With the right amount of planning, your tour or attraction can hit the jackpot on Black Friday.
Nearly 180 million Americans shopped during the Black Friday holiday last year, which lasted from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. The biggest shopping day was on Black Friday specifically, which had a turnout of 66.5 million people shopping in-store and 88 million online.
After two years in a pandemic, many are prioritizing experiences after so much time spent inside, and if you offer them the right deal, you can attract a slew of new customers during Black Friday 2022.
In this post, you’ll find several Black Friday email examples to inspire your upcoming holiday sales — and learn how to prepare your own campaign for success.
How to prepare your Black Friday campaign
- 6 tips to make your Black Friday emails stand out from the noise
- How many emails to send the week of Thanksgiving
3 examples of great travel-specific Black Friday emails
- 1. Much Better Adventures
- 2. Flixbus Black Friday announcement
- 3. Getaway
- 4. Cirque du Soleil
- 5. Pueblo Bonito’s Black Friday reminder
When is Black Friday 2022?
As always, the Black Friday sales event occurs the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday 2022 will be on November 25.
While Black Friday originally began as an in-store shopping event, it has now expanded online as well.
Online Black Friday sales may start as early as the week before the actual holiday. Your tour business can, for instance, promote a special offer each day of the week leading up to Black Friday. The National Retail Federation found that 61% of consumers started shopping for deals as early as Halloween in 2021.
This will help generate excitement around your Black Friday campaign and hopefully bring in more bookings.
How to prepare your Black Friday campaign
The first step in creating a great Black Friday campaign for your tour company or attraction is to know who you are selling to. This is a great time to create a few buyer personas or update ones you’ve made in the past.
A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target customer. It can include demographics like age and location, as well as a list of things the person likes and dislikes.
Once you build a picture of who you’re marketing your Black Friday sales to, you’ll have a better idea of how to engage with them.
You want to start preparing your Black Friday campaign early. In fact, you can start as early as September. There are a series of tasks to prep for the campaign ahead of time:
- Create graphics: Start brainstorming graphics for your social media ads and landing pages. Choose a theme and keep graphics constant so that your customers start to recognize them.
- Optimize your website: Make sure your website is loading fast and can handle an influx of visitors. Double-check that your site is working well on mobile, too. It’s also a good idea to check in on your SEO strategy — what keywords do you want to be ranking for by the time Black Friday comes around?
- Invest in good booking software: You want to offer your guests a smooth checkout experience, and for that, you need good booking software. You also want to make sure that your software is managing tour and ticket availability for you. That way, you’ll avoid overbookings with the influx of new guests.
- Update your tour/product descriptions: Take a look at your tour and product listings. Are your tour descriptions making guests excited? You can find more tips on how to write tour descriptions that convert in this post.
- Clean out your email list: This is a good time to remove people who have unsubscribed from your list. You can also launch a campaign to rescue subscribers who have stopped interacting with your emails. By the time Black Friday rolls around, you want to reach engaged customers that will open your emails.
- Create a schedule: Create a timeline for all of your Black Friday marketing tasks, including the action items above. Then, create a schedule for when your ads will go live.
6 tips to make your Black Friday emails stand out from the noise
When you spend months working on a Black Friday campaign, you want your emails to be seen by your customers. The problem is that everyone’s inboxes will be overflowing with holiday specials before, during, and after Black Friday. Here are six tips to ensure your Black Friday emails are open and read:
- Offer incentives. These incentives should be directly tailored to your existing customers. Think about your most popular tour or event, and offer customers a special discount for that experience.
- Promote your offers on other platforms, too. Advertise your Black Friday sale on your website and social media channels so that your customers are already familiar with it when they receive your emails. You can also create specific landing pages just for these sales, giving customers a dedicated space to learn more about the sale.
- Email your most engaged contacts. These are the people that are most likely to open your emails. To find out who’s engaged, send a couple of emails teasing your Black Friday. The contacts that click on these emails are the ones that are most interested in the sale.
- Write an attention-grabbing subject line. You can look over past emails to see what kind of subject lines most resonated with your audience.
- Use your best graphics. As you’ll see in the examples below, Black Friday emails tend to be very visual. Companies use colorful graphics to grab customers’ attention and make their emails stand out from the rest.
- Optimize for mobile. Your emails should look just as great on a phone screen.
How many emails to send the week of Thanksgiving
If you send just one email on Black Friday, there’s a good chance your customers will never see it. This is why 60% of marketers send multiple emails during the week of Thanksgiving.
Yet you don’t want to bombard your customers with so many emails that they’re forced to unsubscribe. Consider the number of emails you normally send before you ramp up the frequency for Black Friday.
Here are a few ideas of the types of emails to send and when to send them:
- Sneak peek of upcoming Black Friday sales the week of Thanksgiving
- Announce your Black Friday promotions on Friday
- Last reminder before the sale ends on Saturday or Sunday
- Exclusive extension for your email subscribers on Monday
3 examples of great travel-specific Black Friday emails
If you’re still not sure what your Black Friday email might look like, here are a few examples to inspire you. Let’s take a look at how eight different travel companies have created past Black Friday email campaigns that convert.
1. Much Better Adventures
Much Better Adventures appeals to its audience by offering a discount on its small group tours as well as increasing donations to a relevant cause. The tour operator knows that its audience cares about the environment, and therefore chooses to take their Black Friday sale a step further.
Guests will not only get a discounted tour, but also help support an organization that protects rainforest trees. The company found a great way to appeal to their customers’ emotions and stand out from the sea of strictly-discount Black Friday emails in their inboxes.
2. Flixbus Black Friday announcement
FlixBus aligned the holiday with its brand identity by calling it “Green Friday.” The company also does a great job promoting its holiday specials by highlighting the lowest possible fare available. The promotional fare is so low that many customers likely clicked on the “Book” button to find out more. Tour and attraction operators can also use this strategy by prominently promoting their best deal in their emails.
3. Getaway
Source: Email on Acid
The Getaway brand encourages its customers to disconnect in the outdoors, and its Black Friday campaign falls in line with that. The brand uses an image of one of its more unique accommodations to catch its customers’ attention. The brand strategically places its Black Friday deals at the top of the email to ensure the customer sees them right away. The campaign is focused on what the brand feels will appeal most to its customers: getting away from packed shopping malls and instead immersing in nature.
4. Cirque du Soleil
Cirque du Soleil uses colorful graphics to promote its Black Friday deal. It promotes the deal — up to 50% of — both at the top of the email as well as on the graphic itself. The company does a great job at making the deal stand out from the page. When customers open the email, their eyes will immediately go to the circled “50% off.”
5. Pueblo Bonito’s Black Friday reminder
As we mentioned previously, a single email may not be as effective in communicating your offers during Black Friday. A reminder email can reach those that didn’t open the first one, as well as encourage users to book now rather than later. Pueblo Bonito Resorts, for instance, sent a follow-up email to remind customers about its sale. The email gives customers a sense of urgency with a countdown to the end of the sale. Additionally, language like “Don’t miss your chance” can make customers feel “FOMO,” or the fear of missing out, and book a room.
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It’s never too early to start thinking about your Black Friday campaigns. Whether you’re running a tour company or attraction, make sure you’re ready to promote your best deals to your customers this holiday season.
