Black Friday and Cyber Monday email campaigns: From history to 2024’s top strategies for SaaS and eCommerce

Black Friday is a cornerstone retail event that originated in chaotic in-store sales and evolved into today’s well-orchestrated, digital marketing-driven holiday. The season provides a golden opportunity for email marketers to drive sales, build stronger connections with customers, and stand out in their overflowing inboxes. You will find inspiration in successful campaigns and examples of interactive email mechanics to level up your Black Friday emails. 

To provide insights for this article, we also used a LinkedIn event dedicated to this topic. Attending the event were Stripo’s CMO, Volodymyr Kreshchenko, and MailerLite’s Customer Education Specialist, Harmony Riveros.

The origins of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Black Friday is now an international shopping phenomenon, but it began as a much more chaotic local event. The term “Black Friday” reportedly dates back to 1950s Philadelphia, where police used it to describe the heavy foot and vehicle traffic that followed Thanksgiving Day. 

As the holiday weekend evolved, retailers soon saw the potential to attract huge crowds with massive discounts, unofficially kicking off the holiday shopping season. For decades, scenes of frenzied shoppers lining up at dawn and crowding into stores at midnight became an iconic part of Black Friday. These in-store events were intense, unpredictable, and sometimes even hazardous.

From frenzied shopping to digital domination

The arrival of the internet and online shopping brought Black Friday to a much broader audience, effectively turning it into a digital holiday. Transitioning from brick-and-mortar shopping to eCommerce opened new doors for retailers, who could now reach customers who preferred to avoid the in-store chaos. Online Black Friday deals became just as enticing as those found in physical stores, allowing shoppers to snag deals from the comfort of their homes.

This shift was a game-changer for both brands and shoppers. With eCommerce, Black Friday morphed from a single shopping day to a week, or even an entire month, of discounts. Retailers began experimenting with online-only deals, early access sales, and personalized offers, creating the marathon of promotions that keeps shoppers engaged for days on end.

It is anticipated that Black Friday 2024 will see significant growth in online sales:

• in the United States, forecasts suggest online sales could reach $10.8 billion, marking a 9.9% increase from the $9.8 billion recorded in 2023 (Demand Sage);
• global communications platform Infobip predicts a 7% rise in U.S. online sales, for an estimated total of $10.5 billion for Black Friday 2024 (TechBullion).

Rise of email marketing: Crafting the perfect Black Friday offer

As Black Friday moved online, email marketing quickly became the primary tool for brands to reach eager customers directly. Email allows marketers to create tailored, time-sensitive messages that cut through the noise of media ads and packed inboxes. 

For brands, email became the ideal way to send exclusive early-access offers, personalized recommendations, and last-minute reminders for deals ending soon. The personal, direct connection of email also enables marketers to segment audiences based on their shopping behavior, demographics, or past purchase history, allowing them to offer customized discounts that increase engagement and conversions.

Cyber Monday comes onto the scene

Cyber Monday, which was designed to attract shoppers who preferred the convenience of digital purchases to overcrowded stores, emerged in 2005 as an online extension of Black Friday. Introduced by the National Retail Federation, the concept capitalized on the growing trend of online shopping, especially for those who didn’t want to miss out on deals but who weren’t able — or willing — to brave long Black Friday lines. 

Positioned as the perfect follow-up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday quickly became a holiday shopping staple.

Lessons learned from previous Black Friday campaigns

Expert

Volodymyr Kreshchenko

CMO at Stripo

At Stripo, we’ve gained valuable insights from our Black Friday campaigns over the years. 

One of the key challenges we’ve encountered is the impact of significant discounts on product perception. When steep discounts are expected year after year, customers begin to anticipate these price drops, often holding off purchases until sales events. This cycle can drive up costs for repeatedly attracting the same customer rather than highlighting the product’s inherent value, ultimately reducing campaign effectiveness.

Our first Black Friday sale was incredibly successful, yielding strong ROI and positive feedback. However, in subsequent years we noticed a decline in effectiveness. This trend has encouraged us to explore new mechanics and offers to keep our campaigns fresh and engaging for customers.

Additionally, we’ve learned the importance of balancing the needs of our loyal customers with efforts to attract new ones. Existing customers who understand the value of Stripo may feel overlooked if significant discounts are aimed primarily at new users. To avoid this, we’re working to ensure that promotions are inclusive and considerate of our loyal users.

Expert

Harmony Riveros

Customer Education Specialist at MailerLite

MailerLite often extends discounts to annual plans during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, allowing for the engagement and onboarding of new customers for an entire year. Rather than having a discount that keeps someone on the platform for a month, it allows them to use their account for a full year and to take advantage of all the tools. This approach attracts customers and builds loyalty by enabling them to experience the platform over an extended period.

Combining Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Extend and optimize your promotions

Combining Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns is an effective strategy for brands looking to maximize their holiday sales. By merging these events, brands can extend the impact of their promotions and create a longer window for customers, especially online shoppers, to make purchases.

Combining Black Friday and Cyber Monday is very important because it allows you to extend your sales and discounts. Cyber Monday is a big holiday for online sales.

Harmony Riveros,

Customer Education Specialist at MailerLite.

Combining these events can also help with cost efficiency and new customer acquisition. For SaaS, for instance, extended discounts can stimulate new sign-ups or longer-term commitments, giving users more time to explore the platform’s features.

Combining both of them can be valuable for businesses, especially for SaaS and eCommerce, where the focus can be on attracting new audiences.

Volodymyr Kreshchenko,

CMO at Stripo.

Choosing email campaign strategies and technical preparation

When planning Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns, choosing the right strategy and preparing technically are key.

For SaaS businesses, focusing on new audiences and encouraging annual subscriptions with discounts can be highly effective. This approach attracts new customers during the sale and keeps them engaged throughout the year, maximizing retention.

It’s also essential to start preparing months in advance. Early preparation allows for the testing of various tactics to find what resonates best while avoiding last-minute rush changes.

You can always test something new, but you don’t need to test it too close to the actual Black Friday event.

Volodymyr Kreshchenko,

CMO at Stripo.

A crucial part of this prep is ensuring high deliverability. Checking in advance that your account settings, segmentation, and list hygiene are working optimally will improve the chances that your emails reach inboxes when it matters most. As email deliverability has become an even bigger focus this year, prioritizing it can make all the difference in the success of your campaigns. After all, your efforts only pay off if your messages reach your audience.

We recommend that people start their strategy weeks ahead of time, if not several months ahead. Make sure that your account is set up deliverability-wise so that when you are sending Black Friday emails, your deliverability is the highest it can be.

Harmony Riveros,

Customer Education Specialist at MailerLite.

Maintaining a “clean” email list is essential and should be prepared prior to the email frequency spikes of Black Friday. Regularly clean your list to ensure it includes active, engaged subscribers — that is, those who open and interact with your emails. This helps improve deliverability by ensuring that your emails land in inboxes instead of spam folders. 

Additionally, check your Postmaster account and monitor for any issues with spam complaints or IP addresses. By keeping your email list clean and healthy, you’ll be in a better position to deliver impactful Black Friday campaigns with fewer deliverability concerns.

Avoid launching too early and sending too many emails

Launching Black Friday promotions too early can backfire for your brand and the market as a whole. Starting months in advance risks diluting the impact of the sale, leading to "discount fatigue," which occurs when customers become overwhelmed by endless offers well before the event. Instead, timing is key. Begin your promotions closer to Black Friday to help maintain a sense of urgency and excitement.

Around this time, inboxes are flooded with Black Friday emails, and messages are easily lost. Rather than bombarding customers early, focus on standing out by crafting a thoughtful, data-backed strategy. 

Personalization and segmentation 

Personalization and segmentation make a big difference here. Targeting specific groups, like loyal customers or recent sign-ups, with tailored offers ensures relevant emails that are likely to grab attention. This approach helps your brand stand out from the other messages in crowded inboxes, boosting open rates and engagement without overwhelming your audience. This is especially important when considering the highly competitive nature of Black Friday emails.

We need to put a lot of effort into our audience’s personalization and segmentation to deliver a better experience and better communication. Sometimes, marketers communicate differently, not only in messages and narratives. They also use different level discounts, and nobody actually likes it when you can get 10% off for one of the emails you send up and 50% off for other emails.

Volodymyr Kreshchenko,

CMO at Stripo.

Focus on quality over quantity

It’s important to avoid overloading customers with repetitive messages. Instead, focus on delivering value with each email. Carefully crafted, well-timed emails create a more positive experience that keeps customers engaged without causing frustration.

We definitely shouldn't be noisy. Often, we see situations where sending multiple emails from different angles doesn’t lead to good performance.

Volodymyr Kreshchenko,

CMO at Stripo.

Increase engagement with interactive emails

We were doing some research on this year’s trends in email marketing, and one of the things we did see is that attention spans are getting shorter, whether it’s social media, but that also applies to emails. The average attention span is 47 seconds, and it’s even less with email. It’s like nine seconds.

Harmony Riveros,

Customer Education Specialist at MailerLite.

Short attention spans mean customers respond better to concise, to-the-point content. To keep engagement up, incorporate interactive content into Black Friday email designs. Include fun elements like mini-surveys or quick tips that add value without demanding too much time. In this way you stay on customers’ radar without overwhelming them, ensuring that they feel valued and engaged in your brand community even after the sales event has ended.

Here are the interactive mechanics that are most successful in Black Friday emails.

Wheel of fortune

This game mechanic, which provides the opportunity to get big discounts, is great for engaging subscribers. This is how it can look in an email:

To implement such mechanics quickly and without code hustle, use the Stripo interactive module generator and this guide.

Countdown timer

A countdown timer is one of the most popular ways to visually communicate that holiday offers are about to expire. This method works great in email campaigns and is also quite easy to create using a module in the Stripo editor.

(Source: Stripo email template)

To get inspired and make your email creation task easier, visit the Black Friday email templates section. 

Game mechanic "Find a pair"

The email recipient must find pairs of logically related pictures until all pairs are found. This one was made by the Promodo agency for a Black Friday email campaign for hardware and electronics store Stylus.

(Source: Email newsletter by Promodo agency for Stylus)

I want to inspire you to create something interesting and creative, maybe something outstanding for your audience or industry. So create, add that we talked about this previously, and maybe just make some small signs, gifts to your customers, or useful information you can give away for free. Just inspire your customers to make more or spend more time on your platform as well.

Volodymyr Kreshchenko,

CMO at Stripo.

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Post activities: Retention and engagement

After Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s essential to follow up thoughtfully to retain the customers you’ve attracted. Post-event activities should be a standard part of your checklist — don’t just wrap up and move on! Keep up the momentum through continued engagement to help turn those one-time buyers into loyal long-term customers.

Some tactics:

1. Start with simple actions like sending a warm thank-you email to show appreciation. Automating thank-you emails, discount reminders, and other post-sale touchpoints ensures a seamless experience and lets customers know that they’re valued both during the sale and long after.
2. Post-sale data offers valuable insights into customer preferences. Use this information to create personalized product recommendations. Tailor follow-ups based on purchase history to engage and help drive future sales by keeping customers interested in relevant products.
    

   You now have data based on what they purchased during Black Friday, and you can use it to put them on a targeted list and recommend products in the future.

   

   Harmony Riveros,

   Customer Education Specialist at MailerLite.
3. Gather feedback. Sending a survey or requesting reviews not only helps improve future campaigns but also reinforces that you value your customers’ opinions. 

But don’t overload them with too many messages. Instead, keep it balanced and relevant.

Testing your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns

Testing is critical to optimizing your Black Friday and Cyber Monday email campaigns. Every audience is different, so experimenting with various approaches can uncover what resonates best with your subscribers.

For instance, you might test different subject lines to see which gets the highest open rate or test varying discount levels to see which drives more clicks and engagement. Even subtle changes, like adjusting tone or frequency, can reveal valuable insights about your audience’s preferences. And don’t limit yourself to one test. Consistent, ongoing testing helps you stay responsive to shifts in audience behavior, which can vary from year to year.

We recommend A/B testing in different areas. It means whether it's emails, automation, forms, or creating different versions, it could mean just a different subject line to see what gets a higher open rate. It could mean a slightly different discount to see which one gets more engagement. Testing to see what works — and A/B testing is the main way you can do that because it allows you to — you don't have to create lots of different emails.

Harmony Riveros,

Customer Education Specialist at MailerLite.

Consider “negative testing” as well by comparing your new campaigns with previous versions. Sending an older campaign to a small segment of your list can reveal whether audience preferences have shifted or if specific tactics no longer perform as they once did. This can provide insights into your audience’s evolving expectations and allow you to stay ahead.

Key metrics to track for Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns

Tracking the proper metrics is essential for understanding how well your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns perform. Key email marketing metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates provide a snapshot of how well your emails engage recipients.

For eCommerce brands, tracking sales through platforms like WooCommerce or Shopify adds depth to these metrics by connecting email engagement directly to purchases. Understanding sales volume and product preferences from among these metrics can inform how you refine and personalize future email campaigns.

While you can monitor your engagement, you also need to monitor your sales, and both are very important in email marketing because sales all lead to how you target and send your emails. The main reason to collect this data is to have the insights to create better results, whether that's for next year or the next sales season. It is always good to have that data to make better decisions for the future.

Harmony Riveros,

Customer Education Specialist at MailerLite.

But metrics alone aren’t enough — to get a complete picture, pair them with customer feedback from various channels such as post-purchase emails or surveys. This combination of data and insights can reveal unexpected findings about audience preferences or shifts. Each metric and piece of feedback is valuable for guiding the improvement of future campaigns, helping you build better email strategies and audience relationships year round.

Just make sure you're not collecting metrics just for the sake of collecting metrics. All the insights should come from people, combined with your own insights and experience.

Volodymyr Kreshchenko,

CMO at Stripo.

Wrapping up

As you gear up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, keep these core strategies in mind to maximize your impact and keep your campaign on track:

1. Leverage past lessons — to optimize this year’s approach, review past campaigns to identify what worked and what didn’t.
2. Create a strategic timeline — balance your promotions for Black Friday and Cyber Monday with thoughtful timing and a clear email schedule.
3. Focus on engagement and interactivity — incorporate interactive elements and personalized touches for more engaging and targeted emails.
4. Test every aspect of your campaigns — A/B testing helps you to fine-tune your results. 
5. Remember post-event follow-up — plan retention activities, such as thank-you emails and product recommendations, to keep new customers engaged and coming back.

This framework will help you stand out during the year’s busiest shopping season and make a lasting impression on your customers.