There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for Black Friday.
Brands that stand out in an increasingly crowded landscape lean into their unique strengths.
Take athleisure brand Gym+Coffee, for example: they used their purpose-built tech stack to grow their community of fans and capitalise on customer excitement ahead of Black Friday 2024. And it paid off. By using SMS to build relationships with their community, they saw a 2,006% increase in subscribers compared to the previous year.
If you want to see results like that, 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
Advanced 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 longer 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 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:
You can do this by running broad-brush paid campaigns with hefty budgets in September and October, notes Kristen Tumasonis, marketing director at SuitShop.
You might do this before the holiday rush by offering a discount at sign-up, promising subscribers early-bird access to your holiday sale, or simply optimising your on-site pop-up with forms display optimisation.
During a big spring or summer sale, Alex Melone, co-founder of CodeCrew, recommends emailing everyone who’s engaged with your emails in the past year. Alternatively, you can gradually send to more and more of your list throughout the fall. Just don’t send your first big blast during Black Friday—spam filters are ultra-sensitive around that time, notes Andrei Marin, COO of CodeCrew.
4. Consider an SMS shortcode
If you have 30K+ SMS subscribers, it makes sense to migrate to an SMS shortcode before Black Friday.
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 Black Friday, 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 Black Friday 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 Black Friday 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 Black Friday. For a bulletproof strategy, use multiple, integrated channels to get your message out.
For example, you might use:
- An all-in-one email and SMS platform, so you can reach out to your contact list on the owned channel where they convert best and save time with centralised reporting
- 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 apologise for a fake website outage to make your product look popular. There were so many outage apologies last Black Friday, 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; personalised product recommendations, powered by Klaviyo AI; and more.
10. Optimise your post-purchase experience
Holiday acquisition costs are high. It’s important to optimise and personalise your post-purchase experience so your CAC:LTV 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:
Maybe you can call out someone’s specific order, or the fact that they’re a first-time buyer—touches like this make people feel seen, and more likely to return.
Flowers recommends trying SMS for transactional messages and shipping updates—the SMS inbox isn’t as crowded during the holiday season as email.
It’s a frustrating customer experience, Flowers says—and with Klaviyo Reviews, it’s avoidable. When Compass Coffee switched to Klaviyo Reviews from Yotpo, they were able to customise the trigger on their review request flow so that it only goes out after an order is delivered, rather than a fixed number of days after the order is placed. In their first quarter with Klaviyo reviews, that new flow drove 70.5% QoQ growth in reviews per quarter.
“Personalisation fuels more than just that net-new acquisition,” Flowers says. “Personalisation 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.”
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