Black Friday is won in October, maybe even September.
Not in the subject line you write at 11pm on the 27th of November. Not in the discount percentage your client or manager approves two weeks before. Not in the email you send to your entire list because everyone wants to spend money on Black Friday, right?
The brands that come out of peak season with stronger customer relationships than they went in with, have already started preparing. If you’re in my team, we’re almost always thinking about the ‘tent pole’ moments, all year, no exaggeration. Why? Because if you don’t have a clear view on who has intent, and who does not, will put you at a weaker position in the moment where inboxes are bombarded with noise.
The panic pattern
Here’s the pattern we see every year, across all sizes of businesses.
A brand spends months building thoughtful email journeys, carefully segmenting their audience, testing send times, refining their tone of voice. Then October arrives, the pressure goes up and all of that discipline evaporates. They revert to ‘batch-and-blast’, convinced they can turn a cold audience warm. They mail everyone with the same 20% off subject line as every other brand in their customer’s inbox. They hit send and hope.
And then they wonder why their list is smaller in December than it was in September, and why they are suddenly dropping into people’s spam folders vs primary inboxes.
Black Friday doesn’t have to be a one-off moment. But if you want it to do something useful for your long-term customer relationships, rather than just spike your short-term revenue, you need a plan before the chaos starts.
This is that plan.
Take a moment to ‘zoom out’
1. Start with your list’s health, not your discount strategy.
Before you think about what offer to run, think about who you’re running it to. Most brands going into Black Friday are carrying a significant chunk of unengaged contacts, people who haven’t opened an email in six months, bought once two years ago or never properly confirmed their preferences.
Sending to those contacts costs you money and costs you deliverability. Inbox providers use engagement signals to decide where your emails land, and when you spike volume in November to a cold list, you pay for it in the spam folder.
Actions: Suppress the unengaged. Re-engage the dormant, or let them go before they drag your deliverability down when it matters most.
A clean list going into November is worth more than a large one. “Quality over quantity”.
2. Build your post-purchase infrastructure now – not during the rush.
This is the one most brands miss entirely. They do not plan what happens after the big BF moment.
The customer who purchases on Black Friday is price-motivated and/or brand-agnostic in most cases. What converts them into a returning customer is what you do in the 30 days after the sale – not the sale itself. If your post-purchase flow is a generic three-email sequence written however many months ago that nobody has touched since, you’re leaving the most important work undone.
Action: Build a dedicated BF post-purchase sequence now. It should be distinct from your standard welcome flow. It should acknowledge the context, introduce the brand beyond the product and give them a reason to come back before the January lull sets in. Do this in October, when you have time to do it well.
3. Define your segment strategy before you’re under pressure to decide it.
Not everyone on your list should get the same BF campaign. Your VIPs who’ve bought four times in the last year should not be receiving the same email as someone who signed up via a pop-up six weeks ago. Your lapsed customers need a different message to your active contacts. Your SMS subscribers may need a different cadence entirely. Don’t allow space for the big mistakes that will cost revenue.
Action: Decide this segmentation logic and send cadence now. Get the required signoff from key stakeholders and allow yourself space to flex on the plan rather than compromise on it. Map it out. Agree the discount or promotional tiers. Build the suppression logic. Write it down and circulate it so the whole team is working from the same plan.
4. Set up your January win-back sequence before anyone’s thought about January.
This sounds counterintuitive, but the best time to build your January re-engagement programme is also October (busy October!) because by the time January arrives, you’ll have the data you need and little to none of the headspace.
Decide now: how long after a BF purchase will you trigger a lapsed re-engagement? What will the hook be? A new product, a non-promotional reason to come back, something that isn’t another discount? Where does someone go if they don’t respond? Having this logic in place means you can fire it automatically based on purchase date, rather than scrambling to build a win-back campaign in the slump.
A quick checklist
- When did you last audit your list for unengaged contacts and do you have a suppression strategy in place before peak?
- Does your post-purchase flow exist, and when was it last reviewed?
- Do you have a written segment strategy for Black Friday or is it going to get decided in a meeting the week before?
If your answer to any of those is ‘not yet’ or ‘not sure’ that’s exactly what we’re here for.
Black Friday rewards the brands who treat it like the start of a relationship, not a one off moment. If you want a pre-peak CX audit before the rush hits, get in touch. We can turn one around quickly.
P.S. We’ll be holding a post-black Friday meet up in our offices to debrief, decompress and most importantly start planning for next year. It’s NEVER too early.