December 2nd this year, Cyber Monday is a great chance to shop for everyone who didn’t have time for it during the Black Friday weekend. Historically, the difference was that Black Friday was all about physical sales, hustle and bustle, and standing in lines whereas Cyber Monday has always been a digital event and happened online, hence the name.
Consumer behavior changed, though. Even before the pandemic and thanks to worldwide progressive digitization, Cyber Monday was gradually taking first place in terms of revenue. And ever since the holiday season of 2020, Cyber Monday has been bringing more revenue than Black Friday. According to Adobe Analytics, in 2024, shoppers are forecasted to spend $13.2 billion on it out of $240.8 billion of total spending on the holiday season November 1-December 31.
Not even the best Black Friday marketing campaigns can change the trends. In 2024, Cyber Monday will continue to be extra-popular too since its entire concept is built around being online and favors e-commerce shopping, away from the Black Friday crowds. So the stakes are high. Shoppers aren’t just ready to spend money, they’re actually excited to do it.
If you want a piece of this holiday shopping pie too, then your task is to prepare a decent Cyber Monday email marketing campaign!
Before you begin creating your holiday marketing campaigns, you need to do a few things with your list of contacts.
Clean up your list. You might want to tidy up your email list first before you engage in important campaigns to get rid of inactive contacts, duplicates, and other useless email addresses. It’ll save your money and minimize the risk of running into a spam trap and getting banned by email providers.
Segment your list. Typically, brands send the same e-commerce sale announcements to all clients. But if you know which product categories your potential customers like the most, you can use segmentation to make your Cyber Monday emails more relevant and increase conversions. You can study the results of your Black Friday emails and sales to determine how and who to target.
Create a list of new customers. For example, you can add an extra Cyber Monday-only subscription form to your website and make a special offer to new customers.
Re-engage old customers. If you haven’t connected with your customers for a while, first you’ll need to launch a win-back campaign to make sure they expect your offers and will not report your emails as spam, spoiling your reputation as a sender.
Email marketing is a great tool that can help prepare subscribers for the day of big discounts, spark interest, and make them count the days until they can finally take part in your grand Cyber Monday e-commerce sale. Let’s see what you need to do for your holiday campaigns to go as planned.
What do you do if you want to choose a movie but you have no time for trailers? Well, you make a decision based on titles, and it’s a marketer’s job to create a title that represents the subject, attracts the right audience, and sounds interesting and promising.
The same goes for email subject lines. A study shows that 33% of recipients open emails based on their subject lines.
So a subject line must be:
Here are some of the examples of successful holiday subject lines by real brands:
You can also draw inspiration from Black Friday email subject lines and repurpose the effective ones.
The design of an important email campaign, one such as Cyber Monday, should be memorable.
What’s special about Cyber Monday is that there are no clear requirements in terms of design — no bunnies or candy canes like other holidays have, no immediately recognizable colors, no special phrases or traditions. Except perhaps for the elements of techno-style like in this example:
The absence of traditional elements is both good and bad. On the one hand, you don’t have much to go off, and it’s more difficult to create an instantly recognizable design associated with Cyber Monday. On the other hand, you’re free to express yourself. It all depends on your imagination and the skills of a designer.
Just look at this imaginative Cyber Monday holiday email by Fossil:
Another point is that your template should be clear. As beautiful as the message is, the main rule of any design is not to prevent a person from taking the required action. Make sure your email template has a clear structure, enough white space, and a coherent hierarchy. Highlight the CTAs — they should encourage a reader to go to your site and make a purchase. Read more about email design in one of our other articles.
Give out a discount
Just giving a discount is a simple but effective technique. After all, what everybody waits for at this time of the year is a discount — Cyber Monday and Black Friday are the days of the biggest sales. And people actively use these e-commerce sales to buy holiday gifts. So the easiest and most reliable option not to fail Cyber Monday is to meet customer expectations and lower your pricing.
You can also give a promotional code or indicate a lowered price using the concrete figures. What’s more effective — dollars off or percent off? There’s an opinion that giving an actual dollar amount off is better because a $10, or a $35 benefit is easier to imagine than a 10% or a 35% one.
Consider the rule of 100 — it says that with products or services over $100 a dollar discount is more effective. And with products under $100, things are reversed and a percentage discount is likely to be more effective.
Make a gift
Thanksgiving holiday emails (and even those dedicated to e-commerce sales) can showcase your company’s generosity and appreciation toward clients. Another good way to delight customers on Cyber Monday and drive sales is to offer a gift — make customers feel special. And don’t forget to mention it in your subject line.
A couple of ideas to make your gift offer even better:
This email by a clothing brand is great for several reasons. First, the brand’s customers can choose their gift which makes the offer resonate more. Second, the banner states that this is a once-in-a-year opportunity to stress the urgency and exclusivity of this e-commerce promotion. And lastly, the email has a thorough How it works section to explain the mechanics in detail.
Include multiple offers
Shoppers love discounts, and yet the price isn’t the only thing that interests them. People also care about the speed and methods of delivery, payment options, terms of return, or any other feature. A reliable service in addition to the main product is another way to stand out from the competition.
What to offer:
Statistics say that 68% of consumers have made an impulsive purchase after learning about someone else’s experience. If you’ve ever found yourself holding two cans of Coke, one of which you hadn’t intended to buy at all, you know what we’re talking about. This is called “FOMO” and it stands for Fear Of Missing Out — a feeling when a person worries that they might (have) miss(ed) something.
When it comes to effective e-сommerce strategies, FOMO marketing is a great technique because fear is a very powerful motivator. It may sound like something manipulative at first but it’s really not as long as you stay true to your offer and don’t hide the fact. It just gives hesitant buyers a little urge.
Cyber Monday emails are a perfect place to use some urgency to illustrate e-commerce offers that have deadlines. Emphasize that time is running out and that your subscribers will have to wait a whole year for a similar holiday sale.
You can show urgency in emails in several ways:
Moving pictures are great for setting the mood and drawing attention to a specific part of an email. Use GIFs in emails when you need to astonish, amuse, show your brand personality, show an assortment of goods, or replace a video.
The key is to follow the best practices for animations in emails:
GoDaddy analyzed 4 studies on why people unsubscribe, and guess what, very often people do it because the content is boring and not interesting to them.
Jokes in email subject lines and email bodies:
Funny content is tricky though, because the sense of humor is extremely subjective. To avoid sounding offensive, do not write what you would not say to an unfamiliar person in a real-life situation. When writing about massive sales, stick to kind humor and leave the dark and surreal one for another time.
You’ve already seen examples of emojis in the subject lines. It’s a popular way to make messages stand out in inboxes, especially for e-commerce businesses. Still, only a minority of senders do it, so you can try it too to improve open rates and overall email marketing results. A few tips to help you make better use of emojis in your subject lines:
You can also use emojis in the body of a message, like this:
42% of users read emails on mobile phones, with Apple iPhone being the most popular mobile email viewing platform. So with almost half of users reading emails on smaller screens, it’ll be a shame to include unreadable text or unadapted pictures in the mobile versions of your email.
Thankfully, many of today’s e-commerce email templates are so mobile-first and minimalistic that practically nothing changes when you compare their desktop and mobile versions:
The easiest way to make sure your emails are responsive is to use platforms with email builders that have this feature by default. For example, Selzy has a powerful email builder that’s responsive.
Given the inflation and economic crises, consumers are likely to be extra eager for holiday pre-sales and extended sales this year. Make a series of emails to lead your customers to purchase.
Here is an example of a basic emailing plan:
Another thing many retailers do? Extend your sales and promotions.
Here’s a Cyber Monday email campaign by Angara from the pre-sale to the extended sale:
One last pro-tip: use email automation to make sure your emails are sent on time. Plan everything in advance, and when the holiday sale starts, relax and enjoy the hands-off process.
Want to see some design inspiration? Then you’ve come to the right place! Here are some of the Cyber Monday design ideas you can use in your campaigns.
When you think of technology and cyber reality, you probably think of the Matrix movies and the green digits on retro computers’ screens.
This email below feels very Cyber Monday appropriate with bright green on the black background, almost everything written in uppercase, and a pixelated internet image:
The email above feels like too much? You can always use a light green shade as an accent color for just a touch of the holiday theme:
It’s hard to pinpoint the retro-futurism aesthetic, you just know it when you see it. Think the movie Drive, disco, pixelated sunsets, and such.
This campaign uses pink and purple-tinted visuals to convey a retro, nostalgic feeling:
If you like this idea but want to make it a little simpler, here is another example. This email banner cleverly combines stylized fonts and soft-colored shadow effects to make a Cyber Monday sale look interesting:
You can also just opt for neon:
Another spin on the Cyber Monday email design is to include pixelated fonts, computers, or windows and tabs.
Here is an example with little playful animations:
This banner with stylized computer windows and a cursor can be a template for your campaign:
You can also go all out and prepare illustrations like this brand did for its Cyber Monday campaign:
You don’t have to come up with a special design for Cyber Monday, you can also just keep the theme you already use for all the winter emails. Use images of snowpeople, Christmas symbols, ornaments — you name it.
Here is a playful email by Life Is Good Inc that shows Santa and the elves riding a train with gifts through a snowy forest:
There are simpler ways to achieve the same effect and make your Cyber Monday email fit with other holiday campaigns. Nunn Bush used a creative photo and simple animation to make the design winter-themed:
Adopting a holiday theme can be great, but you don’t have to. Sometimes the most effective and memorable campaigns are the ones that go against the grain. Like this beautiful ornate email series from Baggu:
You can also send an email not about the sale and cut through the discount buzz while reminding your customers about the Cyber Monday offers:
If you plan to give a sneak peek, it is better to launch an email chain dedicated to the Cyber Monday sale at least a month in advance. Then follow the advice from the previous point.
As for the best hours, consider these findings:
Early morning seems to be the best time for sending emails in every respect, but you can also try experimenting with evenings. For more information and different studies, check out our article on the best time to send emails.
This will also help:
Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day in the U.S.
To prepare a decent Cyber Monday email campaign, follow the best practices:
This article was originally published in October 2021 and was updated in November 2024 to make it more relevant and comprehensive.
