wanted to hear from you in the first place. Bring back that lost connection! Test this out and see if it lowers your unsubscribe rates.

This is a great foundation for your win-back sequence. You can enhance this sequence further by adding more emails that talk about your brand and address your customers’ needs.

2) Use High-Value Content Emails

“The biggest problem that I see is that companies use them (emails) exclusively to try and sell things.” —David Meerman Scott, Online Marketing Strategist and Author of Fanocracy

While making sales is your top priority, winning back customers is more about re-engaging them. It’s all about the connection and your relationship with them.

Even though they aren’t sales emails, content emails still play a huge role in your sequences. While they don’t generate as much revenue as your sales pitch emails on their own, they supplement those emails by making the highlighted products more enticing to your customers.

High-value content can relieve potential pain points and call out benefits to lead your customers over the conversion finish line—making your sales pitch emails even more effective! In short, content emails are a perfect support system for your sales emails.

Here are some examples of high-value content emails:

Educational Content: Product background and benefits
Social Proof: Customer testimonials, product reviews
Long-Form Video Content: Product demonstration or review videos
Long-Form PDF Content: For subscribers who prefer reading to watching videos

Mix these in with your sales pitch emails in your win-back email sequence and you’ll have a solid one-two BFCM email strategy. You’ll strengthen customer relationships and generate high sales from highly-engaged customers — before AND during BFCM!

3) A/B Test Your Flows

Only winning emails will win back customers and reclaim their attention! In other words, the only way you can guarantee the success of your win-back email sequence is by A/B testing your emails.

A/B test your emails based on the following elements:

• CTA Format: Button, image, or GIF?
• CTA Phrases: Plain action words, fun puns, or creative and witty phrases?
• Discount: Too high or too low?
• Content: Which type of content above gets your subscribers to engage?

There’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all, especially with email marketing.

Create your emails for your target customers, their buying behavior, interests, and content preferences. Maximize the relevance and the value of your emails to them.

When done right, you’ll end up with a foolproof win-back strategy that is guaranteed to reignite your inactive customers’ interest in your brand.

Final Thoughts on Your 8-Figure BFCM Email List Strategy

BFCM 2020 is rolling in FAST! So tune up your email open rates before the tsunami hits to ensure maximum email sales! Remember, more active subscribers in your email lists mean more potential sales once you start engaging with them with your BFCM email campaigns.

After helping 200+ eComm stores to have record-breaking BFCM for the past few years, we at Chronos Agency have found that there are a couple of strategies you need to use to maximize your sales revenue.

With what’s happening in the world right now, we expect online sales to shoot through the roof. We’re projecting online sales revenue for BFCM 2020 to grow by 20–50% compared to previous years.

So while you’re focusing on frontline sales, our email experts are more than happy to optimize your email list strategy and flows (as well as take care of other back-end issues you might have) for you!

Just answer a few of our questions and schedule a strategy call with us!