Common Mistakes To Avoid During Black Friday – Things That You Can Take Care of Right Now

Do you want to avoid email communication problems on Black Friday? Check out the following article and learn what are the biggest challenges for your e-commerce during this hectic sales period, and how to overcome them.

Black Friday has evolved into a global phenomenon, and its influence continues to grow in markets like Poland and the EU. Hundreds of marketers prepare specially tailored promotions to attract customers to their stores each year. However, achieving success isn’t just about sending marketing content and securing purchases—it’s also about providing professional customer service throughout the entire transaction process.

A Campaign Monitor research found that as many as  116,5 million emails, are sent on Black Friday, more than on any other day.

[Updated on 08 October 2024]
This article now includes the latest trends, such as the role of AI-driven personalization in email marketing, the growing importance of mobile optimization, and strategies for integrating omnichannel marketing into Black Friday campaigns. Additionally, new sections on email security, data privacy (GDPR), and emerging email technologies have been added to help marketers prepare for Black Friday 2024.

Black Friday: The Challenges for the E-Commerce Industry

From an email communication standpoint, stores face two main challenges:

• Effectively reach potential customers with your timely email communication and generate enough interest to prompt them to buy.
• Handling higher transactional traffic, ensuring successful delivery of order confirmations and other transactional emails

Delivering emails is becoming increasingly difficult. In recent years, less than 20% of Black Friday mailings made it to 90% of the primary inboxes. As we approach 2025, this trend underscores the importance of optimizing deliverability strategies.

Grab customers’ attention during Black Friday mailings and Cyber Monday.

Speed Matters: Ensure Timely Delivery of Marketing Emails

To succeed, it’s essential to deliver promotional offers on time to all users who have consented to receive marketing emails. During high-volume periods like Black Friday, inbox saturation is common, so you must ensure high throughput on your sending infrastructure to prevent delays.

Another factor affecting delivery speed is IP reputation. If your IP address is shared with other companies, their email activity can interfere with yours. Opting for a dedicated IP during Black Friday can prevent queuing issues and ensure timely delivery.

If you would like to learn more about the advantages of individual IP addresses, take a look here:

In 2024, maintaining a dedicated infrastructure not only ensures better control over delivery times but also improves your sender reputation. It helps mitigate the risk of anti-spam filters rejecting your emails and enhances deliverability. Leverage AI to predict optimal email sending times based on user behavior, maximizing engagement.

Ensuring E-mail Deliverability

While many believe that sending an email guarantees its delivery, the reality is more complex. During marketing harvest season, mailbox providers are on high alert for spammy elements. Before an email hits the mailbox, it’s at the mercy of spam filters like SpamAssassin, a filtering program that runs on a mail server. It scans message headers and its body, looking for signs that may suggest spam. It assigns a spam score for each such item. Once a certain score limit is exceeded (default is 5.0 points), the message is given a spam status.

Check using Mailchecker.net , which is based on SpamAssassin scoring, whether your message may contain spam characteristics suggesting unsolicited nature of your email communication.

Avoid Spam Filters 

In 2024, spam filters have become even more sophisticated, incorporating AI-driven analysis to detect questionable email behavior. To ensure your emails pass these checks, be mindful of the following:

• Text-to-image ratio: don’t rely too heavily on images—ensure the email contains at least 500 characters of text. (Based on Emails on Acid tests)
• Attachments: Avoid unnecessary attachments, as these can trigger spam filters.
• Clickbait phrases: Steer clear of phrases like  “if you don’t want to …, click here”, “click here”, “unsubscribe”, etc.
• Minimal symbols and emojis: Use emojis and decorative elements sparingly in subject lines, as excessive use can harm deliverability.
• HTML title: Ensure your email has an HTML title, but remember to remove the “tbody” tag – spam filters often associate overly simplistic code structures, like the presence of this tag, with spammy content.
• Turn off CAPS LOCK: Avoid using all caps in your email content, as shouting in the email can trigger spam filters and alienate recipients.
• Experiment with personalization: incorporating the recipient’s name or specific product recommendations based on browsing behavior—this strategy has proven to increase open rates without raising spam flags.

Optimize for Mobile: Responsive Email Design is Key

With mobile devices accounting for over 70% of email opens in 2024, ensuring your emails are mobile-friendly is more crucial than ever. Slow load times or poorly formatted messages can cause potential customers to lose interest.

To avoid this:

• Ensure that all images and text are responsive and load quickly on mobile devices.
• Simplify your content: Use clear calls-to-action and easily readable text, ensuring that your promotional emails can be consumed at a glance.
• Run mobile testing before sending, verifying that everything displays properly across different devices.

Bet on Professional Infrastructure

Once we have done everything we could on our side to professionally prepare our mailing (we have taken care of the base hygiene, and email design is created according to best practices) it’s time to consider the backend email infrastructure. High deliverability isn’t just about what’s in the email—it’s also about the technology that sends it.

 Using a professional email infrastructure like EmailLabs offers several advantages:

• Dedicated IP addresses help protect your reputation and ensure faster delivery times.
• Authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC reduce the risk of your emails being marked as spam. In 2024, Gmail and Yahoo! increasingly prioritize authenticated emails in their inbox placement algorithms.
• Email segmentation: Split marketing and transactional traffic by using separate IPs. This ensures that high-volume marketing campaigns don’t delay important transactional emails like order confirmations or shipping updates.

10 questions you should ask when choosing your ESP

Omnichannel Marketing: Integrate Your Email Campaigns

While email remains critical, 2024 is the year to integrate email with other marketing channels. By leveraging a multi-channel approach, including SMS alerts, push notifications, and social media retargeting, you ensure that your promotional messages reach customers across various touchpoints. AI-driven tools can help coordinate this effort, ensuring consistency and maximizing engagement across all platforms.

Schema and Structured Data in Email

As email marketing evolves, the integration of schema markup and structured data has become increasingly important for improving email engagement and deliverability. Schema markup is a form of microdata that helps inboxes understand the content of your message. By adding schema to your emails, you can provide more context about the content and enhance how your emails are displayed in inboxes. It is worth noticing that Gmail has recently introduced summary cards that leverage structured data to present email content more effectively. These cards allow email senders to display key information directly within the Gmail interface, providing a snapshot of the email’s content before it’s opened.

Structured Data and Schema – A Way to Highlight Discount Coupons in Emails

 source: Source: https://blog.google/products/gmail/new-gmail-summary-cards/

Post-Purchase Emails: Make Customers Come Back to Your Store for Hunting Next Year

Purchase satisfaction is not just about the product we receive, but about being pleased with the entire service behind the transaction. Imagine when a customer, acquired with a certain amount of effort and budget, finally decides to purchase from our store. Can we congratulate ourselves on our success already? Not really.

At times, only after the order is placed comes the hard part, effectively discouraging clients from returning. Post-purchase email support is crucial here. After all, customers expect orders, payment, receipt confirmation, or information about product shipment. When they receive such messages with a significant delay or not at all, they begin to feel anxious and doubt whether the whole process succeeded.

During such a busy mailing period as Black Friday, every store should make absolutely sure that no obstacle stands in the way of a transaction-customer email. Therefore, to avoid exposing ourselves to possible problems, our email communication must meet certain requirements. Besides a properly maintained contact list, the basis in the world of emailing is message authentication using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Without these security measures, our correspondence may be rejected or sent to spam by inbox providers right from the start.

Also, while accepting inbound traffic, ISPs’ receiving servers are more likely to handle messages from authenticated senders, which can ultimately help avoid queuing as well as slowing down the delivery of our emails to users’ mailboxes.

What Is The Easiest Way To Avoid Delays In Transactional Email Delivery?

By splitting marketing and transactional traffic on separate IPs, so we won’t encounter a situation in which a large promotional mailing will block important transactional messages. The next advantage is that it signals incoming servers which messages should go to the main or notification folder, and which should be placed in the offers tab.

Stay Compliant: Don’t Overlook Data Privacy Regulations

As data privacy regulations like GDPR and the upcoming EU AI Act continue to shape the e-commerce landscape, staying compliant is essential. Ensure that you only send marketing emails to users who have given explicit consent, and provide clear opt-out options in all communications.

In Summary: Key Effectiveness Factors to Focus On

To ensure maximum deliverability and effectiveness for your Black Friday 2024 email campaigns, focus on the following crucial factors:

• High IP Reputation and Dedicated IP Address*
  Use a dedicated IP to separate your traffic from other senders and maintain a strong reputation, especially during high-traffic events like Black Friday. Shared IPs can affect your deliverability if others misuse them.
• High Throughput to Avoid Delays
  Ensure your email system can handle large volumes to send emails quickly, preventing delays or queuing, which can diminish the impact of time-sensitive offers.
• Emails Sent by Servers with Partnerships with Mailbox Providers
  Consider using email services that have established partnerships with mailbox providers (such as EmailLabs) as they often have enhanced deliverability agreements in place.
• No Blacklisting
  Regularly monitor your sending domain and IPs to ensure they aren’t blacklisted, which would significantly harm your ability to reach recipients’ inboxes.
• Authentication Protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
  Implement these email authentication protocols to verify your domain and improve trustworthiness, reducing the chances of being flagged as spam.
• Recipients Engagement (Open and Click-Through Rates)
  Engagement metrics, like email opens and link clicks, are crucial indicators of email success. ISPs monitor these to determine whether your emails are well-received, which directly impacts future deliverability.
• Low Bounce Rate from Previous Campaigns
  Keep your email list clean and up-to-date by removing inactive addresses, which lowers bounce rates and boosts your sender reputation.
• Correct HTML Code
  Clean, well-structured HTML improves deliverability. Remove unnecessary tags (like “tbody”), and always ensure your email has a proper HTML title to avoid being flagged by spam filters.
• Consistent Message Volume
  Avoid drastic spikes in email volume, as ISPs often flag sudden surges as spammy behavior. Ramp up your volume gradually, particularly before high-traffic periods.
• Mobile Optimization for a Seamless Customer Experience
  With over 70% of email opens occurring on mobile devices, ensuring your emails are responsive and mobile-friendly is crucial for engagement and conversion.
• Omnichannel Integration for Cohesive Messaging
  Integrate your email campaigns with other marketing channels to create a seamless, cohesive experience for your customers.
• Schema and Structured Data
  Utilize schema markup to enhance your email’s visibility and engagement through summary cards in Gmail, providing valuable information directly in the inbox.

*Sharing IPs with other users means their reputation and actions will directly impact our deliverability. When choosing a shared IP, it’s even more important to ensure it has a good reputation (all IPs at EmailLabs are properly prepared for customer sends, i.e., tailored to handle business mailings and monitored in terms of quality).

Wishing everyone a successful Black Friday campaign and a problem-free transaction service!