Are you up for a new twist in your holiday email marketing strategy this year? You don’t have to replace your entire holiday marketing plan. But I have an idea you can use to build engagement and conversions on the long shopping weekend that begins on Thanksgiving and extends to Giving Tuesday.
Here it is: Create a holiday within a holiday for “Cyber 6” weekend email marketing for retailers and ecommerce brands.
You’ve probably heard about “Cyber 5:” five themed shopping days that include Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday. You probably send emails on two or three of those days already.
This year, I’m hearing more retail and email brands talk about creating “Super Sunday” with its own identity. That brings the total to six themed days and a fresh opportunity to get your emails seen and acted on.
A Cyber 6 holiday email strategy takes the usual Black Friday or Cyber Monday emails to a higher level to create a broader cyber week strategy. You need a plan and ideas to make it happen, though. And that’s just what you’ll find in this post.
Cyber week email strategy
First, the basics: Your plan needs a goal, a strategy to achieve that goal, and tactics to help you carry out that strategy. Let’s break it down:
1. Goals: Increase conversions and build engagement for the rest of the holiday email season.
2. Strategy: Create a coordinated series of themed campaigns intended to create higher visibility in the inbox, leading to greater engagement and potential for conversion.
3. Tactics: Use a design based on a standard template with a custom logo, theme, and brand or campaign colors that reflect your general holiday design. The series can combine stand-alone and stacked promotions tailored to each day in the series. Copy will combine clear customer benefits, reflect the theme for the day, and support the daily promotion while using a standard subject line format and copy tone.
That’s the basic plan. The particulars will depend on your brand, audience, holiday plan, resources, and technical capabilities. You might come up with a plan for each Cyber 6 day, or just for the ones that matter most.
Want to know more? Before I get into the details, here’s why a plan like Cyber 6 might be more important than ever this year.
Why create a Cyber 6 holiday email strategy?
It’s all about giving your emails a recognizable identity that adds more oomph to the themed emails you send already. Instead of thinking of each day as a separate entity, you’ll think of each day as part of a whole and consider how those messages can work together. Planned correctly, the sum of your cyber week emails will be greater than the parts!
So, one reason is to get more from your promotional emails. But there’s more at stake this year, too, and that gives you another compelling reason to pay a little more attention. Here’s why:
Your greatest challenge, as always, is getting your emails noticed in the avalanche of emails that will start filling your customers’ inboxes soon. This year, email services like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail have made that job even harder, thanks to new rules that govern deliverability.
That means it’s more important than ever that you can show how your subscribers – their customers – want and value your messages. That means more opens, clicks, and forwards, and fewer spam complaints, deletes without opening, and non-activity.
Without that demonstrated interest, your messages are more likely to get shunted to the spam folder, if not denied delivery to the inbox. Helping your messages stand out through themed campaigns can give you that necessary visibility.
How Cyber 6 weekend marketing evolved
Black Friday is the traditional kick-off to the holiday season, both in stores and online. Cyber Monday followed as digital shopping became more popular (and revenue-generating). Thanksgiving entered the chat as more brick-and-mortar stores opened for a few hours on Thanksgiving Day.
Small Business Saturday is an American Express campaign to spotlight its member small businesses. Giving Tuesday is a social media project that originated at the 92nd Street Y in New York City and has morphed into a global nonprofit organization, raising $1 billion for local charities.
Super Sunday was always an unofficial member of the Thursday-to-Monday cyber week period. Now it has a name and plenty of potential to squeeze more money from Black Friday, preview Cyber Monday, or fill a need for your own email marketing program.
Cyber 6 email marketing campaign tips
1. Create a theme. “Cyber 6” probably won’t mean anything to your retail or ecommerce customers. So, choose one that reflects your brand or ties in with your overall holiday theme.
2. Choose which days to include. Although we have come up with ideas for each day of the Cyber 6 weekend, some might not fit into your series. If your company doesn’t do fundraising or support a charity, you could skip Giving Tuesday. (But what a great thing it would be if you could pull something together in time!)
3. Design a template for your Cyber 6 messages. It can work with your holiday template, if you use one, and incorporate common elements like a holiday logo or colors. But your cyber week messages should have a uniform look, such as one hero image and copy block, to help you deliver information fast. Save your multi-offer messages for less email-intensive days.
4. Write copy that reflects the qualities or values of each day. Thanksgiving, for example, should sound different from Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
5. Maximize your inbox view. Your sender name and subject line are your greatest assets in an overcrowded inbox. Choose a unique sender name that includes your brand with one or two descriptive words, like “[Brand] Holiday Weekend Specials.” Write explicit, value-based subject lines. Scrap the usual cliches, like “Black Friday Starts Now!” Every other brand is using that one – don’t waste all your hard work with a subject line that looks like everyone else’s.
A note on preheaders: AI-driven extraction might replace your carefully crafted preheader with copy pulled at random from your message. You should still write a preheader that complements the subject line, with a secondary offer or more info about your primary offer. Just be sure your subject line is strong enough to demand attention if your preheader goes missing.
6. Link promotions. Offer a VIP incentive to people who convert from your message, which they could apply to a future promotion in your Cyber 6 series. For example, if someone buys from your Black Friday message, give them an extra 20% on a Cyber Monday purchase.
7. Preview the next event. Add a hint about what’s coming in the next message. Give this more punch if you put it in the same location in each message design. Build it into your Cyber 6 message template so you don’t leave it out by accident.
8. Does this work with a multi-email campaign? Yes. If your Black Friday or Cyber Monday plan includes multiple daily messages, send your Cyber 6 message in your prime spot and follow up later with emails bearing different offers, such as a don’t-miss-out email to subscribers who opened but didn’t act on your previous emails.
Cyber week promotions for retail and ecommerce
Even if you decide not to experiment with Cyber 6 this year, the promotions listed below can help you tune up your theme-day emails for better results.
Thanksgiving
Customer goal: Informational and commercial
What’s your Cyber 6 strategy? This is a creative challenge. Your message has a dual role: thanking customers for shopping and giving both idle scrollers and deal-hunting planners a reason to click to your site. Give them VIP-only teasers or an offer to use on Thanksgiving, and a special offer buyers can use on Black Friday.
What’s your Cyber 6 strategy? Have a little fun with the day if it fits with your brand or holiday theme. I love this email from Original Grain, whose product list includes a line of watches made from whiskey barrels. The cocktail tie-in is totally on brand.
Black Friday
Customer goal: Transactional
Content focus: Your customers are in spending mode. They want deals. You want conversions. Black Friday emails usually combine urgency, exclusivity, and transaction-focused copy. To make your Cyber 6 email stand out, choose one of these themes, like exclusivity. You can always change up your focus with a follow-up email later in the day, promoting urgency.
Tip: Remember what I said earlier about avoiding cliches in subject lines? That goes double on Black Friday. Please, please, please – no “Black Friday starts now!” subject lines. You have precious little space as it is. Don’t waste it with a subject line that looks like 50 others in the inbox.
This email from Cotton Traders uses animation to capture attention, reinforce brand features like its return policy and Trustpilot rating, and impart urgency with a countdown clock.
Small Business Saturday
Customer focus: Transactional, informative, and emotional
Content Focus: Small Business Saturday is a themed promotion from American Express, but many small businesses that aren’t AmEx customers use the day to promote their employees, product stories, or ties to a community. Bigger brands can use the day to highlight vendors or other small-business partners.
If you have always wanted to experiment with storytelling, this would be a good place to do it.
Tips: If SBS isn’t in your brand wheelhouse, don’t push it. Inauthenticity is worse than a recycled Black Friday email. But see if you can find a story to tell, and add a relevant offer. Even if it’s just a 20% off “thanks for sharing our story” promo.
This email from Nood shows how you don’t have to work hard to tell your business story. This simple format fits the storytelling framework and would help connect customers to the faces behind the customer service voices.
Super Sunday
Customer focus: This newly themed day hasn’t developed a personality yet. So, the field is open. You can decide what you want your message to be. In general, customers are still bargain-hunting but without the stress and urgency of Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Tip: Consider a gift guide. These are popular devices that bring multiple products into a single email without cluttering it up, something that can blow up your Cyber 6 design. With a little forethought and some data insights into your audience and their preferences, you can build a meaningful guide that isn’t just a mishmash of products.
This gift guide from Crate & Barrel uses activities and personal preferences to classify gifts, but you also can use price level, new products, even colors or sizes. Call on your brand or product managers to help you come up with fun or relevant categories that are likely to match a gift-buyer’s quest.
Cyber Monday:
Customer goal: As with Black Friday, your customers are in transactional mode, sorting through emails quickly to find the best deals.
Content Focus: Cyber Monday ramps up FOMO – fear of missing out on the great deals everybody else is bragging about. You can reassure your customers with emails that combine value and scarcity, promising that your deals will beat everyone else’s.
Tip: Your subject line can make or break your campaign. This one from Volcom can stop the inbox scroll long enough to get an open: Extra 50% OFF Sale + Free Shipping! Cyber Monday is ON
This email from Volcom delivers the information shoppers want at a glance. It’s designed for two kinds of shoppers: people who want to know just enough to decide whether they want to jump to the website, and scrollers who want more detail before acting. Either way, it should generate plenty of clicks, and the design would be compatible with your Cyber 6 or holiday template.
Giving Tuesday
Customer focus: Emails on this day can combine commerce with social impact. Or they can provide relief from the unrelenting onslaught of promotional emails.
Content Focus: Nonprofits can emphasize their cause-based storytelling and ramp up donor engagement, besides soliciting donations. Commercial brands can use Giving Tuesday to highlight their social or charitable work. Some focus exclusively on promoting their good works, while others offer a buy-and-donate combination in which the company donates proceeds from specific product sales or a percentage of sales.
Tip: UNIQLO goes hard on Black Friday to Cyber Monday and then takes its foot off the gas on Giving Tuesday with an email promoting its charitable work. The email highlights the organizations the brand works with at the top of the email and then adds an appeal for its own social program. But it’s not 100% informational. The brand adds a standard promotional module at the end for people who just want to shop.
Wrapping Up: Start strong with Cyber 6
New deliverability rules and AI-driven alterations have made your path to the inbox even more difficult. Even if your messages land in the inbox, they face stiffer competition from other senders, many of whom have the same goal as you: to get emails seen, opened, and acted on.
With email volume hitting annual highs on the post-Thanksgiving shopping weekend, your campaigns need all the help you can give them. A cyber week holiday email strategy can help you create purpose-driven messages that deliver value for your customers and results for your email program – two positive outcomes that can set up your December holiday email campaigns for even more success.
Want more advice on creating a strong holiday marketing strategy? Download my free guide, Building a Holiday Email Marketing Strategy, for easy-to-implement advice now.
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