10 Black Friday Marketing Ideas for Your Store

In 2024, a single sale announcement email won't suffice; plan to send at least 3-5 emails, starting weeks in advance.

In 2023, some brands began sending Black Friday warm-up emails as early as November 1^st, right after Halloween.

Wondering what you should be emailing about? Here is a list of emails you can include in your Black Friday marketing campaign:

• Teaser – start building your wish lists and load your carts
• Announcement – Black Friday sale is on
• Savings highlights – products with the deepest discounts
• Recommendations – bestsellers, new arrivals, or team favorites
• Countdown – last chance to shop before the end of the sale
• Follow-up – cart abandonment reminders

If you need more specific ideas, make sure to check out our Black Friday email marketing guide for small brands.

2. Use social media to generate leads

Social media ads, unlike email, enable you to reach existing audiences, attract new visitors, and generate leads.

But let’s be honest: the competition in November is fierce, and most people don’t have an unlimited budget.

So here's the first campaign idea: build anticipation weeks before Black Friday comes. Your goal is to bring visitors to your store and achieve three things:

• stay top of mind,
• encourage product views or cart additions,
• and collect emails.

With that in mind, some brands choose to announce early deals, pre-sales, and flash sales weeks before Black Friday. For example, last year Coach started their Black Friday marketing campaign on November 1^st. And Monica Vinader, a jewelry brand, ran daily flash sales for several days preceding Black Friday. Both brands promoted their offers via Instagram Stories:

You can experiment with different lead generation formats if you don’t want to run early sales. For example, some brands use social media ads in October and November to offer quizzes, free samples, giveaways, and coupons:

Whatever the offer is, the end goal is to collect the email address of a visitor and reach them later via email marketing. You can easily start a campaign like this in September or October so that your list grows significantly before Black Friday approaches.

To the visitor arriving to your website through these ads, you can display a personalized email signup form that is cohesive with the offer in the ad:

Ready to start planning? Here's a sample social media calendar structure you can use:

• Six to eight weeks earlier, launch your lead generation campaign
• Two to four weeks earlier, launch a reminder for your existing audience — e.g., “Mark your calendar: November 29!”
• Three weeks earlier, launch a re-engagement campaign, publishing 2-3 times per week about new arrivals, best sellers, or team picks
• Up to a week earlier, launch your sale announcement, discount details, and special offers

Since most Black Friday shoppers are adults aged 35 to 44, focus on using social media platforms popular with this demographic.

3. Consider running an early sale or a longer sale

We’ve briefly mentioned this in the previous sections, but it’s worth repeating. There are no fixed rules about when your Black Friday sale should start or end.

Each year brands launch their sales earlier and earlier before the conventional Black Friday date. In 2023, some companies launched entire Black Friday weeks.

If you’re a smaller brand, this strategy might help you accomplish two things. First, capture buyers’ attention before they get bombarded by offers from the big players. Second, maintain the momentum and reach more potential customers.

So what does it look like, in practice?

That depends on your strategy. If you choose to launch an early sale for subscribers or VIP members, you can mention that on your email signup form and send a deep discount code to those who fill it out. This is how COS did it:

In this case, you’ll need to email your subscribers about the start of the Pre-Sale and send them a coupon that is exclusive to them. For example, James Michelle sent the following email to subscribers announcing a 4-day Pre-Black Friday sale and featuring a 40% discount coupon.

On the other hand, you can make your early Black Friday offers available to all of your store visitors and announce them both through social media ads, emails, and on-site banners. For example, Oradina, a jewelry brand, made Black Friday discounts available on the website a week before the actual Black Friday date.

Early sales help gauge product interest, allowing adjustments to inventory and marketing strategies. VIP sales also can help you create a sense of exclusivity for your subscribers.

4. Create urgency with countdown timers

Urgency is a powerful motivator in driving sales, and countdown timers are a simple way to leverage this psychological trigger. By adding a countdown timer to your website, emails, or social media posts, you remind shoppers that the clock is ticking, helping to convert indecisive visitors into buyers.

Countdown timers can be used in various stages of your campaign:

• Pre-sale phase: Count down to the start of your Black Friday sale to build anticipation.
• During the sale: Highlight how much time is left for the current discounts or special offers.
• End of sale: Create a final push by reminding customers of the approaching end of your sale period.

If you’re on Shopify, we recommend GSC Countdown timer (Free); if you’re on WordPress, we recommend HurryTimer (Free).

5. Prepare a gift guide

Consumers use Black Friday not only as a date to take advantage of the biggest discounts of the year but also to take care of their holiday shopping, as it's less than a month away from Christmas Eve.

The National Retail Federation found that more than half of holiday shoppers start to research and plan their gifts in October or earlier.

The same National Retail Federation reports that in 2023, American shoppers spent an average of $320 between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

You can cater to gift buyers by using a gift guide – one of the most popular marketing ideas for Black Friday.

A gift guide highlights a list of curated products perfect for different occasions and segments. They also improve the buying experience and lower your customers’ anxiety over all of the options available.

As you can see in the image above, people search for “gift guides” during the months before Black Friday and Christmas, proving they are perfect for these dates.

Gift guides should be segmented based on different attributes, such as:

• Target audience: That includes gender, age, occasions, specific product uses, or any other persona you have.
• Interest: If you sell a wide range of products, you can offer segments based on hobbies, professions, or personality traits.
• Price: Categorize products by price—expensive, mid-priced, or cheap.

To set up a gift guide, you want to create a specific category page—or even a landing page—and show visually the different segments you have decided to create based on your chosen attributes.

Once a visitor clicks on one of these segments (like “For Him” in the image above), you will show all the products you have curated. Explain why each product was selected for its category, which can help ease purchase decisions.

If you are pressed for time or don’t have enough skills to create new store pages, you can make do with a pop-up product filter like this one 👇

To add it to your store, all you need to do is create relevant product collections and assign their URLs to the buttons on the popup.

6. Sync your new collection launch with the sale

This is another Black Friday Marketing tactic that is becoming popular, especially among jewelry and apparel brands. Essentially, the idea is to launch a new product or a new collection right before or during the sale.

For example, Ferko’s announced adding 20 new pieces to their collection during the Black Friday sale.

The Banana Republic marketing team also chose to feature new arrivals in the Black Friday email campaign, making sure they’re also personalized to the subscriber’s preferences (women’s clothes, in this case).

This tactic leverages the excitement and attention that new products generate. New products are often associated with freshness and exclusivity. So when you launch new products and offer them at a discount from the start, you increase the chances for customer engagement.

7. Launch an SMS campaign

If you’ve been thinking about including SMS marketing in your strategy, there’s no time like the present.

While this channel is clearly making a comeback, it is still less “cluttered” compared to email, and many brands take advantage of it – particularly during Black Friday.

Brands like KiwiCo and Oak and Luna use SMS marketing to announce sales, promote special offers, keep their products top of mind, and remind customers when the sale ends.

SMS is among the top 3 revenue-driving channels, according to Attentive. It also has a higher open rate and might work better than email to re-engage relapsed customers. So, if you're up for it, don't hold back.

The catch? People tend to be more cautious about sharing their phone numbers, unlike their emails. Therefore, a compelling incentive — like an extra discount or exclusive access to an early-bird VIP sale — is crucial.

If you want to include SMS into your Black Friday marketing strategy for this year, start collecting phone numbers in addition to emails today. Just add a second field to your opt-in form and make it mandatory or optional – depending on the incentive you’re offering.

8. Leverage partnerships

Your business likely has partners, even if you don't actively recognize them. These can be influencers, affiliates, suppliers, and other brands in your niche who aren’t direct competitors.

These partners have audiences of their own you can tap into to extend your marketing reach. The price you pay to access your partner’s audience is to let them access yours (assuming both have similar audiences).

Ecommerce businesses leverage partnerships all the time, you just may not realize it. For example, back in 2017, Walmart and Tasty, a food publication owned by Buzzfeed, developed a partnership in which the latter would create shoppable videos that would redirect to the former’s site.

With a partnership, you develop a “win-win” situation: both parties benefit equally from the extended reach. You need to be creative and find potential partners in your existing network, such as:

• Your suppliers
• Your retailers (if you sell wholesale)
• Your followers (particularly those with substantial followings)
• Your affiliates
• Other businesses in your industry or niche that aren't direct competitors

It doesn't take more than two or three partners to see the benefits of this tactic. Once you find those partners, you can use any of the following ideas before and during Black Friday:

• Joint marketing: Share media contacts, promotional campaigns, and content to promote each other's businesses.
• Social media cross-promotion: Share each other’s content on social media.
• Email cross-promotions: Mention your partner and/or promote their discounts in your email newsletters.
• Giveaways: You can set up giveaways with your partner’s products and vice-versa.

9. Adjust your website design

During Black Friday, time is your enemy. You need to get people to take action fast; they are only a click away from a competitor. If your store design confuses them, you may end up losing them.

How do you get them to visit your discounted product pages quickly?

By using popups.

If you have already visited Getsitecontrol before, you know we love popups. They are a great way to direct people to any page of your store, including product pages, collections, and sale pages.

But guess what? You can also use popups to generate leads and share your Black Friday discount codes.

Another option is to use floating bars, which work exactly like popups, except that instead of interrupting the visitor’s experience, they appear at the top or bottom of the page 👇

If you want to feature special deals or categories with deep discounts, you can add a holiday-themed banner to your home page to bring shoppers to your sale, like John Lewis did last year.

Finally, it’s a good practice to create site-wide banners that will appear on all pages, so your non-Black Friday shoppers won’t miss out on your offers.

10. Launch a cart abandonment email campaign

No matter how steep your Black Friday discounts are, you will get some people to abandon their carts. here are many reasons why your store visitors will do so. According to the Baymard research, some of the most common being shipping costs, taxes, unexpected fees, compulsory registration, and lack of trust.

There are many ways to lower your cart abandonment rate (including offering coupons right before your customers abandon their cart), but one that we have found to be particularly effective is to set up a cart abandonment email campaign.

Cart abandonment email campaigns are particularly effective, as multiple studies found that:

• 45% of abandoned cart emails get opened by the recipients
• 21% of those who open a cart abandonment email, click through
• 50% of these clicks generate purchases

To set up a cart abandonment campaign, start by connecting your ecommerce platform with your email marketing tool.

For example, if you’re on Shopify, you can use Getsitecontrol to set up cart abandonment email campaigns.

Consequently, you can send an email one or two days after they abandon the cart, saying that they can still get the desired item at the Black Friday discount. As a rule of thumb, you want to send no more than three emails, as more will annoy them.

Your email should be simple: it should tell them what product they left in the cart, what the price is, and, if possible, it should include an incentive (e.g., a coupon).

An abandoned cart recovery campaign will help you get some lost customers back. As a matter of fact, many of them will be thrilled to see they can still get an item they want for a discounted price! It’s a handy marketing tactic for a Black Friday email strategy, but you should consider including it in your main email marketing strategy as well.

Wrap Up

When done right, Black Friday can be the biggest day of the year for your ecommerce store. You will increase your sales, attract new customers, and foster a deeper sense of loyalty with your existing ones if you use some of our Black Friday marketing ideas.

The question is, will you make the most sales, or will your store cruise along? Start your Black Friday campaign early using social media, but don’t forget all the other available channels if you can. Target gift shoppers who are often ignored and represent a big portion of the Black Friday crowd.

Finally, leverage partnerships that extend your campaign’s reach. Once you get people to visit your store, lead them to your offers so they can take action fast. And whenever someone leaves a product in their cart, bring them back using a cart abandonment email campaign.