Navigate the 3-Key Phases of BFCM: Expert Strategies for eCommerce Success

Need to Know 

• Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unpredictable, but with the right strategic preparation ahead of the season’s three key phases, you can gain an edge over your competition, hit your targets, and drive long-term loyalty.
• Our experts have compiled their top strategies for BFCM success, offering actionable tips to drive results and revenue from the planning stage, to the main event, and beyond.
• For more expert tips and strategies to help your team win this season, download our free BFCM Roadmap at the end of this article. 
   

Black Friday and Cyber Monday offer significant revenue opportunities for eCommerce retailers — but they also come with fierce competition, and shifting consumer behaviours that can be unpredictable.

Success throughout the season depends on making the right strategic decisions in all three phases of the BFCM season, from the early preparations, to the peak, and the final holiday rush.

Our experts put together this guide to help you get ready for BFCM and create wins for your brand by aligning your strategy with your goals, building promotions that capture your audience’s attention in the crowded holiday marketplace, and more.

Explore key tips from our BFCM Roadmap below to help your team build strategies that will maximize your revenue in each critical stage of the season.

The Ascent: Late Q3, Early Q4

Locking in your goals ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is crucial. It lays the groundwork for your seasonal campaigns and messaging and gives your team the ability to pivot your strategy to capitalize on market changes during the critical Q4 period.

Plan Your Winning BFCM Strategy

Every successful BFCM campaign starts with a solid foundation. Before the end of Q3, we recommend prioritizing these steps to plan a successful BFCM strategy for your eCommerce brand: 

1. Analyze last year’s BFCM performance to guide your strategy for this year. You can use this review to identify successful tactics and identify areas for improvement to shape your upcoming seasonal campaigns.

This evaluation should highlight key differences between the previous year and this one, so you can understand which factors are working for your brand and identify opportunities ahead.

2. Collaborate with your media team to establish your budget, performance targets, and KPIs for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period.

Aligning on these details before the start of the promotional period is essential so that your team has the ability to scale your campaigns quickly and seize opportunities when they arise. 

3. Develop a communication plan to use when your BFCM promotions launch. Fast communications are essential during the BFCM period. 

4. Share inventory details with your team to ensure that your campaign messaging and creative are tailored to highlight these products during the peak.

5. Establish clear scaling thresholds. The only thing predictable about BFCM is its unpredictability, so it’s important that your media team has the tools and guidelines they need to make swift, data-driven decisions.

By giving your team clear parameters for scaling campaigns up or down, you’ll gain the flexibility to make adjustments and jump on opportunities as they arise, while also allowing for better budget and goal management during peak performance.

6. Align on your source of truth for measuring performance. Having a singular source of truth is crucial for assessing the impact of your campaigns.

Whatever you choose, ensure you can track campaign performance and incremental conversions across each platform or campaign.

Build Your BFCM Promotions to Drive Revenue

Once your team is aligned on your seasonal game plan, it’s time to start building your promotions. Here are a few of our experts’ recommendations for promotions in the lead-up to BFCM:

1.  Start building consideration ahead of peak media periods. A significant amount of holiday shopping happens right before BFCM, and media costs tend to rise accordingly during this time.

But recent trends show that consumers research products they plan to buy during BFCM as early as September, creating an opportunity for you to engage customers in the months leading up to the season to build brand awareness and consideration.

2. Run promotions earlier to capitalize on early research intent. Early promotions can help you capture early and late shoppers while spreading out the impact on fulfillment requirements on your team.

Defining your promotions’ start and end dates is key for success during the promotional period, which can include a week or two before BFCM.

To ensure you don’t exhaust your promo ahead of the key shopping days, we recommend establishing different discounts for every phase of the promotional period. 

3. Plan your creative approach. During the competitive BFCM season, effective creative is the key to driving consideration and conversions.

With media budgets typically tripling compared to the average brand investment, it’s vital to produce a diverse range of assets to fight ad fatigue, attract a broader audience, and maximize the potential of your ad placements to support the increased spend.

Once your budgets and targets are set, work with your media team to:

• Determine how many creative variants will be needed based on your segments, promotional strategy, and expected volume of spend.
• Analyze your highest-performing creative from last year’s BFCM, along with effective styles from the rest of the year, to inform your approach.
• Consider creating backup assets featuring more significant discounts or alternative messaging to have on hand in case performance doesn’t go as expected.
• Ensure your delivery or assets are timely, at least five business days before launch, to leave time for trafficking and Quality Assurance (QA).

4. Build out your email and SMS lists. During BFCM, the majority of consumers find out about deals through emails from brands they are subscribed to.

Combining email with SMS is an effective way to maintain communication with your potential customers during the most competitive time for their attention.

We recommend building your email and SMS lists in the months prior to BFCM to establish your relationship and drive interest.

Lead Ads are an effective way to build your email list ahead of the busy sale period.

When building your SMS lists, we recommend incorporating SMS consent into your onsite opt-ins. You can also consider running SMS lead generation, or reaching out to email contacts asking for SMS consent. 

The Peak: Black Friday and Cyber Monday Week

Black Friday shoppers are on the hunt for deep discounts, and showcasing them in a clear and engaging way will make your offers stand out in the crowded marketplace.

Promote Your Offers Strategically

When it comes to your promotions, prioritize simplicity to improve your customer experience and minimize potential friction points. 

1. Keep your offers straightforward. For example, you could consider eliminating the need for a promo code to save users a step, reducing the likelihood of cart abandonment.

2. Limit promotional exclusions and complications, which could lead to lost customer interest. Whenever possible, apply offers sitewide.

3. Ensure your offer is rich enough to stand out from your competitors. At least 20% off is generally the minimum offer needed to drive interest during this time.

4. Bolster your promotions using your automated email and SMS campaigns. Creating BFCM-specific messaging for your abandonment and welcome series automations can help you drive urgency and grow your contact lists for BFCM.

Closely Monitor Your Campaign Performance

Closely monitoring performance across platforms during the peak of BFCM will allow you to make quick, data-driven decisions to optimize your budget and creative strategy.

1. Monitor platform performance by channel to assess how much of your budget is being allocated to each. If you notice better results on one platform over another, consider reallocating more of your budget to the better-performing platform.

2. Assess the performance of each campaign, tactic, and ad set, adjusting your budgets accordingly. Pay attention to leading KPIs like CPMs and Ad Frequency, which can help you identify if you're overspending on a specific audience.

3. Track the performance of your creative and products. BFCM isn’t the time for creative testing, so pause underperforming ads immediately and iterate on the winners. Ensure you have enough creative to avoid ad fatigue, and schedule creative updates throughout the promo period to keep things fresh

4. Incorporate AI-driven tools and strategies into your media mix to enhance your campaign's reach and efficiency, particularly during the high-stakes BFCM period. AI tools for bidding and targeting are designed to optimize performance, allowing you to scale your efforts more effectively while maximizing ROI. 

Stay Competitive Throughout BFCM

Beating out your competitors’ BFCM offers requires more than just solid promotions — it involves actively monitoring and reacting to market trends in real time. 

1. Closely observe your competitors' offers. Discounts and promotions are the primary incentives for customer purchases during BFCM.

If your competitors offer deeper discounts or more attractive deals, you may need to adjust your strategy to stay competitive.

Our experts advise preparing backup promotions and creative assets to have at the ready in case you need to change your strategy. If matching a competitor's discount isn’t feasible, consider alternatives to make the deal better for your customers, such as free gifts with purchase or free shipping.

2. Keep your launch dates ahead of your competitors’ promotions. Many consumers have a shopping list in mind before BFCM begins, so if your competitor goes live before you, they could secure those early shoppers who might have otherwise chosen your brand.

3. Monitor auction insights in Google Ads. These reports will reveal which brands are bidding on your keywords, and how frequently you both appear in the same search results. They can also show you if your competitors are outbidding or spending more than your brand. If that’s the case, consider adjusting your bidding strategy or budget to stay competitive

The Descent: Sustaining Performance Throughout the Holiday Season

When BFCM comes to an end, you can use your learnings from this period to craft irresistible promotions for the rest of the holiday season.

Appeal to Last-Minute Gift Shoppers

1. Offer free express shipping with “arrives by” guarantees for last-minute shoppers.

2. Create offers and discounts for Buy Online, Pick-Up In-Store (BOPIS), which also appeals to those who need to get their items quickly.

3. Build gift-oriented promotions, such as buy-one, get-one offers, after discounts have been exhausted through BFCM.

4. Break through the discount noise with new product launch messaging. 

Drive Traffic to Your In-Store Locations

Consumer habits shift toward in-store shopping after the BFCM period. With half of all purchases taking place in December — and most of those happening offline — adjusting your strategy to capture this audience is an important part of any successful holiday plan.

By highlighting omnichannel options and customizing your marketing to boost foot traffic, you can continue to drive sales throughout the holiday season. 

1. Consider updating the messaging on your ads to highlight any in-store promotions or incentives and drive users to your physical locations.

2. Capture local traffic from Google ads by ensuring your stores have a presence on Google’s “near me” search terms feature.

3. Update your campaign objectives to drive in-store actions. This can include store-visit objectives on Google Ads, Find Location clicks on website, or even in-store sales with a proper API connection to your POS. 

Adjust Your Messaging to Drive Holiday Urgency

Your customers will be eager to receive their gifts in time for the holidays, and you can use this to instill a sense of urgency in your messaging and boost sales.

1. Make cut-off shipping dates prominent in your marketing materials, on your website, and in your email campaigns.

Offering expedited shipping options, and promoting these as these dates approach, can also help capture those late shoppers who are eager to get their gifts on time.

2. Leverage scarcity messaging in your promotional strategy. Inventory scarcity is a powerful messaging tactic in this period, when customers don’t want to miss out on sales and promotions.

3. Highlight gift card options in your messaging once your last ship date has passed to capture last-minute gifters ahead of the holidays.

4. Create a simple post-BFCM automated nurture email series to re-engage with purchasers, highlight holiday promotions, and extract value in the form of social proof, UGC, and loyalty opt-ins.

Capture Spend in the Post-Holiday Period

Boxing Week and New Year's sales present excellent opportunities for shoppers to use their holiday gift cards or take advantage of post-holiday deals.

Plan your promotions in advance and consider offering deep discounts on your remaining inventory to clear out stock.

Promoting these sales early, can help you capture interest and keep the momentum going through the end of the year.

How can Northern help you build a successful BFCM strategy?

Winning Black Friday and Cyber Monday requires a well-planned strategy that’s driven by data and flexible enough for your team to pivot in response to holiday trends and opportunities.

From aligning your priorities with your budget and goals, to building creative that resonates with your audience, planning ahead and being strategic in all three phases of the season is critical during the most competitive retail period of the year.

Partnering with Northern’s retail experts is an excellent way to further empower your team with tailored insights, tools, and strategies to maximize your brand’s performance throughout BFCM, and sustain its growth well beyond the holidays.

Ready to take your BFCM campaigns to the next level? Contact our team today to get started.

If you’d like to learn more about our experts’ proven BFCM strategies, download our full Roadmap to BFCM Success for free here.