BFCM 2019 email marketing stats and lessons learned

Black Friday 2019 is over and we’re excited to share with you what we learned this year. Ahead of the Christmas rush, we believe these insights will help you get better results from email marketing especially.

The week leading up to Black Friday Black Friday 2019 was a wild one – I’m sure for you as well – but it gives us an understanding of people’s buying behavior better than any other time of the year.

Black Friday emails

When is the best time to send Black Friday email campaigns?

When to start your BFCM promotions?

How to make people open and click/ tap on your holiday emails?

It turns out the earlier, the better.

Black Friday has turned into a week-long event and companies that start early win.

When were the most Black Friday Black Friday 2019 emails sent out?

Of course, the two “shopping holidays” Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw the most emails sent out, but that’s not the most interesting part.

Friday, 22nd, as well as Wednesday, 27th, Thanksgiving and the day after Cyber Monday followed closely in numbers of emails sent.

Now, that matters because open rates were quite good for the output. It turns out emails sent around the big date, but not exactly on it, have a much higher chance of being opened. Your offers will reach your customers more efficiently if you don’t aim for the big event necessarily and avoid the “rush hour” in email marketing.

Black Friday email open rates

Open rates began declining on Monday, 18th. From 12.8% it went down to 6% on Thursday, 21st, a week before Thanksgiving. It’s normal that people were waiting for the “big” offers to drop and ignored the very early ones.

But here comes the big surprise. Open rates began climbing up again and got to the peak 12.5% on Monday, 25th. So it wasn’t that early to start after all.

These two days, 18th and 25th, were the best days in terms of open rates.

In fact, Black Friday itself saw the sad 7.2% open rate. Cyber Monday was not much better with 7.9%. The day after Cyber Monday was abysmal with 4.2% – people got enough for now.

BFCM click through rates

Of course, in order to evaluate sales performance, we need to look at the click through rates as well.

Indeed, Thursday, 21st (a week before Thanksgiving), saw the best click rate of 22%, followed by the Saturday after, 23rd, with 16%.

Why is that?

Our guess is inboxes were not so flooded on those days so people were able to pay more attention to offers.  Our graph of emails sent confirms that the more emails are sent out, the lower the click through rate and conversion rates.

The two “shopping holidays” got 12.6% and 9.2% (lowest in the two weeks monitored) respectively. This again is because people got too many emails to bother clicking on all.

BFCM orders and revenue

Surprisingly, most sales happened on Tuesday, 26th, before Black Friday. Our guess is most people had seen enough offers by then and FOMO worked so they didn’t want to wait.

What do we learn from these numbers that can be used next BFCM?

• No-one reads emails on Black Friday. People go directly to the website of the brands and retailers they’re interested in to see the offers.
• You’ll get more eyes on your offers in the days leading up to Black Friday.
• 10 days before the day is too early to fire away offers. A week before is perfect.
• Prepare for the most orders a few days before the actual date of Black Friday – the shopping rush seems to be moving earlier every year.
• Give yourself a little break after Cyber Monday because people cool down the shopping rush a bit. Come up with fresh offers after the first week of December when everybody’s on the serious hunt for gifts.
• Don’t get discouraged by low click through rates – awareness is important too.