We’re less than a month away from Black Friday which means it’s time to finalize all the details of your promotions and start setting up your marketing content, including your emails. 

One of the things you might be wondering about is whether or not you should update your email automations to reiterate your Black Friday deals and promotions… the answer – if you have time. 

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When I think about ALL the things you need to do to get ready and promote your Black Friday sales, while email is super powerful and one of my favorite ways to make money in eCommerce, the only way email automations are effective is if you have customers moving through them. So if updating your automations means that’s less bandwidth you have to actually promote your sale on your marketing channels or through your email campaigns, then no – I don’t think you should bother. 

If however, you’ve got everything else dialed in and have some spare time, then yes – by all means go ahead and do that. 

The best way to accomplish this in Klaviyo is to create a conditional split at the top of your flow that says, what someone has done or not done, action this flow is referring to – for example checkout started at least once or joined the newsletter, between the dates that you want this version of the email to be live. Then you create a new version of the email on the yes path, while your regular flow lives on the no path. 

When it comes to setting your dates, these will be specific to your account and you’ll want to consider the delay that you have in your flow. It’s possible by the time they receive the email the sale will be over. Consider cutting off the date on your conditional split a little early, or extending your promo code beyond when you advertise it expiring.  This will also accommodate any potential sending delays because technology isn’t perfect. 

Even when you use Klaviyo auto-generated coupons, the expiration date of the coupon in Shopify is 24 hours after the date you set in Klaviyo just in case. 

If you’re using this strategy in a flow that a customer would receive more than once, such as a checkout abandonment flow – you’ll want to make sure that you remove that conditional split after the promo is over because the next time they go through the flow, they will still qualify for that conditional split since it’s based on the user profile, not the transaction itself. 

So if I as the customer abandon checkout on November 24, 2022, on February 15, 2023, when I abandon checkout and go through the flow again, when the conditional split checks to see if I had a checkout started event on Black Friday weekend of 2022, the answer is still going to be yes and I’m going to go down the wrong side of the flow. 

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