The four-day-long omnichannel shopping festival Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) – one of the peak retail trading seasons for Australian retailers – provides a massive opportunity not only to optimise sales but to strategically attract new customers. 

BFCM is the time when retailers have the opportunity to implement multiple discount plans, countdown promotions and a focused, concentrated program of engagement with existing and new customers. 

But, as intelligent marketing automation platform Klaviyo explains, the often-overlooked aspect of the four-day festival is the window for retailers to offer compelling motivations to new customers to sign up for marketing communications – both by email and by SMS – as well as collect invaluable data about shopper behaviour to use in future strategic promotional campaigns. 

“It is important that retailers recognise that BFCM is a sales opportunity that expands well beyond a four-day weekend,” advises Ben Eversfield, senior customer success manager at Klaviyo. “Employing the right strategies before, during, and long after BFCM is crucial. Retailers who carefully audit sales results from BFCM and use the data at hand to understand and align their overall strategy throughout the year will reap the most rewards.”

1. Use the weeks ahead to boost brand interest

Klaviyo advocates retailers use the weeks ahead of BFCM to increase interest in the brand and encourage a connection. That might start with encouraging new customers and VIP customers to subscribe to dedicated BFCM discount emails so they can gain advance access to special deals before they open to the general public. 

Similarly, retailers can encourage customers to give them permission to send SMS texts offering exclusive deals – by using the BFCM season to offer a level of exclusivity and special privileges if they register. 

2. Build a campaign flow to drive leads

The starting point for any BFCM communications campaign is to develop a flow (Klaviyo has a helpful guide with an action checklist here). Flows guide deal-driven leads through the marketing funnel and will delight loyal customers with relevant content. This builds engagement and triggers browsing or shopping intent that, if managed well, will later convert into sales. 

With Klaviyo, retailers can set up automated email flows triggered by specific customer actions, ensuring timely and relevant communication. Automated flows can include welcome emails for new subscribers, cart abandonment emails for shoppers who didn’t complete their purchase or post-purchase emails encouraging reviews or showcasing related products.

3. Use segmentation to boost engagement

Segmentation is vital to ensure marketing communication is relevant to the customer receiving it. Klaviyo allows retailers to segment their email lists based on various customer behaviours and preferences, leading to more personalised communications. 

Retailers can create segments for high-value customers, frequent buyers or those who have shown interest in specific product categories, ensuring that the content of the emails is tailored to each group’s interests. 

4. Use A/B testing to test ideas 

Klaviyo advises retailers to experiment with different subject lines, email content or send times to see which variations perform best and use these insights to continually improve their email strategy. This can be done using Klaviyo’s robust A/B testing tool and its detailed analytics which allow retailers to optimise their email campaigns for better performance. 

5. Include SMS messages in the strategy

SMS messages can be used effectively to complement email responses to customers – both those who purchase as well as those who surf away from the site. Once a customer enters your flow, a well-timed SMS message can build customer engagement, often prompting them to return to the product they may have opted not to purchase, or recommending an alternative that may better suit their needs in price or functionality. 

“Prioritise text messages during the time of day the customer is likely to be most responsive. Analysing your customer data will inform you of the time they are more likely to visit your site or shop online, so schedule messages during that period,” explains Eversfield. 

Another engagement strategy retailers can build into their flow is the addition of a countdown timer. This adds a sense of urgency and can trigger FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), potentially increasing the chance of a sale. 

How Little Sleepies more than doubled BFCM sales with Klaviyo

One retailer that successfully deployed Klaviyo’s advice and platform to boost its BFCM performance is apparel and accessories brand Little Sleepies which last year increased its BFCM revenue driven by email by 138.2 per cent. 

Thanks to carefully planned email messaging flows, the retailer’s order volume rose by 250 per cent month on month last November.  

With a 30 per cent sitewide discount offer – up from 25 per cent the prior year – and additional targeted discounts in its armoury, Little Sleepies had the incentives to convert customers from browsers into buyers. 

Lindsay McClelland, VP of marketing, at Little Sleepies, says the company wanted to be more focused and intentional with its promotional emails – “not just blast our list”. 

After promoting its sale on organic social and an on-site pop-up long before it started, the brand encouraged customers to subscribe to emails for an hour of early access to the holiday sale, a tactic that drove significant list growth.

Once the sale began, the company leaned heavily on email, using Klaviyo automations and segmentation to send frequently to active shoppers. That tactic proved a huge success. 

“We drove more revenue day one than we had projected for the entire week of BFCM,” McClelland recalls. “We were re-forecasting every single day. Klaviyo helped us target people who were actually shopping.”

Klaviyo (CLAY-vee-oh) powers smarter digital relationships, making it easy for businesses to capture, store, analyse, and predictively use their own data to drive measurable, high-value outcomes. Klaviyo’s modern and intuitive SaaS platform enables business users of any skill level to harness their first-party data from more than 300 integrations to send the right message at the right time across email, SMS, and push notifications. Innovative businesses like Frank Green, Saba, Budgy Smuggler, Who Gives A Crap, and more than 130,000 other paying users leverage Klaviyo to acquire, engage, and retain customers – and grow on their own terms. For more information on Klaviyo’s leading-edge solutions for retailers, visit the company’s website here.