Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) might feel like a distant blip on the horizon, but for email marketers, September is where the real prep begins.
Leave it until November and you’ll be scrambling. Inboxes are flooded, deliverability wobbles, customer service groans under the pressure and offers don’t always land the way you hoped.
The brands that win BFCM are the ones that plan early.
This post is the first instalment of my Black Friday Success Series – a 3-part guide to help you plan, build, and launch with confidence so you can get the best results from BFCM.
Here’s what I’ll cover across the series:
1️⃣ Plan → Get your foundations in place, figure out what offer(s) you’re promoting, align your teams and draft your schedule.
2️⃣ Build → Define your segments, messaging, build your campaigns, tweak your automations and outline your A/B testing approach.
3️⃣ Launch → Now we’re in the thick of it with campaigns going live, team alignment and updates are important to share learnings and insights.
Let’s dive into Part 1: Plan — the foundations to put in place this September.
1. Learn from last year & set your targets
Start by looking back before you look forward. Which campaigns performed best? Which offers didn’t do as well as expected? Where did bottlenecks happen? Not just in marketing, but across your site, fulfilment or customer service.
Those insights will show you what to double down on and what to avoid this year.
At the same time, set your targets. Define what success looks like for BFCM 2025:
- Revenue targets
- Conversion rates
- Engagement metrics
- Retention goals for new buyers
- List growth
By using last year as a baseline, you create benchmarks that keep your team aligned and make success measurable.
2. Decide your offer strategy
Don’t leave your promotions until the last minute. Think it over in advance, use last years learnings to guide you. Consider whether you want to offer a percentage discount, money off, a tiered offer, a free gift, bundle discounts, drive customers to join your loyalty program, download your App – there are plenty of options to consider.
From my own experience, I’ve found simple works best. Complex mechanics like “spend x to get y” can get confusing for customers and create headaches behind the scenes. It’s also best not to muddy the waters with too many different offers, a maximum of 3 strong ones is plenty. This can work well for different customer segments or products/categories you want to push.
Key actions to take at this stage:
- Talk to your Operations and Finance teams now to define that offer and sense check stock levels to avoid over-promising.
- Run the numbers to make sure offers are profitable and deliverable.
3. Align with your teams & plan your sending schedule
Black Friday isn’t just marketing’s problem. Operations, Service, Tech and Marketing need to work in sync otherwise you’ll likely fall down somewhere.
Start those conversations early. Align on:
- The offers you’ll promote and how they’ll be fulfilled.
- Which marketing channels are in play, how will they align and when they will be in action.
- Promotional codes/mechanisms and terms and conditions.
- Discuss a fall back offer, or a way to switch off/dial down your promotion if stock or free gifts are running low.
And map out your send schedule. Even a rough calendar makes a big difference. Decide:
- The timeframe for your promotional offer(s).
- How many sends you’ll run across BFCM week (or broader) and to roughly which audiences (segments can be finalised in the next stage).
- Which days carry the biggest offers.
- How you might need to throttle sends if going to a large audience base/sending to multiple domains/regions to avoid overwhelming your site or service teams.
Planning this now avoids the “all hands firefight” that happens when nobody knows what’s going out, or when.
4. Protect your deliverability
Your reputation with Inbox Providers like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo etc can’t be fixed overnight. If your plan includes sending more emails during this sale season (and for most ecommerce brands it should!), you need to tread cautiously and protect your reputation.
Use the 2 months beforehand to get your deliverability in order:
- Clean your list by removing inactive or unengaged subscribers.
- Gradually ramp up volumes from September/October to avoid a spike in November. Start with your most engaged and slowly expand out to your lesser engaged audience before you hit the start of your BFCM campaign schedule.
- Equally think about how you’re going to reduce your sends and return to your regular BAU schedule at the end of the sale period. You want to avoid any large ups or downs in send volume.
- Have a throttling plan for big sends to large audiences.
Think of it like warming up before a race — you’ll perform much better on the day if you’ve prepared gradually.
5. Review and adapt your automations
Your automations can do a lot of heavy lifting during BFCM, but only if they’re relevant. Start thinking now about how you can optimise them for BFCM, even small tweaks can result in big wins – like adjusting your pop-up messaging (see below).
- Welcome flow: Create a Black Friday variant for subscribers who join via BFCM landing pages.
- Pop-ups: Don’t forget if you’re switching up your welcome flow to align your pop-up messaging to focus on Black Friday too.
- Browse/Basket abandon: Double-check timing and copy to match the urgency of the season.
- Win back/reactivation: Adapt your win back flows to re-engage past purchasers with your Black Friday discounts. Perhaps you could even offer them a unique promotion?
- Post-purchase: New customers shopping during BFCM are potentially “discount hunters” more likely to jump ship, but what can you put in place to increase your chances of retention? A unique post-purchase flow to nurture them further could help you retain them longer term. Tell them what other “value” you can add besides the initial offer they joined you via.
Small tweaks now can give your automations fresh relevance and make sure you’re not missing out on easy conversions.
💡 Pro tip: During my time at Vision Direct we also used BFCM as a great list growth mechanism, by tweaking the messaging on our pop-up to: “Be the first to hear about our Black Friday offers”. This drove a 351% increase in sign up’s YoY vs our standard sign-up message!
Wrapping up
September is all about getting the foundations right. Learn from last year, decide your offers, align with your teams, plan your schedule, protect your deliverability and update your automations.
Do that now and when inbox chaos hits in November you’ll be in a much stronger position.
👉 Next in the series: Part 2 — Build (coming on the 11th September). We’ll cover how to test, refine, and lock down your campaigns by October.
This post is Part 1 of my Black Friday Prep Series: Plan → Build → Launch & Learn. If you’d like a quick steer on your own BFCM strategy, just get in touch — I’m always happy to chat through how I might be able to help.