Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is the selling event of the year for most businesses. Throwing generic marketing messages and discounts into the wind and hoping for the best isn’t going to cut it.

The brands that break through the noise and win during BFCM are those that are willing to get creative, embrace what makes them different, and find unique ways to stand out to potential customers who are already experiencing an onslaught of marketing from every direction.

Take luxury watchmaker Shinola, for example. For their first decade in business, they viewed their brand as non-promotional. That meant they didn’t run BFCM sales. But for BFCM 2024, the year after their 10-year anniversary celebration, they decided to run their first-ever BFCM promotions—on their own terms.

In the 3 weeks leading up to the holiday, Shinola sent a daily drumbeat of email offers on specific products and limited-edition product drops. Then, during BFCM itself, they switched to a “spend-more, save-more” sitewide event, all aimed at their most engaged shoppers.

The result? More sales and more efficiency—to the tune of a 27% YoY increase in Klaviyo-attributed revenue and 48% YoY growth in revenue per email recipient during BFCM.

If you want to see results like these, you’ll first need to figure out what approach will resonate most with your brand’s particular audience.

But in the meantime, there are a few expert-recommended, process-level best practices that make sense for most brands.

1. Start planning early

Advance planning helps the hectic holiday weekend flow smoothly, and improves the quality of promotional creative across channels.

“The sooner we can get things to creative, and the more rounds of edits that they go through—it’s just going to make the campaigns better,” says Megan Edwards, email marketing manager at Tecovas.

Plus, the earlier you start planning, the more creatively you can build excitement around your sale before it starts, says Wei Tan, co-founder of The Orchard Agency.

2. Learn from past campaign performance

No one has better data on your audience than you do—so use it. Recent campaign performance offers the best insight you can get on what’s trending now with your biggest fans.

For example, as a lifecycle marketer, “what’s most top of mind for me is what we’ve seen over the past few months performing well for us in emails,” Edwards explains—especially in terms of layouts and landing pages.

3. Build your audience before the rush

The holiday season is a pricey time to cold prospect for leads on paid social, and there’s an alternative: focusing on getting back in touch with people who have already entered your funnel, and letting them know that your sale has started.

How do you make sure your funnel is full to the brim before the holidays? Here are a few key strategies:

4. Consider an SMS shortcode

If you have over 30,000 SMS subscribers, it makes sense to migrate to an SMS shortcode before BFCM.

Shortcodes come with a monthly fee, but they’re built for high-volume SMS marketing campaigns, unlike the free 1-800 numbers many brands start with.

During BFCM, 1-800 numbers have extra limitations, and it’s hard to use them to send MMS messages—texts that contain images or GIFs.

Klaviyo’s deliverability and compliance team helps with shortcode procurement, and can typically connect it to a brand’s SMS account within 8–12 weeks.

5. Pause smart sending

Klaviyo’s Smart Sending feature is a great way to put a hard cap on the total number of emails and texts your subscribers receive from you in a given timeframe. If you have a lot of flows active, you don’t want to overwhelm browsers with 17 emails in one day.

Usually.

But BFCM is such a high-intent shopping weekend, it makes sense to turn Smart Sending off.

“Don’t accidentally have Smart Sending turned on if you’re sending multiple emails over BFCM weekend that you want everyone to receive,” warns Kristin Bond, founder of Email Snarketing. “I almost ruined a whole weekend of campaigns in the past.”

But she avoided it—and so can you.

6. Segment by engagement to reward loyalty and prevent fatigue

Sending your BFCM campaigns to curated segments—instead of routinely blasting your whole list—not only drives results. It also reduces unsubscribes.

In the month leading up to BFCM 2024, Patrick Ta Beauty ran several email campaigns promoting their loyalty program, giving members early access to their holiday promotion.

With Klaviyo segmentation, the team created unique messages for subscribers with loyalty accounts vs. those without—helping drive a higher repeat purchase rate during BFCM and hundreds of new loyalty sign-ups along the way.

Patrick Ta also took care not to over-message customers who’d just bought. “We strategically suppressed recent purchasers from the past 7 days across all email and SMS sends to ensure a seamless customer experience and avoid overwhelming those who had already converted,” explains Chelsea Song, ecommerce manager at Patrick Ta.

This thoughtful approach not only helped minimize unsubscribes and keep loyal customers happy. It also contributed to 175% YoY growth in ecommerce revenue during BFCM and 8x YoY growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue during BFCM.

7. Leverage multiple channels

Every channel has different strengths and weaknesses during BFCM. For a foolproof strategy, use multiple, integrated channels to get your message out.

For example, you might use:

• An all-in-one B2C CRM like Klaviyo, so you can bring together unified data, omnichannel marketing, customer service, and advanced analytics in a single platform
• Klaviyo’s Facebook integration, to create lookalike audiences based on your email contact list or specific email segments

Especially for DTC brands, a diversified digital marketing strategy that blends paid and owned channels is the only way to scale with manageable customer acquisition costs (CAC).

8. Be clear and honest in your messaging

That means don’t offer a discount with 7 tiers. It’s too complicated, and you’ll lose prospects—“keep it to 3 at most,” advises Melone.

Don’t promise a free gift with purchase but neglect to mention it’s only for orders over $100, and definitely don’t apologize for a fake website outage to make your product look popular. There were so many outage apologies last BFCM, consumers started to wonder.

Just be direct. No deceptive tactics, and no Rube Goldberg-esque offers. It’s a chaotic time for shoppers, and they’re looking for straightforward deals from trustworthy brands.

9. Invest in holiday support

“You have to assume that with these great deals you’re going to see new customers shopping with you,” says Tumasonis. “There might be questions, and being available can make a huge difference in the end.”

Even sporadic support over the holiday weekend goes a long way. Customers don’t need an immediate response—but ideally, they get a response before your sale ends.

An even better option? Provide options for customers to self-serve. With Klaviyo Customer Hub, customers can access a wide variety of account information in one place: recently viewed items; order history, with product-page links for convenient repurchasing; order tracking information; personalized product recommendations, powered by Klaviyo AI; and more.

In less than 4 months after starting with Customer Hub, officewear brand Ministry of Supply reduced escalated support tickets from customers requesting “basic information”—and account holders performed 650+ self-serve support interactions.

10. Optimize your post-purchase experience

Holiday acquisition costs are high. It’s important to optimize and personalize your post-purchase experience so your CAC:CLV ratio stays at roughly 1:3.

Ali Flowers, senior manager of ecosystem marketing at Klaviyo, shared some recommendations on how to do that at Klaviyo’s Own It conference. Big-picture dos and don’ts include:

“Personalization fuels more than just that net-new acquisition,” Flowers says. “Personalization is the backbone of your LTV strategy—it’s really going to be contingent on how well you’re able to curate a 1:1 relationship with a buyer.”