Picture this: it’s the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, and I’m deep in the trenches, scheduling one of many emails set to go out between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.
If you’re in email marketing, you know just how chaotic this time of year can be.
The inbox is equally chaotic for consumers—a flood of messages from brands they shop with regularly and some they haven’t heard from since LAST Black Friday. By Cyber Monday, inboxes often feel like they’re filled with repetitive messages, especially from brands they’ve already purchased from. Or maybe not?
As I scheduled email #5 for the one-week sale for a client, I suggested that we suppress anyone who had already purchased during the sale. How often can you scream “BUY, BUY, BUY” to someone who just bought, especially when a post-purchase series is running? Plus, due to the sale, we had ramped up from sending weekly emails every other day.
Suppressing recent buyers seemed like a logical way to avoid over-messaging. We also send SMS messages, and I wasn’t suggesting suppression for that channel. I also suggested that we suppress those who have not opened any emails since the last holiday season unless they were buyers.
I expected the client to respond, “Sure, that makes sense.” Instead, I got a resounding “No!”
Now, before you assume this was one of those “never suppress anything, ever clients,” let me clarify: they were perfectly fine suppressing the non-openers. But they weren't on board with suppressing buyers who had already purchased during the sale.
This response surprised me. After all, I’m an email marketer, and my suggestion stemmed from years of experience, particularly in my early days working with gift-giving brands. I also saw that the open rate declined slightly during the week, and I assumed this was due to the increase in the number of deployments. My thinking was, “Why risk annoying loyal customers with redundant messages?
The client had a different perspective. They believed that people who had already purchased might still buy again during the sale. In fact, they had noticed this behavior in past years during their annual sale. So, I gave in, figuring the best way to prove my point—or to be proven wrong—was to let the data speak after the campaign. If I were right, the numbers would show that customers who purchased from the first few emails wouldn’t likely convert again on emails 5 and 6. But if I were wrong, we’d see incremental revenue we might have otherwise missed.
What the Post-Deployment Data Revealed
Black Friday arrived, and my curiosity got the best of me. Within the first hour after email #5 for the week went out, I checked the reporting. Sure enough, one of the earlier buyers had already made another purchase from email #5.
At first, I thought, “So what? It’s just one person.” However, by the end of the entire Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday (BFCM) campaign, 3% of buyers had made multiple purchases during the sale. We would have missed out on that incremental revenue if we suppressed them.
The Lessons…
So, back to the question: “To suppress or not suppress?” The answer is—it depends.
For this particular brand, there were better strategies than suppressing buyers who already purchased during the sale. However, segmentation remains essential, suppression or not. Knowing who on your list are buyers vs. prospects (or not yet buyers, as I like to call them) is essential, and speaking to them based on where they are in their journey with your brand is just plain smart email marketing.
What will my strategy be for this brand next year? It will definitely not involve suppressing buyers, as the data from BFCM 2024 has proven that people will buy more than once during a sale for this specific brand.
Instead, my recommendations will look something like:
- Provide early access to that 3% group who purchased more than once during BFCM 2024
- For those who purchase during the sale, we can create messaging that is specific to them, featuring products that complement what they already purchased. This will ensure that the messaging is relevant and more varied.
- We can and will likely suppress those who have not opened since before the 2024 BFCM sale. Maybe we can reach them on another channel, such as SMS, but if they are also not buyers and have not engaged with email for over a year, it likely doesn’t make sense to send them more emails. Yes, I know the verdict is still out on this one.
In closing, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to segmentation and suppression. It is more about being willing to experiment to find what works best for each specific brand and using data to prove your point. If the brand had just said “OK” to my recommendation without any data, we would have missed out on additional holiday revenue.
Photo by Jacob Culp on Unsplash