We analyzed 2.2+ billion Black Friday messages from 2023. The common thread? Optimization and personalization give brands a competitive edge.

Get inspiration for your holiday planning by browsing BFCM examples, templates, and more in our Complete BFCM Archive.

Consumers spent a record $38 billion during Cyber Week last year—and eMarketer predicts continued growth in 2024. That’s a deliciously large pie that retailers stand to earn a slice of. But making it big during the holiday shopping event isn’t a given.

As consumers look to get more value out of their purchases—and have more choice than ever thanks to e-commerce growth—they’re comparing their options closely. So brands have to work for their attention.

But 63% of consumers worldwide are willing to pay more to shop with a brand they’re loyal to. So your relationship-building owned channels like SMS and email are critical for Black Friday success.

How do we know this? Brands that use Attentive drove $1.8 billion in revenue from personalized SMS and email during Cyber Week last year—a 64% increase from the year before. This highlights the power and growing importance of owned channels.

And personalization is a critical piece of the equation. 78% of consumers say they’ll likely engage with a personalized offer tailored to their interests. Meanwhile, 68% will ditch a brand for more personalized experiences elsewhere.

To deliver the tailored experiences customers want, McKinsey recommends that retailers lean on new technologies, including AI. After a sensational debut last year, AI is already supercharging marketing programs. Leveraging it can give you a significant advantage and help you earn your slice of the Cyber Week pie.

Ready to try AI for yourself? Get started today.

Black Friday will be here before you know it, so it’s time to start preparing your SMS and email program now. In this three-part guide, we’ll give you proven strategies and tips to help you execute a messaging strategy that drives maximum revenue and loyalty and sets the foundation to engage shoppers throughout the holiday season.

Our recommendations are based on the 2.2+ billion messages sent through Attentive during BFCM last year (+30% year-over-year) and the Black Friday data we’ve been collecting and analyzing for 8+ years.

‍In this guide: With 90 days to go, maximize reach and revenue-driving opportunities during the holiday shopping season by establishing the foundation for your SMS and email program.

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Build a strong foundation: SMS, email, and AI work in synergy

SMS and email are great channels on their own, but work even better together to create a cohesive customer experience and maximum ROI. AI takes both to the next level, taking the manual work out of delivering personalization and optimization to drive even better performance.

Integrated SMS and email enhance your messaging strategy

Crafting a messaging program that blends SMS and email into a unified strategy lets you take advantage of the strengths of both channels.

We recommend leaning heavily on SMS to reach customers, as US holiday mobile sales surpassed desktop sales for the first time in 2023. Generally, SMS is ideal for time-sensitive communications—crucial for BFCM. It has high engagement rates, so you can reach more of your subscribers. And it’s personal, facilitating direct and intimate connections with subscribers. SMS can be a great way to identify your VIPs, too. Many brands find that SMS subscribers are more invested, so you can treat them from the get-go with perks like early access, extra loyalty points days, or exclusive discount codes. SMS also complements other marketing channels, like social media and email well.

Email is a critical part of your strategy and has its own benefits. We recommend relying on email for more detailed content and less urgent communications. It’s great for education and lots of visuals, or to follow up after a customer doesn’t engage with a text.

Some customers only subscribe to one channel, making a comprehensive strategy for each channel essential. But many subscribe to both, opening up opportunities to communicate with subscribers on the right channel depending on their engagement on each and the kind of message you’re sending.

For example, you might send a cart abandonment message by SMS first to reach a subscriber quickly. If they still don’t purchase, you can send an email with more details—like testimonials or product education—to combat purchase friction.

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AI elevates your strategy by hyper-personalizing messages at scale

Personalization is essential to stand out during the Black Friday frenzy. But it can be challenging to activate the mountain of data in front of you.

‍Attentive AI™ helps brands overcome this by enabling true 1:1 personalization with an unprecedented level of specificity using:

• Browse and purchase history
• Interests and preferences
• Engagement patterns with your campaigns

With AI, you can deliver more accurate product recommendations and craft messages that resonate. You can reach customers on their preferred channel at a time they’re most likely to engage. And this happens in real time based on your evolving relationship with your subscribers, giving brands who use AI a competitive advantage.

For BFCM 2023, nearly half of our customers used AI to support their messaging programs—and they saw higher click-through rates (CTRs) than those who didn’t. More clicks lead to more revenue and ultimately better efficiency and ROI.

In fact, brands that power their SMS and email programs with Attentive AI™ are seeing:

• 120% more clicks
• 117% more purchases
• 115% more revenue

“By using AI, we’re taking the guesswork out of how to optimize our sends by expanding the high-intent audiences and excluding those with lower likelihood of making a purchase,” says Christine Taylor, Sr. Retention Marketing Manager at Little Sleepies. In fact, getting their messages in front of more high-value customers with AI has led to a 31% increase in incremental revenue. Other notable marketing metrics boosted by AI include JAXXON’s 249% increase in ROI and a 120% lift in revenue per message with Send Time AI for Marleylilly. 

Attentive’s high deliverability rates for both SMS and email, proactive program monitoring, and reliable platform performance make it an ideal solution to run your BFCM messaging campaigns. Add Attentive AI™ to the mix and you’ve got a powerful copilot to hyper-personalize your program and boost your profits. If you plan to switch from another platform, we make migration easy so you can get your program ready to go well before Black Friday.

‍Note: Reach out to our team if you have any questions about which features are available in your region.

‍Attentive AI™ is purpose-built for marketers and enables brands to drive high-performing email and SMS programs in a fraction of the time. Schedule some time to learn more about Attentive AI™ so you can maximize your time later launching BFCM campaigns. 

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Grow your subscriber lists for a bigger BFCM audience

Expanding your subscriber list before Black Friday gives you more people to market to during the high-impact shopping event. And it lets you cultivate customer relationships, creating a more engaged audience for your Black Friday promos.

Try these methods to grow your subscriber list

Online:

• Add a welcome popup to your mobile and desktop homepages and secondary pages
• Enable a persistent bubble throughout the site so shoppers can open your popup again if they close it
• Show an exit-intent popup with one final incentive to visitors who are about to leave
• Turn on opt-in at online checkout via a simple checkbox if you use Shopify
• Promote your list on social media via your “link in bio” page or as a direct link in Instagram Stories
• Launch retargeting ads to shoppers who visited your site but didn’t opt in
• Partner on a giveaway campaign with another brand who has a similar audience
• Promote your SMS list to email-only subscribers

Offline—using QR codes or Text-to-Join keywords:

• Display QR codes or Text-to-Join keywords in dressing rooms, at checkout, or on receipts at your retail stores
• At checkout, have retail associates ask shoppers if they want to subscribe to your SMS or email list
• Send postcards in order packages with a prompt to join
• Add a CTA to subscribe in your direct mail campaigns

‍Pro tip: Use a multi-step opt-in form to grab a shopper’s phone number and email address at the same time. It’ll be harder to get them on another list later.

Use incentives to encourage shoppers to subscribe

When promoting your email and SMS lists, communicate the value shoppers will get from joining.

Discounts are the most effective incentive to get shoppers to join a brand’s SMS and email list, according to our internal data.

But if discounts don’t feel aligned with your brand, other great options include:

• Loyalty or reward incentives
• Free gift with purchase
• Exclusive first access to sales and new products
• Free shipping
• Product recommendations through a quiz
• Waitlist sign-up (for upcoming launches or out-of-stock products)
• Helpful content (like gift guides or other resources)

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Pro tip: Consider upping the incentive for SMS or highlighting the additional perks they’ll get by signing up for texts. Early access is a common benefit for SMS subscribers because of the timeliness of the channel.

‍Learn more about effective list growth tactics in the full guide to growing your subscriber list.

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Collect customer data to power personalization

The most successful email and SMS programs leverage personalization to achieve high engagement and revenue. So the earlier you start learning about your subscribers’ interests, behaviors, and preferences, the more targeted your campaigns will be year-round—but also for Black Friday.

In addition to behavioral data like browsing history, email and SMS engagement, and purchases, start collecting zero-party data from your customers for interest-based segmentation and better product recommendations.

For example, depending on what’s relevant to your brand, you can ask a subscriber about their skin type, what pet they have, what gender they shop for, their go-to coffee drink, etc. 

Easy ways to get zero-party data before the holidays:

• Send surveys and polls by text to learn more about subscribers through keyword responses
• Use an on-site quiz to give product recommendations while learning about your customers’ needs and interests, which you can use to segment them for more targeted texts and emails
• Add a post-purchase survey to your checkout page to ask about the context of their purchase

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Find out more about the power of first- and zero-party data and how to activate it.

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Prime your programs for deliverability

If subscribers don’t get your messages, you can’t engage them, which impacts your ROI and your ability to engage and convert customers.

SMS deliverability

You'll have set up most of your essential SMS deliverability infrastructure when you launched your program. But here are a couple extra things to think about as you prepare for Black Friday:

• Encourage your audience to save you as a contact so subscribers can recognize you. If you send MMS, that can be in the form of a virtual contact card.
• For US brands that can send MMS, this format can increase conversions up to 20% or more—just note that due to the high volume carriers are processing during BFCM, MMS is only realistic for shortcodes, as toll-free numbers will experience delays.

We invest heavily in our relationships with carriers to secure the highest capacity in the industry and priority sending. This has led to a 71% higher deliverability satisfaction compared to other SMS platforms.

Email deliverability

Email deliverability is more challenging. To stay out of the spam folder, you’ll want to avoid spam triggers and audit your email program to account for Google and Yahoo’s new requirements for 2024. You’ll also want to ramp up your sending volume slowly.

Increasing your email volume overnight can look suspicious and trigger spam filters. By gradually bumping up your sending volume, you can guarantee you reach the inbox when it matters most.

Start by determining your goal volume for BFCM based on:

• Last year’s performance and sending volume
• Your list growth projections for this year

Then you can map out a schedule to slowly increase your email sending volume.

We’ve found that sending a slightly higher, more consistent volume of emails from Q2 to Q4 (a “tortoise” strategy) is more effective than saving up your emails for a big spike during BFCM (a “hare” strategy). Brands that used a tortoise strategy last year benefited from a 10% higher ROI and 13% lower opt-out rate compared to hares. 

If you didn’t already start ramping up in Q2, it’s not too late to start. We recommend increasing email sends by no more than 10% of the previous day’s volume.

Attentive makes it easy to reach subscribers’ email inboxes and stay out of the spam folder. Built-in best practices and proactive deliverability monitoring help Attentive customers maintain high delivery rates of 99+%.

If you’re planning to add Attentive Email, or switch from another provider, now’s a good time to do it so your program is all set for BFCM.

Turn on journeys for automated revenue

Triggered messages are an essential part of high-revenue email and SMS programs and can help you bring back shoppers after they’ve shown interest in your brand. Plus, they supply you with automated revenue so you get a great ROI.

Last year, Attentive customers recovered $148 million in abandoned carts on Black Friday alone. Conversion rates (CVR) for automated text messages stayed above 30% from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. And automated emails reached a 23% CVR on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So don’t leave these powerful messages out of your strategy.

Activate these essential journeys now so you have as much time as possible to optimize them before the holiday shopping season:

• Welcome series: This is your subscribers’ first impression of your brand. It sets the tone for what they can expect from your texts and emails and encourages their first purchase.
• Browse and cart abandonment reminders: These high-performing journeys encourage shoppers to take another look at something they were interested in and boast a 33x and 125x average ROI respectively.
• Post-purchase flow: These won’t drive as much revenue, but support long-term retention and future revenue.
• Winback messages: These messages work to re-engage subscribers who have purchased in the past but have since gone quiet. Reactivating subscribers now warms them up for better engagement and sales during Cyber Week.
• Inventory updates: Letting shoppers know a product is back-in-stock or will be out-of-stock soon are powerful motivators for purchase—leading to a 25% average CVR for email—and will be highly relevant during BFCM.
• Transactional journeys: If available for your e-commerce platform, keeping customers up-to-date on their order status builds trust, which in turn enhances loyalty and retention.

Learn more about journeys.

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Optimize everything to maximize your program’s impact

Optimizing every aspect of your email and SMS program will support healthy business growth year-round.

It’s true for SMS, too, of course.

But it’s all the more important for Q4 when you stand to pull in the most revenue for the year. So use your pre-BFCM prep time to find out what works to draw in, engage, and convert subscribers.

Optimize your sign-up forms

Figure out what pulls in the most subscribers by testing your:

• Incentives (Discounts, free shipping, loyalty benefits, first access to new products, etc.)
• Copy
• Imagery
• Sign-up unit experience (e.g., spin-to-win, tap to reveal, countdown timer, micro-yes)
• Call-to-action (CTA)
• Number of fields
• Timing (e.g., immediate load vs. exit intent)
• Location (e.g., home page vs. product pages)
• Suppression settings (e.g., 1 day vs. 3 days after a site visitor closes a pop-up)

When analyzing A/B tests for your sign-up units, go beyond the number of subscribers you earn and also consider the behavior of those subscribers after they sign up:

• How much do they spend?
• What are your profit margins?
• Do they engage with your texts?
• Do they unsubscribe at a higher rate than usual?

A deep discount on a first purchase will naturally draw in more subscribers than a more modest discount. But your profit margins may suffer and you might find that those subscribers don’t come back for a second purchase. You want subscribers that stick around.

‍Pro tip: Consider updating your sign-up forms throughout the year for major holidays and other brand events. Prompting site visitors to “join the waitlist” is particularly popular leading up to holiday sales. You can run separate tests during these events to inform how you’ll update your sign-up units for Black Friday.

Test your campaigns’ effectiveness

Every text message and email you send teaches you what resonates with your subscribers.

Test:

• Copy variations
• Tone of voice
• Emoji usage
• MMS vs SMS (for text messages in the US)
• Plain text vs stylized messages (for email)
• Subject lines (for email)
• Sense of urgency
• CTAs
• Imagery (e.g., statics vs. GIF, studio shots vs. lifestyle, and different moods)
• Link placement (beginning, middle, or end of your campaign)
• Link destination (collection page vs. product page)
• Incentive type (e.g., BOGO, $ off vs. % off, free gift, etc.)
• Send times

We also encourage you to test multi-send campaigns. Bookending a sale, giving early access to VIPs, or sending reminders is a great way to increase engagement.

Want to boost performance and save time on campaign messaging? Use Attentive AI to generate copy (and variations for testing) based on your audience’s preferences and your brand’s goals. It can give you 50% time back on copywriting and 10% more purchases on average. In AI Pro, you can use Send Time AI to reach subscribers when they’re most likely to take action, maximizing ROI and conversions.

‍Pro tip: Use your late summer and fall sales (like Labor Day, back-to-school, and Halloween) as testing grounds to understand how customers interact with campaigns promoting a sale.

Get inspired: 10 A/B testing examples to boost SMS performance

Boost the impact of your triggered messages

Since behavioral flows are great at automatically driving engagement and purchases from your existing audience, optimizing them can result in huge revenue gains.

Test everything you would with your campaigns, like your copy, imagery, and CTAs. Also test the:

• Number of messages in each journey
• Order of those messages
• Trigger timing for each message
• Channel each message gets delivered on

Two-way journeys are a great way to boost impact, so also consider experimenting with messages that include a survey or question shoppers can respond to.

For brands that use AI Journeys, you can optimize your triggered messages more effectively and tailor them to each individual subscriber. Brands that do are seeing 120% more clicks and 115% more revenue compared to their standard journeys.

Improve your segments

Segmentation helps you reach the right subscribers with your messages and skip the ones unlikely to act on certain messages. But for optimal efficiency, you want as many subscribers as are relevant to be in each segment.

For example, if you have an “engaged” list, you want to set your parameters so that you don’t leave anyone out that should be there. But those parameters differ by brand. So test your thresholds to see how different portions of your segment react to your campaigns.

If you lose subscribers at the 120 to 150-day mark, that’s a sign to scale back. But if you’ve extended your “engaged” segment to 150 days with no negative impact, you might test including a cohort of customers who’ve purchased or clicked on a message in the 150 to 180 day window.

‍Audiences AI, part of AI Pro, can help you optimize your segments for better targeting without all the manual calculations. For example, Audiences AI helps Little Sleepies maximize their product drops list by adding in high-purchase-intent subscribers and excluding less engaged subscribers.

Keep these A/B testing best practices in mind for accurate results

Adhering to these A/B testing principles will give you better insights into what works:

• Test one variable at a time so you can be confident you know the impact of your test
• Use a segment of at least 500 subscribers for a statistically significant sample size
• Run multiple A/B tests to verify the results are consistent

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Embrace AI to amp up your messaging performance

All this testing can be time-consuming and you probably can’t test everything you’ll want to before BFCM. Plus, human optimization alone has its limits. Furthermore, 1:1 personalization isn’t possible with rule-based workflows.

AI unlocks new capabilities for your SMS and email programs so you can drive better results on Black Friday.

With Attentive AI™, you can:

• Generate on-brand copy: Like Emma Sleep does for a 26% boost to CVR
• Optimize send time: Like Marleylilly does to achieve a 120% lift in revenue per message
• Identify and segment subscribers: Like Little Sleepies does to earn 31% more incremental revenue
• Tailor triggered messages: Like SwimOutlet does to 7x total revenue

All in all, brands that use Attentive AI see better metrics across the board, including revenue, conversions, clicks, and ROI.

And it’s particularly useful for holiday campaigns. Men’s jewelry brand JAXXON used Attentive AI to amplify Memorial Day performance. AI used the brand’s historical SMS performance data to determine the best messaging, cadence, and segmentation for their campaign.

Compared to a variant of the campaign sent without the help of AI, the brand achieved a 249% better ROI, 232% surge in revenue, and 138% more clicks.

Now is a great time to start using AI to see what results it can drive for your brand. By adding Attentive AI to your program now, you’ll have proven the value for your brand and feel comfortable and confident by November.

‍Learn more and get started with Attentive AI.

‍Note: Reach out to our team if you have any questions about which features are available in your region.

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Word to the wise: Impact of the summer sports

Major sporting events this summer will generate excitement worldwide. This opens up opportunities to engage customers with themed promotions and collaborations with athletes and sports organizations.

Sending more campaigns in the summer builds relationships with your subscribers and it has a strong correlation with a more successful holiday season. So these sporting events are one avenue to achieve that if it makes sense for your brand. 

But as you consider how you’ll incorporate these sporting events into your marketing strategy, allocate your spend with the holidays in mind. You don’t want to overextend your budget.

Read more about how the 2024 summer sports will impact consumer behavior.

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Work with a platform built to handle Black Friday

You stand to pull in more revenue than any other time of year during Cyber Week. The worst thing that can happen is that the platform you use crashes and your text messages and emails don’t get sent.

Attentive is built to support brands during this high-stakes event with:

• No down time, unlike other platforms that have experienced outages on Black Friday
• 99+% SMS and email deliverability rate
• 400+ dedicated customer success team
• Response time in under 20 minutes
• 24/7 support at your most critical moment
• Built-in compliance tools and proactive monitoring to ensure high deliverability

And as you grow and optimize your program the rest of the year, you can benefit from our:

• Significant AI investment that’s already delivering high-performing results
• Best-in-class subscriber identification for an average 95%+ lift in email revenue when switching from competitors
• Patented two-tap technology that grows your list 2x faster
• 30+ list growth tools

If you’re not already using Attentive, now’s a great time to get started. 

Ahead of the game? It’s never too early to start crafting your Black Friday messaging strategy. Once you’ve got a strong foundation, read part 2, The 60-Day Countdown to BFCM: Craft a Unified Black Friday Messaging Strategy, or check out our Complete BFCM Archive for more resources and inspiration.