Love it or loathe it, you’ll undoubtedly be aware of Black Friday. What started out as a US-only phenomenon has turned into a global shopping event, bringing in billions of dollars in sales to businesses in just a few days.
It’s also an event that is getting bigger. Black Friday 2023 was worth $70.9bn globally, 8% higher than the year before. And while it’s an event dominated by the online marketplace, in-store sales benefit as well. Last year, they went up by 1%, but are forecasted to grow by 3.3% this year.
This all means that pressure on retailers is high. There’s a lot of competition, a lot of demand, and a lot of fighting for customer attention. Getting your messaging right is critical. Send unfocused, unenticing, or incorrect messages to customers, they’ll go elsewhere. Any message needs to be targeted and, ideally, personalized, if it’s to succeed.
Here's why that matters, and how you can test this reliably.
The importance of SMS and email
While billboards and TV adverts will steal the headlines this Black Friday, they’re far from the only method of reaching out to customers, and they’re impossible to personalize too.
SMS in particular is proving to be a resurgent force in customer marketing, growing by 19% from October to November 2023. This increase in SMS popularity isn’t surprising – it’s practically a direct route to your customer’s pocket, and one that’s far more likely to be read, compared to email, which also saw growth of 9% in the same period.
These routes are popular because of their ability to be personalized, and their versatility. They can be used for everything from initial offers, to returning customer offers, and additional incentives and reminders for people who abandon their carts.
Accurate messaging matters
If you’re pursuing the personalized route for Black Friday emails and SMS, it’s important to make sure you don’t make any mistakes. Because while 91% of people are more likely to shop with a brand that provides relevant, customized offers and experiences, it’s all too easy to turn people off, with 71% saying they’re frustrated by impersonal and inaccurate emails and SMS.
With nothing being a quicker turn-off for a customer than an offer that doesn’t exist, that isn’t right for them, or – worst of all – a link that doesn’t work, it’s important to test regularly to make sure every message sent is correct. If you don’t, not only will they take their business elsewhere, there’s also a high chance they’ll never trust your messages again.
That’s why there is significant pressure on development teams to provide fast, reliable systems that deliver the right message at the right time, to the right person, based on an ever-increasing number of datapoints. And in such a complex system, with more data being added all the time, one change could lead to the whole system failing somewhere.
Because of this, regular testing is important, to ensure emails and texts continue to work as planned. That means running tests to ensure the content is correct, that it displays correctly, that it can be delivered (if it’s an email), and that any links or codes contained inside work as you’d expect them to.
Of course, testing all of these elements manually is an enormously time-consuming prospect, so opting to automate these tests is naturally a good idea too, as it prevents the to-do list getting overwhelming.
Depending on your QA testing framework of choice, be it Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, WebdriverIO, or anything else, we have guides to help you quickly test every element discussed in this blog. Visit our documentation page to find out more.
Gain customer goodwill this Black Friday
We’re only a few days out from the big day in 2024, and the quantity of texts, emails, display ads, billboards, and TV ads are reaching their height. Standing out in this chaos and noise isn’t easy. Your best chance is to connect to customers at the right time.
Undoubtedly, your email and SMS campaigns will have a significant role to play in this, especially if it’s personalized. But with this personalization comes increased risk of errors creeping in.
The best way to avoid this, is to give QA teams the tools they need to test effectively and automate as much of the testing as possible.
Mailosaur can help. While not a testing framework like Selenium, it instead adds additional features, allowing for effective SMS and email testing within a chosen framework. From link retrieval for testing, to deliverability checks, see what it can offer you with a free trial.
Or, for more information, speak to our sales team.
Have a great (and successful) Black Friday!