5 Essential Post Black Friday Campaigns for Ecommerce Brands

The year is not over. The quarter is not over. The holidays aren’t even over. 

Ecommerce brands still have plenty of opportunities to boost sales and enhance profitability before closing out the year. And this is an especially smart time to do it—Black Friday can drive tremendous customer acquisition, but it doesn’t always translate into profits.

Now is the time to maximize the impact of those newly acquired customers and keep revenue rolling through the selling season. These five essential post-Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns will help make it happen.

1. A Second Purchase Campaign

A lot of brands discount heavily around Black Friday, which eats into profit margins. Balance that out by engineering a second purchase from the customers you acquired in November. 

Don’t sit around and hope it will happen—ink it into Klaviyo, into Facebook, into Postpilot, into your marketing strategy.  

Base your campaign(s) on data on your past repeat customers. Look at the average time between their first and second purchases, and create targeted campaigns that showcase additional products. 

Here’s a fun chart that shows what we’re talking about. In PostPilot, it’s the Time Between Purchases Report.  

For this brand, 74% of customers who come back to buy again do so within 90 days. If you don't get them to return within those first three months, you’ll probably never see them again. 

You have to start getting in front of them to drive that repeat purchase behavior and incentivize them to take it. 

Do not discount—at least not until you know from the data that you risk losing these customers for good. In this case, after 90 days I would consider offering 10% or 20% off to entice them back. 

We recommend automating this process in your marketing stack and using a discount ladder—increasing the amount of the discount as a customer goes longer without making a purchase. 

2. New Year, New You

Tap into the New Year's resolutions and aspirations of your customers, especially if your brand is in the supplements, healths, wellness, fitness, beauty or even apparel space.  

For these brands, December and January is something like a Q5. It's almost as big as Black Friday. People are making New Year's resolutions, they want to work out, lose weight, look better, feel better. 

This is a great time for reactivation. You can go back very far in your customer file—months and even years—and entice people who haven’t engaged with your brand in a long time to finally come back. 

The challenge, of course, is that they’re not opening your emails or SMS. Direct mail is essentially the only way to get back in front of them. We see remarkable results around New Year’s reactivation campaigns. 

3. Retargeting

Almost every brand experiences a traffic surge in Q4. But conversion rates are low–often 1% or 2%. Most traffic bounces off your site like it’s made off Teflon, never to be seen again. 

This is where you want to lean into retargeting—connecting with customers who visited but didn’t buy through Facebook, Google and direct mail. 

PostPilot’s SiteMatch product is like magic for site retargeting. We can match about a third of your cold website traffic with physical addresses, so you can drop them a piece of print collateral. You can add filters, so your campaign only gets sent to people who, for instance, have seen certain product pages or spent a certain amount of time on your site. 

SiteMatch is especially effective for high-AOV brands. If your products have a longer consideration time, a campaign like this can achieve stellar results. 

4. Thank Your Best Customers

It’s not just to be nice. 

Studies have shown that a handwritten thank you note can double the amount a customer spends going forward. Pretty earth-shattering. 

And believe it or not, handwritten cards can be automated using programmatic direct mail. PostPilot has robots that can match your handwriting using real pens on paper. They even make tiny errors for an extra human touch.  

Automate this process based on customer criteria such as order value, frequency, or total spend.

Handwritten notes are rare these days, which means they really stand out. This is a great and inexpensive way to increase your mind share and make your brand unforgettable. 

5. Holiday Gift Guide

Retailers are rebooting catalog marketing—because it works. 

Catalogs and catalog equivalents like PostPilot’s Cardalogs let you put a selection of products in front of your customers. And they sit around (in a good way). People toss them on the counter or coffee table and peruse them. When was the last time someone perused one of your emails? 

The biggest challenge with catalogs is that they’re expensive to produce. The lead times are months long, and if a product sells out, you can’t replace it. 

Trifold Cardalogs give you the real estate to showcase your best-selling products—but can go out within a week. You can automate them and update them on the fly. Cardalogs can be synced with SiteMatch: When a customer visits your site without converting, they receive a whole spread of products in the mail.  

The conversion rates are amazing, especially for high-AOV brands. And Cardalogs start at just 80 cents each, design services included. 

Summary

These post-Black Friday campaigns offer strategic ways to continue driving sales, retain customers, and enhance brand loyalty throughout the holiday season—and beyond. By combining data-driven insights with creative marketing approaches, ecommerce brands can ensure a very happy new year. 

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