What should your Black Friday to New Year campaign calendar look like?

What’s wrong with one big Black Friday sale?

What typically happens on Black Friday is people run this big sale, and then sales drop off. You get a spike, then a cliff.

The shape I want is a staircase. A build-up before the sale, then a series of peaks through Black Friday, Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year, with revenue lifting between them. Even in January we want to taper, but we want to taper to a higher baseline.

That’s the real job of Q4. Lift the baseline. A record Black Friday that falls straight back to where you started hasn’t changed much about your business.

What goes in the calendar?

It’s the same skeleton every year, and it’s the standard formula we load into every client’s planner.

1. A build-up before the sale, ideally a product launch, so there’s energy before the discounts start.
2. VIP and repeat-customer early access at the start of November.
3. The public sale, released to the wider market mid-November and running into Black Friday weekend.
4. A Cyber Monday extension.
5. A post-sale offer that carries you through to Christmas.
6. Shipping cut-off emails.
7. Boxing Day.
8. A New Year offer.

Each one needs its own offer and its own messaging. If every moment says the same thing, nobody has a reason to come back for the next one.

Batch the easy pieces early. Shipping cut-off emails can be written and scheduled well before the rush, which leaves your attention for the parts that need it.

How do you keep people interested for two months?

Give them something other than discounts. We want some kind of new launch or new product in December, and another in January. It gives your emails and ads something fresh to talk about once sale fatigue sets in.

Gamification helps too. A little bit of competition at this time of year is what you need to get some cut-through. A hidden prize running through December gives people a reason to keep opening and buying after they’ve done their Black Friday shopping.

If your range covers lots of different customers, rotate your gifts with purchase. One brand we look after has a broad range and several distinct customer segments, so the sale period runs a series of different gifts, each aimed at a different bucket of customers. Every segment gets at least one moment built for them.

What should you lock in early, and what can wait?

Lock in the infrastructure. Keep the messaging flexible.

Decide early what’s happening on Meta, with onsite messaging, with promotions, with your emails and with your SMS. Those decisions drive the things that take time: integrations, automations, and lead times on any gift you need to source or produce. The exact products and the words can flex closer to the date.

I like two planning sessions, held months out. In the first, go wide and list every offer idea without filtering. Then cost them up, and in the second, get realistic about which ones you can actually do.

And leave the website alone. I’m not a big fan of making wholesale changes to a site before Black Friday. Stick to tweaks and fixing whatever is blocking conversions.

When should you start building the list?

Months before. Your sale-period list is only as big as the consent you collected beforehand, and the biggest Black Friday mistake I see is not marketing early enough to build it.

Turn on SMS consent at checkout, add an SMS step to your pop-up, and run re-engagement pop-ups for past customers who’ve dropped off your list. Then run list-growth ads to people who aren’t already in your database, early enough to stay clear of the peak-CPM weeks. The more fearless you are with list-building spend in the lead-up, the more people you’ll have to sell to when the calendar kicks off.