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Black Friday is both a huge opportunity and a major challenge for ecommerce brands. With the right marketing strategies in place, you can position Black Friday as a major driver for your ecommerce brand, not a challenge to overcome.
As we step into the final gasps of Q3, those of us in the ecommerce world only have one thing on our minds - Black Friday.
Whilst the date may have lost its shine for consumers in recent years, the impact of a strong Black Friday cannot be understated. Representing a massive opportunity for brands, by setting you up well for the remainder of the holiday season and giving you a massive boost in both new and potential customers, a well-executed Black Friday can impact - even rescue - your entire financial year.
As the date draws near, let’s give you a checklist for executing a successful Black Friday marketing strategy.
The promises of Black Friday for brands are aIl well and good, but the date is ultimately informed by the economic landscape that surrounds us. In 2025, there are two things to keep in mind.
Firstly, Black Friday spending has risen by an average of 7.3% year on year the past 2 years. Which predicts a spending of £1.2 billion in 2025, with brands each competing for their own piece of the pie.
However, the size of the slice your brand receives may depend on how established you are, and how many loyal customers you have. UK inflation is at 3.6% as of June 2025, and consumer confidence is hovering at around 19%. In other words - not good.
This predicts that, whilst customers may be willing to spend a lot, they’re going to be intentional with their purchases and likely only purchase from trusted brands. There may be a reduced exploration of new brands, especially those whose campaigns don’t provide additional value beyond sales.
Additionally, on paper, Black Friday is just one day of the year. But, crucially, it sits in the middle of a number of other key retail dates including back to school sales, halloween, and Guy Fawkes night before Black Friday and Christmas, New Years, and Valentines after Black Friday. This means there’s a lot of opportunity to both garner hype for Black Friday and build upon the success you have from it - making it even more important within your Q4 and Q1 sales cycle.
Hopefully you’re now confident that Black Friday’s a big deal in the ecommerce calendar, so let’s look at 9 strategies to help you nail Black Friday.
Hyper-focusing on one channel will mean your Black Friday message is stifled. You have potential customers waiting to discover your brand across every digital channel. It’s ecommerce best practice - especially in the run up to Black Friday - to talk to as many potential buyers as is commercially beneficial and to integrate your data across all touchpoints.
If we buy into the idea that customers are going to return to trusted brands over Black Friday, email marketing becomes especially important. Like all other channels, your email messaging should remain coherent with your other channels but there are some other things to be thinking about too.
In the lead up to Black Friday, when getting new email sign ups is key, we recommend using Klaviyo’s AI tools to optimise the timing of your sign up forms. With the leads you do have acquired, building targeted segments is key, this allows you to send unique messages to each of your customer profiles - allowing you to get as much value out of each customer as possible.
Here’s an interesting statistic for you - 72% of customers expect weekly SMS messages from the brands they follow. For most brands, SMS presents some untapped potential, and many have never implemented it before. But, with how competitive social media platforms, SEO, and even email have become, implementing simple SMS alerts in the run up to Black Friday is certain to drive additional hype.
Like with your email marketing, creating separate segments and sending unique messages to each is key to succeeding.
To the customers who are willing to discover new brands over Black Friday, SEO is going to be your best friend. Whilst SEO is much more of a year round game, there are some specific optimisations to best position your site to show up in customer searches.
Building dedicated sales landing pages to earn SEO authority and repurposing them over the Black Friday period is going to be priority number one. Getting your page to rank for seasonal terms such as “Black Friday Sale” and temporarily changing some meta descriptions to capture seasonal attention and boost customer click through rates are both key to succeeding in the competitive SEO game.
As a large ecommerce brand, you should have tons of data on your Meta and TikTok ad strategies. Trust the first party data you have available about your customer base to retarget engaged and existing customers and use both your first and zero party data to create lookalike audiences - hopefully getting some new eyes on your brand in the lead up to the big day!
In terms of the content you’re posting in the run up to Black Friday, in addition to the core content you’ve likely produced, shoppable posts, interactive content, and platform specific content like platform-specific trends is key to maximising engagement and hitting your KPIs over the Black Friday period.
The main reason people are so willing to spend over Black Friday is the deals - in fact, it’s historically been the “get your christmas shopping done” day. However, brands who seek to win on undercutting the rest of the market alone are actually unlikely to succeed in the long run as they’ll have scraped their margins too thin and not have the profit to reinvest.
Unique discounting strategies are becoming more and more commonplace over Black Friday. From “3 For 2” to tiered rewards - anything to give customers an incentive to actually shop more can serve both you and the customer at the same time.
Giving customers other reasons to shop with your brand is essential too. Potentially changing up what you’re offering on the days before Black Friday - such as offering free gifts or unique products - is a unique strategy that’s paid dividends for brands previously
We all know how powerful product bundles can be: they’re an average order value boosting powerhouse if used effectively. BFCM presents a great period to test 3 or 4 new product bundles to see if there’s interest.
If these bundles see significant interest, and the combined value doesn’t sacrifice your margins too much, it might be worth making them permanent additions to your site.
Upselling complementary products is a similar strategy and “complete the look” or “you may also like” sections are tried and tested methods to put this in place.
We’ve made it clear that Black Friday is the most important day in the ecommerce calendar, but to some consumers it brings with it a number of darker feelings about the state of consumerism and environmental concerns.
It’s not something your brand can ever overcome on its own, but if it aligns with your brand, taking a more purpose-driven approach may lead to increased support.
We’ve previously seen brands succeed with these kinds of strategies, with London Sock Co, who stood to donate a pair of socks to charity per pair purchased on Black Friday, which led to a 180% increase in average order value.
Linking back to the beginning, unified messaging across all channels is key to succeeding.
But that messaging needs to link back to your site too. For the BFCM period, event specific navigation can further amplify the strength of your message.
We also recommend testing the user journey yourself. Does it feel intuitive and coherent? If it doesn’t to you, you can’t expect it to to an uninitiated customer.
The major disruptor to this Black Friday - in fact to ecommerce in general - is AI, and how it’s enabling ecommerce brands of all sizes.
AI tools, and their implementation within tools such as Meta, Klavyo, Shopify and more, allows ecommerce brands to…
Even if you believe the AI recommendations to be sub-par from a passing glance, A/B testing them in the run up to Black Friday may still prove beneficial - especially if you’re primarily looking to drive sales in place of brand affinity.
Black Friday’s all about the deals - but it’s going to place an additional strain on your customer support teams.
Creating tailored email flows to unite post purchase messaging with your core Black Friday messaging is going to strengthen brand affinity and customer loyalty. It’s also key to have the right tech in place - be it returns, loyalty programs and more.
You may also want to schedule extra support for peak periods.
Bundling is just one thing you can test over the Black Friday period. The increased site traffic is a perfect time for testing different site layouts, CTAs, and even small changes like button colours.
The period will reveal some insightful data about customer preferences and what journeys customers prefer.
While Black Friday itself presents a massive opportunity to get sales, you also get a ton of resources to boost your brand’s success in the long term. From Email sign ups to even just site traffic, the retargeting capabilities of Black Friday cannot be understated.
In the weeks between Black Friday and christmas, SMS reactivation, email campaigns, and loyalty marketing can play a major role. It’s an opportunity to turn one time buyers into long term customers and site visitors into customers.
Ecommerce is full of numbers. From revenue metrics to ad statistics, there’s a ton of data to keep track of.
Over the Black Friday period you primarily want to be tracking your AOV and units per purchase, as well as your MCOS, ROAS, and CTR. Outside of it just being Black Friday, you’ll likely have some takeaways to implement which can improve your offering year round.
Staying reactive has always been a huge part of any brand’s ecommerce success, but you should be leaving room to be reactive, not the other way around. Planning ahead of time, testing different strategies, and implementing with confidence, if going to give you the best chance at succeeding come Black Friday.
With these crucial insights to hand, hopefully you have more than just a successful Black Friday, but you're able to leverage the data into a more effective ecommerce offering long term.
And if you’d like help with your Black Friday planning - from creative to marketing, website optimisations and more - we’d love to hear from you.
