Run promotions around holidays or when you need a quick revenue bump. The three reasons to run one: add incremental revenue, extend LTV of existing customers, or sell through inventory.
The best bundles for promotions have four traits: high AOV, a discount you don't normally offer, narrow not too wide, and variety to encourage sampling.
Make sure all offers, promotions, and sales balance discounts with AOV — don't give a high discount on a small cart.
If you're spending a small daily amount compared to what you plan to spend around Black Friday, make sure your ad accounts can handle the scale. Ramp up ahead of time.
Focus on top and mid-funnel building activities NOW so you have warm audiences ready in a couple months for the holidays.
If possible, add a holiday-specific insert into all packaging. This is an easy touchpoint to build word of mouth. Find relevant trinkets or gifts-with-purchase you can add to orders.
With your BFCM offers, keep in mind your customers will remember what you had last year. Don't do anything for a short-term revenue gain that lowers your brand perception. You don't want to turn into just a discount brand offering 50% off site-wide, because next year sales from loyal customers will drop in October and they won't buy until that 50% off sale hits again.
Be smart with how you package promotions. You're not just handing away free money — you should have strategy around moving inventory with lacking sell-through, or coupling lower-velocity products with ones you know people will buy immediately.
My favorite offer for Black Friday is a high-discount + high-AOV offer. If you're selling a $20 product, try to build a bundle that sells for a $100 AOV with a 30-40% discount. When you multiply the AOV, you can afford to give a bigger discount on the product.
Right around post-Thanksgiving dinner time, send a note to your most valuable customers giving them early access to the Black Friday sale.
Run a site-wide tiered promotion: Spend $50 and get free shipping. Spend $100 and save 10%. Spend $250 and save 25%. Spend $400+ and save 35%.
Create a Facebook event for the Black Friday promotion and run ads against your LAL audiences to RSVP YES. While everyone else is sending emails and texts, Facebook will light up a push notification on this person's phone when the sale starts.
There is a big difference between offering no discount and 15% off, with the discount winning. But when going between percentages, the difference is much smaller. People want a discount for the sake of having a discount, not always for the monetary savings.
Try to keep messaging away from a sale or promotion. Instead, go with 'Spend $40 and we'll throw in X' — a gift with purchase. You're still pushing for high AOV and can use the margin to pay for the GWP or inventory you need to move.
Sometimes you want to run promotions just to keep customers engaged. I would challenge you to focus on creating content that keeps them engaged, instead.
On Black Friday, go high AOV, high discount, high margin. Bundles at 2-3x your normal AOV. 30-50% discount justified by the high AOV and high margin.
For Cyber Monday and Cyber Week, use tiered discounts: Spend $100, get 10% off. Spend $200, get 25% off. Spend $300, get 35% off.
On Giving Tuesday, flip the promotion on its head. Instead of a discount, give a percentage of the order to charity. Psychologically, it's a reason to make a purchase and not feel bad about spending money. We saw higher-than-expected orders and AOV.
If you're a small brand competing in Q4 when CPMs spike, build your audience NOW. Optimize that on-site email/SMS capture. Think about what you can give customers as a fair trade for those CRM records.
Each BFCM promotion should have 2 landing pages — one for new customers and one for existing customers. These two audiences should be spoken to differently.
If you're spending money with daddy Zuck, submit all your ads for review as soon as possible. You don't want to get caught up 'In Review' because you submitted too late — reviews generally take longer during Q4.
Everyone is competing for the same real estate on someone's phone on Black Friday: ads in the feed, email inbox, and SMS messages. How about a notification that comes from Facebook for an event that's about to start? It's free to do, and everyone has their Facebook notifications enabled.
Create a VIP Mystery Box with limited units. Collect a $1 reservation via Apple Pay on a landing page — this gives you the payment token. On the day the box ships (Black Friday), charge the remaining balance. It also gives you a good understanding of what to expect for BFCM.
Build your own gift guide for your ideal customer. Keep your brand in the first or second slot, but still make the rest of the gift guide valuable. Push it with your own audience and get the viewers to share it. This is the type of content to get a 1:1 ratio of likes to shares when run as an ad.
Tag all your customers from now until after Cyber Monday as BFCM2022 customers. Next year when planning BFCM, you'll want to know how last year's customers did from an LTV and contribution-margin standpoint.
To assume your BFCM setup is going to run with no issues is like buying a raffle ticket and thinking you're going to win — it's delusional. Things break. Test every single button, variant selector, image preview, coupon code, and Shopify script.
Most of the time when people are about to purchase, they just need the validation that it's not a stupid decision. A discount helps corroborate that story.
Run a donation promotion — 'Buy this weekend, and we'll donate 10% to XXXXX.' These do really well. Or run a GWP instead of a discount — it lets you liquidate slow inventory or sample a new product.
On January 1st of every new year, you and your team should create a rough strategy around the major promotional moments. Have concepts in mind, but stay flexible to play off culture. Plan BFCM creative 90–120 days out; all other holiday sales 6–8 weeks out.
For every important sale campaign, answer upfront: What's the budget? What's the goal? How much inventory? Where are we pushing the sale, and to whom? What does the LP look like? What's the offer, copy, and creative? What's the email/SMS strategy pre and post purchase? How are we tagging these customers after?
There's no perfect formula for how much inventory to order for a sale. Early on it's gut feeling; later you establish baselines. With Long Wknd's Butter Bar, we sold out in 2 days thinking we had 4 weeks of inventory. Don't hate yourself for it — everyone goes through it.
The best brands make custom variants, colorways, or 'holiday bundle sets' designed to go with each sale. Think about what's relevant during that particular season for your brand.
Free push notifications. When Black Friday rolls around, everyone will have a full inbox, an ungodly amount of text messages, and enough mailers at home. Rarely will brands have their own push notification setup on the phones of customers who are excited to shop their brand. They're completely free.
In 2022, most brands saw roughly a 3.3x increase in daily revenue during BFCM compared to the week before, and a 10% increase to their average AOVs. Brands spent roughly 70% more on Meta and Google during BFCM week.
According to Klaviyo, the average brand sent 11 emails during BFCM weekend. I think 15-20 is more than okay. No one will remember in a bad light that you sent extra emails 2 weeks later, but those extra chances to convert could mean meaningful revenue.
Aggressive Black Friday email strategy: 12:01am announce the sale, 7-9am reminder, 11am blast to non-openers, 12:30pm text-only offer to openers who didn't convert, 8pm text with extra 5-10% off to clickers who didn't buy, 9:30pm last chance email.
If your offer is 30% off sitewide, put it in the subject line. Consumers want to know what offers are available so they can decide how to allocate their limited BFCM budgets. Put the offer upfront and make it loud and clear.
If your evergreen ads are working during BFCM, don't turn them off. Layer BFCM ads on top. Your evergreen ads have built up tons of social proof. Instead, just add a module on the landing page explaining the BFCM offer and swap the coupon code.
During BFCM, you don't need to convince cold traffic to try you for the first time. You want repeat purchases from existing customers and to convince people who have meaningfully interacted with you throughout the year that now is the right time to buy.
Brands work the entire year to build awareness for Q4. When your shoppers feel ready to spend during BFCM, go all out to clear your funnel — the 'flush the toilet' concept — and get lurkers, visitors, and on-the-fence buyers to convert.
For those who work in CPG, Black Friday week is our Eras Tour. I live for the midnight Zoom calls where multiple people jump on to solve something or update an entire promotion at the last minute because sales are on fire.
If you plan to send 15-20 emails during BFCM, use exclusions and segments after the first few major blasts. If people opened and clicked, exclude them. If they converted, exclude them. Clear your funnel layer by layer.
Send handwritten cards with an exclusive discount to your top 1,000 customers during BFCM. Very few brands do it, and it's a powerful way to differentiate from the noise.
Early numbers from Shopify claimed another record-breaking BFCM year of $4.1B in sales. Stripe's dashboard hit $8.3B, and according to Barrons, Black Friday 2023 did about $9.8B in revenue.
Jolie has never discounted, but during BFCM they offered a free tote bag with any purchase. They did hefty numbers in terms of revenue, up year over year, without a discount.
'Cyber Week' has now transitioned to 'Cyber Month.' As long as you focus on building true brand awareness and intent, your Cyber Month will greatly benefit. If someone hears your brand name and can associate it with the product they're excited to buy, you're in a good spot.
True Classic started running BFCM offers on November 2nd. If Ben didn't start early, I don't think they would have done $30M+ in revenue in November with $4.5M on Black Friday from Meta alone.
The #1 place to improve contribution profit is typically discounts. Every dollar off eats into margin massively. Instead of large discounts, A/B test cashback as in-store credit or a gift card for the next order. You build that next purchase right in.
True Classic segments BFCM customers into gifters vs. self-purchasers via post-purchase surveys. Brands who know this should lean into gifting creative and set up different promotional calendars for each segment.
Native's first Black Friday earned less than $10,000. Four years later: $614,676 on Black Friday. The most important thing is progress and compounding every year. The numbers look small today, but keep going.
Try running a cash-back-based promotion — it works just as well as discounts. With cash back, you're not discounting off the gross margin; you're giving gross dollars back, of which you may have a 40-80% margin. Similarly, donating a % of profit to charity does well too — no discount on product, and your customers feel great about what they bought.
According to Klaviyo, the average brand sent 11 emails during BFCM weekend with an average open rate of 49% and an average CTR of 1%. That's only 2-3 emails per day. In my opinion, you should send more.
Each year, you get 14+ free opportunities to create meaningful marketing campaigns around US holidays that can drive lift for your brand.
If you run a pre-launch sale for your best customers, direct that traffic to a dedicated landing page where you speak to those customers differently. Then kill that URL before you officially launch the product without a discount.
Promo ideas should be easy to understand, not complex. They should pass the 'Can my grandma understand this?' test.
For BFCM bundles, include best sellers and products you need to move or drive sampling of. Your discount should be higher than anything you've run during the year. Most brands will be around 25% to 60% off for BFCM.
Tiered promos work well for BFCM — something like 'Spend $50, save 10%; spend $100, save 20%; spend $250, save 30%.'
If you're in PST, start your promotions 3 hours before launch to account for EST. If your sale starts on 9/27, enable it at 9:00pm PST on 9/26 (midnight EST). And if you're in EST, keep sales running 3 hours past the end time to cover PST customers.
Typically customers who come through BFCM have a lower LTV, so educating them early with 2-3 additional welcome emails about the brand is critical.
55% of young US shoppers finish their holiday shopping by the end of November. One in five shoppers start planning their holiday shopping lists before the end of June. You can tease Q4 promos earlier than you think.
Avoid blanket discounting for BFCM. 20% off your entire site is less attractive than a new product, variant, colorway, or exclusive bundle or free gift with purchase. Jolie has never discounted once, and it's helped them build a wildly successful, premium brand.
Instead of changing daily deals during promotions, use a consistent offer that can gather social proof and build momentum throughout the holiday campaign period.
Open your Black Friday sale two weeks early to get ahead in customers' inboxes before the chaos. On peak days (Prime Day, early BF, Thanksgiving, BF, CM, Green Monday, NYE), send three emails, two SMS messages, and double ad spend.
Rename your shipping options to 'Black Friday Rush' in your Shopify settings to create urgency. Use 'Fast and Free Shipping' instead of just 'Free Shipping' — it's been found to be more attractive.
Include discounts directly in the product title (e.g., '30% off') to reduce scrolling and make the discount immediately visible. On your homepage, showcase the product first and mention discounts subtly — you're still selling products, not just deals.
Send handwritten notes to customers of your BFCM sale. These always stand out and make customers feel super special.
Create a well-merchandised holiday gift guide — a long form article you can run ads to that highlights your products, the offers, and why they're a good fit. Highlight which products are great gifts for him or her, mom or dad. Make it fun and easy to read with clickable product links.
Try a 'Reverse Black Friday' strategy — offer an event a week before BF. Position it as the low-stress alternative to shop early and get ahead of the holiday rush.
Allocate at least 20% of your BFCM preparation time to website optimization and 20% to offers. Your website is where conversions happen.
Email all existing customers and say: leave us a review, get 15% more off our best BFCM deal. Run a special sale to get more reviews during your highest-traffic period.
One of the big commonalities across brands that crushed BFCM was how consistent they were in messaging and how easy the UX was, across both the offer and the shopping experience.
Hint's 36 bottles for $36. Everyday Dose's 50% off offer. Harry's $5 shave trial. The best way to scale acquisition is finding your honey-hole acquisition offer — something that can scale across Meta, TV, influencers, and organic content.
For consumable products, the discount sweet spot is 20-30%. For one-time purchases, 15-20%. Don't just discount the main product — leverage the retail value of included gifts to create the perceived discount.
Last year, nearly 48% of all Black Friday ecommerce sales and 78% of traffic came from mobile. If something is going to break during BFCM, it'll break under the thumb, not the mouse.
This year, Black Friday sales were $6.2B on Shopify, up 25% YoY. Everything stems from the MER number you can afford — that decides how aggressive or relaxed your ad spend engines are during BFCM.
Jolie didn't just sell their filtered shower head at a discount — they knew people gifted lots of Jolies last year, so this year it was all about making it easy to gift. Custom gifting box, redesigned image carousel to be gifter-friendly, and multiple callouts to make sure you knew it was an easy gift to give.
Brands aren't just giving stuff away for free — they're targeting an AOV that is usually 2-3x higher than their single-product AOV while giving a slightly larger discount to a first-time purchaser. The brand wins by offsetting acquisition costs. The customer wins by getting enough variety to sample properly.
Don't discount your hero SKU constantly. If your flagship product is always on sale, it's not your flagship anymore — it's your bargain product. Protect your hero. Discount ancillary products or bundles instead.
The 4 purposes of a limited-time promotion: add incremental revenue on top of existing funnels, extend LTV of existing customers, re-engage lapsed price-sensitive customers, and sell through inventory due to expiration or seasonality.
If a promotion runs longer than 48 hours, create a quick video for in-feed. If your audience is big enough, retarget video viewers who saw the sale post but haven't purchased yet.
The ideal promotion offer has 4 traits: high AOV, a discount you don't normally offer, narrow rather than too wide, and includes variety to encourage sampling.
August 1st is the beginning of the eCommerce playoffs. The Super Bowl is Black Friday. If you're not thinking about how to be different this year by August, you're already late.
Holiday prep move most brands miss: switch blanket promo codes from WELCOME to custom codes. Generic codes let platforms like Honey leak your margins. Custom codes give you control over where the discount actually lives.
If your sales slow down in November, remember — customers are waiting until Black Friday to get the best deal possible. That's not a sign your brand is struggling, it's a sign your customers are planning to buy big.
Look for shipping efficiencies and build your BFCM offer around them. If you're selling candles and can ship 4 for the same cost as 1, make your offer revolve around a 4-candle bundle. The math on discounts gets way better when you optimize fulfillment.
BFCM Saturday/Sunday hack: push different offers than Black Friday. With JUDY — Saturday: buy The Safe, get The Safety free (~$45 discount). Sunday: buy The Mover Max, get The Starter free (~$60 discount). Great for driving trial of new products or clearing slow inventory.
If someone else is having a sale like Prime Day, host your own sale on your own site. People are already in spending mode — thank you, Bezos. Join the party instead of sitting it out.
Saturday after Black Friday is Small Business Saturday, thanks to AMEX. Use that messaging to your advantage — if you're doing less than $100M, you're a small business. Run a different offer on Saturday/Sunday than Friday to keep customers remembering they NEED to buy the Friday offer next year.
On Giving Tuesday, flip it: instead of a discount, give a percentage of each order to a charity. We ran this with Givz, set 3 charities customers could choose from, and saw higher-than-expected orders and AOV. Psychologically, it's a reason to buy and not feel bad about spending money.
For BFCM, leverage your own customer data to create shareable content that caters to vanity or ego. With Long Wknd, we'd create content like 'What do people in your zip code order?' or 'Here's what scent 1 in 5 people around you shampoo with.' Daily Harvest could say 'Here's which state has the healthiest eating habits!' — the top-ranked places share it with pride, it goes viral, and you're collecting zero/first-party data in the process.
Schedule your BFCM sale to start at an odd time like 8:37am PST. It's far enough from 8:30 and 9:00 that you won't collide with other brands' scheduled communications. Odd timing stands out in a sea of on-the-hour blasts.
Collect a $1 reservation via Apple Pay for a limited VIP Mystery Box before Black Friday. Subscription apps like Smartrr sit on top of Stripe's payment tokens — once someone puts $1 in, you already have their payment info to charge the full amount on launch day. Sell a $99 box with $250 worth of goodies. Limited units create urgency, and the $1 commitment dramatically increases follow-through.
Make sure your product-specific promotions are live in Google Shopping during BFCM so searchers see the active deal. Also verify that subscriber-only bundles don't accidentally show up in your shopping feed — that's a wasted click and a confused customer.
On Black Friday 2022, 90% of brands I was hearing from crushed it with an MER (media-efficiency ratio) of roughly 6x. That's a solid benchmark to measure your own BFCM performance against.
Promotions are an incredible opportunity to convert non-purchasers already in your database. You're collecting tons of emails and phone numbers from people who never bought. A well-timed promo is the nudge they need — stop thinking of promos as just for existing customers.
After every promotion, segment and tag those customers in Shopify. How you tag them makes the next promo 10x easier — you'll know who came in on discount, what they bought, and how to re-engage them differently from full-price buyers.
During BFCM, brands spent 32% more on Pinterest ads but average ROAS on Pinterest somehow declined. My advice: maximize Meta and Google spend and avoid Pinterest overall for BFCM.
On your unsubscribe page, add a checkbox that says 'Only send me Black Friday/holiday offers.' It's a silent way to build a BFCM-specific waitlist from people who would otherwise fully opt out.
Jones Road Beauty's BFCM 'promotion' was making their Miracle Balm minis available for $68.40 — no discount, just a product drop model. It was one of the most purchased products of BFCM 2023.
Brands who could shift and adjust promotions on the fly during BFCM had a huge advantage. Have a team on standby who can update the website, emails, texts, and ad creative in real time. One Friday night Zoom to adjust a promotion yielded an even larger Saturday.
High AOV brands ($150+) crushed BFCM 2023. Those September and October lower sales periods were consumers getting ready to jump on your offer. The key: deal-specific site experiences, loud messaging, and constant reminders the deal is expiring.
If you want to use TikTok Shop for BFCM, you need to start 4-12 weeks before. You can't add shopping links to past videos, so getting live early is critical. Build social proof on your product cards with purchases before the big push.
Send your top 15-20% of customers an email that clicks into a script with your subscription portal, automatically applying the upcoming BFCM promotion with one click. For your top 1-2%, don't even make them click — auto-apply it and tell them you did.
The average holiday shopping purse size is $2,400. Tell people you have a sale coming up ahead of time. Jones Road plans to send an email outlining the sale, the price, what's going on sale, and what time it'll be ready to shop.
Run gated holiday-themed quizzes like 'What gift should you get for your partner?' or 'Find your perfect holiday bundle' and gate the results with an email opt-in. People love this and it's a fun way to build your list heading into BFCM.
Run a 'surprise' discount at a random point during BFCM weekend — a special code sent only to email and SMS subscribers. It creates delight and keeps people checking their inbox throughout the sale.
Offer exclusive holiday bundles via secret, unlisted URLs for email and SMS subscribers only. Call it your 'Secret Sale.' It creates exclusivity, rewards your owned channels, and drives opt-ins from people who hear about it secondhand.
SET Active dropped a new collection with a beautifully-shot campaign video on Black Friday AND ran a full sale. They built simple gift guides with branded covers linking to tagged collections pages — low setup lift, amazing value for the shopper.
Two-thirds of consumers plan to shop the week after Christmas. Q5 — the period from late December into early January — is prime selling time when people receive end-of-year bonuses and holiday cash. Don't go dark after BFCM.
Run a 24-hour holiday flash sale for email and SMS subscribers ONLY a few days before BFCM. Get the party started early with one exclusive offer before the broader sale begins.
Run charity match campaigns during BFCM: pledge something like 'for every dollar spent, we'll donate 10 cents to a charity aligned with your brand.' Shoppers like to feel they're doing good by supporting you.
Consumers spent $65.3B on Black Friday and $46.2B on Cyber Monday globally last year. Shopify merchants accounted for $7.5 billion of those sales — a 12% increase from the prior year. BFCM is make-or-break, and preparation is everything.
Your BFCM promotion should play to what your audience responds to best throughout the year. The BFCM period isn't the time to experiment with a totally unproven promo format — amplify what already works.
Jones Road Beauty's BFCM 'deal' was selling a limited-edition minis set with no actual discount. Jolie gave a free tote bag with purchase. If you go this route, you need strong brand equity and a product that over-delivers on its promise.
Offer exclusive holiday bundles via secret URLs — call it your 'Secret Sale for email and SMS subscribers.' Create special product bundles offered via unlisted URLs before, during, or after BFCM.
During BFCM, Caraway created a dedicated landing page for deals/products under a certain price threshold. This isn't typically done by DTC brands, but during BFCM it's a perfect time to turn on a page like this — it gives budget-conscious shoppers an easy entry point.
More brands are using the 'unlock' format for deals this holiday season — Parachute and Branch Furniture both did it. You'll notice a lot of influence from Amazon's UX and UI making its way into Shopify-enabled experiences now.
December should be 15–35% greater than your November. Q5 — the period from post-BFCM to end of year plus the first 3 weeks of January — is the real 'Super Bowl' moment for health/wellness/supplement brands. No matter what you sell, Q5 should be a strong period.
Everyday Dose added a progress bar to their BFCM offer page to drive social proof and urgency, alongside a raffle-style opportunity to get a refund or win cash. I've never seen this mechanic before — combining a low price point with a gamified refund chance.
Not all promotions are discounts. The full toolkit: percentage off, dollar off (works better at lower AOVs), BOGO/Buy X Get Y, gift with purchase (the premium brand's best friend), bundle pricing (15-20% cheaper than individual), and free shipping thresholds. Most brands only think 'percentage off.'
Ridge's primary always-on offer is a 10% influencer code — MKBHD, NEEDLEDROP, dozens of creators each have their own. It's a soft discount that doesn't feel like a 'sale' because it's attached to a creator relationship, not a promotional event.
Glossier gives branded pouches or mini products as gifts with purchase that cost them $3-4 but carry $15-20 in perceived value. This is also how you introduce new products — your GWP can be a trial size of something you're about to launch full-size.
Dollar off works better than percentage off at lower AOVs. '$10 off' sounds better than '8% off' on a $125 product. It also works as a threshold play — 'Spend $100, get $20 off' nudges AOV up while keeping the discount controlled.
Liquid IV uses Buy 2 Get 1 Free — essentially 33% off, but it feels like getting something for free, which is psychologically more powerful than a number on a screen. It moves volume, introduces new flavors, and feels generous rather than desperate.