Aivalis Tolis
Black Friday Strategy: How to Drive More Sales
A practical guide to planning Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns with the right offers, timing, channels and conversion strategy.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are now well-established sale days. Most offline & online business owners, especially those businesses that have B2C or B2B e-shop, make great offers to their customers. How can we properly prepare our digital marketing strategy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Read in the following article, all the possible promotional activities, placed in a proper order to gather ideas, that you can immediately implement for your own business. We at Knowcrunch implement this strategy the last 10 years, tried in on more than 10.000 customers, having exceptional results, where sometimes reached a return on ad spend (ROAS) up to 60.
Your pricing strategy comes first
Before getting started, you need to decide on the real big discounts you will be running on those days and the categories of your products or services, in which they will be applied. Obviously running small discounts is no good, as is deceiving your consumers with virtual/fake discounts (i.e. raising prices and lowering them again on the 2 days of the sale). For example, on Black Friday very large discounts for 50% or more, wherever your cost and profit margin in your own market allows it, of course, is typical. Those of your customers who really care about price already have your products in mind and expect to find them at a lower price at that time. They usually keep an eye on them either on your website or on price comparison sites all the time and are aware of the price trend. Therefore, it is essential that you decide on your discount in time. The day of Cyber Monday following Black Friday usually has either the same or slightly smaller discounts (30%-40%) for those who didn't catch the Black Friday discounts. Other people choose to apply discounts for the whole month. The decision is up to you.
Time for your digital marketing strategy
Ahead of getting started, you need to contemplate the strategy you're going to implement. A two stages strategy is suggested. The awareness & traffic stage and the conversions stage. Indicatively, you can start step 1 on 1 October (i.e. 2 months before the sales) and peak step 2 on the days of the sales. If you wish, you can start only 1 month before (i.e. 1 November). For these stages of your strategy, you will need a core creative concept, a detailed roadmap/timeline, and an estimation of the total budget (i.e. how much you will invest in media spending, production costs, etc.).
First you start with awareness of your products while doing actions that will bring traffic to your website. The messages at this stage talk about your differences compared to your competitors and not yet about discounts.
However, when the sale days arrive, you will switch tactics and messages. You'll retarget all the visitors you previously collected, who didn't purchase, and start communicating your discounts for the purpose of immediate conversions.
What matters though, is that your strategy generates the following objectives: 1) Initially generate awareness, then 2) visitors to your website to build an audience and 3) retarget all those visitors for the purpose of sales.
It is advisable for all of this, to combine the following digital marketing tactics depending on your allocated budget:
- Social media marketing (an organic tactic that pays off gradually, but will work perfectly if you already have social networks set up with good engagement),
- Influencer marketing (paid tactic that pay off immediately and even involve the endorsement of influencers towards your brand),
- Advertising campaigns (paid tactic that deliver immediate results, allowing targeting and remarketing actions),
- Email & mobile marketing (direct tactic that pay off immediately as long as you have collected legitimate user, visitor, and customer data from time to time).
Optimizing your landing pages
Therefore, if you know in advance which products or services you are going to offer discounts on, it is imperative to have properly prepared pages describing these discounts. These are the pages that people will end up on, to make a purchase (conversion). The rule of landing page optimization says that these pages should have a) a clear title that mentions the discount and relevant keywords such as "Black Friday 50% off for all TVs", b) proper explanatory text, features, descriptions, before and after prices, c) the right photos or videos, d) the benefits of your offer, e) the necessary testimonials & customer reviews as well as any other social proof such as your customer logos or awards you have received. Remember you are one step away from selling, you need everything to be flawless.
Obviously, in addition to landing pages your entire website should play great on mobile phones (friendly & responsive), download fast and your hosting should be scalable, (meaning power, bandwidth, and concurrent users) as visitors increase.
Optimizing your online sales funnel
If a customer places a product in their cart, the long and challenging road of checkout begins, and this is a very important funnel as you will be losing people at every step. This is to be anticipated. For dozens of reasons, people leave at the stage of cart or registration or billing or checkout. Your task is to have made these pages excellent, simple, usable, and mobile optimized so that if they leave it is through no fault of your own. Once you’ve made the necessary improvements, do some testing of your website yourself and try to buy something to see what the potential problems are. Leave nothing to chance!
To understand where exactly you lose people, it helps to break the funnel into its steps and look at the typical abandonment/churn rates of each step of your funnel. A basic funnel included the following steps: 1) cart, 2) account registration, 3) billing & shippment info, 4) checkout (payment) and finally 5) the thank you page which means you have a customer (new or returing) and a purchase which means revenue. According to 50 different studies published between 2006 and 2025 here are the figures.
What is the average cart abandonment rate?
Cart is your first conversion. , the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, , with individual results ranging from roughly 55% to over 84%. In other words, for every 10 people who add a product to their cart, only about 3 complete the purchase. During Black Friday 2025 the global rate climbed to between 73% and 78%, and on Cyber Monday it exceeded 80%, so expect your own numbers to be worse than usual exactly on the days that matter most.
A large share of these abandonments is unavoidable, since 42% of online shoppers say they have left a cart simply because they were browsing, comparing prices, or saving items for later. The remaining reasons, however, are directly related to the shopping experience and can be fixed. The biggest one happens right at the transition from cart to checkout. Extra costs that appear too late in the process, such as shipping, taxes, and fees, are cited by 40% of shoppers, and the inability to see the total order cost up front by another 12%. Typical benchmarks place the drop-off between viewing the cart and moving to the next steps at 30% to 40%, and stores that display the full estimated cost, including shipping and taxes, before the checkout begins consistently see a 10% to 15% reduction in this drop-off.
What is the average account registration abandonment rate?
The first wall many shoppers hit inside the funnel is the request to create an account. 18% of shoppers say they have abandoned a purchase because of account registration, and benchmarks put the drop-off between starting checkout and completing the information step at 15% to 25%. The fix is simple and well documented. Offer guest checkout as the default path and invite account creation after the purchase, when the customer has already converted and you can present the account as a benefit rather than an obstacle.
What is the average shipment & billing abandonment rate?
Once the shopper’s details are in, the next leaks are the shipment and billing steps. Typical drop-off is up to 15% at the shipment info step and up to 20% when entering the billing data. The reasons are rarely technical. Slow delivery is cited by 20% of shoppers, and this is where the shipping cost you may have hidden earlier finally shows up. Across five-step checkouts the losses concentrate exactly at the shipping reveal and the payment field. Show delivery times and costs clearly, offer more than one delivery option, and default the billing address to the shipping address so the customer does not have to type everything twice.
What is the average checkout abandonment rate?
The last step is where the most committed buyers are lost, and every one of them has already cost you acquisition money. It measures only the shoppers who started the checkout and did not finish it. Across a sample of direct-to-consumer stores the median checkout abandonment rate runs at around 73% on desktop, 81% on tablet and almost 86% on mobile, so the mobile checkout deserves the most testing. The main causes here are a process that is too long or complicated (17%), website errors or crashes (17%), and an unsatisfactory return policy (13%). Part of this is distrust. 19% of shoppers say they did not trust the site with their credit card information, 9% found too few payment methods, and 10% had their card declined. On complexity alone, usability testing shows that an ideal checkout can work with just 12 to 14 form elements, while the average checkout displays almost 24, which means most e-shops could cut their form elements by 20% to 60% without losing anything the customer needs. Worldwide, 5% to 10% of online payment attempts fail, and a payment failure rate of 5% or less is considered the benchmark to aim for. Research shows that 40% to 60% of customers who experience a payment failure at checkout do not retry and never return to complete the purchase. So, offer all the payment methods your audience uses (cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay, bank transfer, buy-now-pay-later where relevant), place trust signals right next to the pay button, and monitor your payment gateway reports during the sale days.
Why all these are critical for your Black Friday sales?
The potential reward is significant. The same research estimates that a typical large e-shop can increase its conversion rate by about 35% purely through better checkout design, which translates into roughly 260 billion dollars of recoverable orders in the US and EU alone. So before Black Friday, set up a funnel report with each of the five steps above as a separate event in Google Tag Manager, show all costs early, offer guest checkout, keep the form as short as possible, give people several ways to pay, and make sure the site is fast, stable, and trustworthy on mobile. On the day itself, watch the per-step numbers live. A drop at shipping points to cost or delivery time, a drop at payment points to trust or payment options, and knowing which one it lets you fix it while the sale is still running.
What all this means for Black Friday
The potential reward is significant. The same research estimates that a typical large e-shop can increase its conversion rate by about 35% purely through better checkout design, which translates into roughly 260 billion dollars of recoverable orders in the US and EU alone. So before Black Friday, set up a funnel report with each of the five steps above as a separate event in Google Tag Manager, show all costs early, offer guest checkout, keep the form as short as possible, give people several ways to pay, and make sure the site is fast, stable, and trustworthy on mobile. On the day itself, watch the per-step numbers live. A drop at shipping points to cost or delivery time, a drop at payment points to trust or payment options, and knowing which one it is lets you fix it while the sale is still running.
Prepare the XML feeds of products
Whatever your e-shop is about, you should create an XML feed and link it to the ad managers you will run ads on so that you can a) run ads dynamically for all or some of your products and b) you can dynamically and automatically retarget visitors to your products with remarketing ads (each visitor sees an ad that is dynamically generated specifically for the product(s) they had visited after leaving your website). Make sure these feeds send correct descriptions, photos, and prices to the ad managers. All major ad managers allow commerce catalog feeds (Meta, Google, Pinterest, TikTok, etc.).
Check the conversion tags & events on your website
You obviously want ad managers as well as Google Analytics to track and record, which visitors have reached, exactly where on your website or in your funnel. Therefore, you should have placed several different conversion tags & events on each relevant page. It is recommended that you do this through Google Tag Manager. These tags & events will collect visitors of each step of your website funnel and aggregate them into many different audiences (e.g. 100,000 visited you, 10,000 put something in their cart, 500 reached checkout and 5 eventually became customers).
Update your ad creatives
You are aware that for all the steps in all the advertising channels, you will have to run many advertising campaigns, and each channel has many different creatives. You are going to need different ad creatives for all stages of your strategy (awareness, traffic, conversions and of course remarketing) which is where sensibly all the messages will be different. So, write them all down from the beginning. You need photos, graphics, videos, and texts (copy) for all campaigns and for all channels. Indicatively, you need different ratios of creatives such as rectangular graphics & videos (e.g. for LinkedIn and YouTube), square graphics & videos (e.g. for Facebook and Instagram), and vertical graphics & videos (e.g. for Pinterest, Instagram stories & reels, and TikTok). Share with your agency or graphic designers, copywriters, and video producers, well in advance, a detailed brief of what needs to be created and ready.
Set up your email & mobile marketing funnel & messages
You will send several promotional emails with your offers. Either you directly or your publishing partners that you hire to send emails for you. Prepare all these messages in advance, i.e. SMS, Viber messages, and of course emails.
In addition, you should automatically send out many transactional messages (emails and mobile messages) to visitors, users, and customers. Therefore, set up scripts for emails or Viber messages or SMS which will automatically go out every time someone "abandons" your products in their cart. For instance, an abandoned cart potential email or SMS reminding someone that they left X product in their cart. So, make sure you have all these scripts and messages prepared and your emails or mobile platforms linked to your website to send out all the automatic dynamic transactional messages.
Launch your organic social media marketing strategy
Along with any other educational, entertaining, informative, or product-related posts you make daily for your online community, it's a good idea to put up teasing posts & stories about upcoming sales. This will put in the minds of your fans that something is coming and those who are affected by the price will expect them.
Launch your advertising campaigns
Along with any other campaign, you should run ads for awareness or reach and also traffic (visitors) to your website, especially to the landing pages of the products or services you later intend to offer at a discount. This is needed, to create awareness for your products/services but at the same time generate visitors. All these visitors will become your future audiences (captured by the tags & events you have already set up) which you will need to retarget (remarket) with your discounts later. In other words, anyone who showed interest but didn't buy at this time should see your discounts.
It is recommended to run these campaigns on a) Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger), b) Google Display channels c) TikTok, d) Pinterest, and of course premium publishers via Programmatic & Native ads. Obviously, you are targeting your buyer personas. Depending on your budget, choose as many of these channels have your audience. Ideally, if you want your strategy to work better, place twice the budget that you usually invest currently.
Choose your influencers
You should have chosen several micro or mega influencers who will only rate and review your products or services. Always pick the ones that have our audience and choose the affordable ones according to your budget. The goal is awareness and reviews of your products or services so you drive traffic to your website.
Launch your sales tactics
These days then (or the whole week following if you want), you should strongly communicate your discounts for the products you've been promoting for so long. People have seen your products, and some may have already bought them, but most have not. Let's go over the tactics.
Setup your website pop-ups or tickers
Logically, your website has changed, and your landing pages already mention your discounts. There should be a specific header image or pop-up somewhere on the home page or categories that mentions your discounts and leads to the specific landing page(s).
Setup the abandoned cart emails/messages
Set up scripts for emails or Viber messages or SMS that will automatically go out whenever someone abandons your products in their cart. This way your messages will "chase" the interested parties. Whether or not to offer an additional discount on these messages is up to you to decide.
Launch email & mobile sales outreach campaigns
Send emails or Viber messages or SMS to all your subscribers (excluding those who already are customers) with information about your discounts.
In addition, send paid emails that you have established with major publishers, who have your audience and feature their own email newsletter and will send a purely promotional email for you.
Launch Google Search & Performance Max campaigns
Run campaigns that target searches for your topic/product in conjunction with Black Friday keywords. This way you will only show your ads to those who search for something related to you in conjunction with discounts (e.g. TVs black Friday discounts).
Launch dynamic remarketing campaigns across all channels
Run campaigns that target website visitors from all previous days and of course, exclude everyone who has already become your customer. This way, you will only display your ads to those who have visited you.
You run these ads with dynamic remarketing so that visitors only see the product they have visited. The channels you will run them on are again a) Facebook & Instagram with ad objective awareness and traffic, b) Google Display Network and YouTube c) TikTok, d) Pinterest, etc.
Expect to invest for these remarketing ads 20% of the budget you had invested for the first step (awareness & traffic).
Posts & stories on your social media accounts
Obviously, you will make at least one post or story each day about your discounts with a link to your specific landing page.
Posts in relevant social media groups
If your executives participate in groups where your target audience exists and IF REQUIRED by the terms of the group, then you can make a post in which you mention your discounts to the members with a link to your specific landing page.
Repost posts & stories from selected influencers
You will have chosen several micro or mega influencers who will do purely promotional posts, stories, reels, or whatever else you have agreed on for your discounts. Always pick the ones that have your audience and choose the ones that your budget can afford. The goal is direct sales.
Distribute press releases to premium publishers
You should have prepared and sent to major publishers who have your audience, press releases announcing your discounts. These should be published with an embargo on the exact day of the sale and no earlier.
Monitor & evaluate results during and after your campaigns
"You can't manage what you can't measure,” said Peter Drucker. Therefore, you need to have a proper dashboard or report set up beforehand which you monitor before, during, and after to see if and how much all your above actions worked. Obviously, what you are primarily interested in, is the sales and turnover on those days and you will know that immediately at your checkout! But there are several more elements that will help you improve your strategy from here on out. You may be interested in looking at the following:
Evaluating social media marketing organic results
For social media marketing actions: the total ENGAGEMENT of all organic posts/stories,
Evaluating influencer marketing paid results
For influencer marketing actions: the total ENGAGEMENT of all paid posts/stories,
Evaluating advertising campaigns paid results
For paid advertising campaigns: the total CLICKS and CLICK THROUGH RATE of your ads and of course the CONVERSIONS and CONVERSION RATE of all your campaigns,
Evaluating email/mobile marketing outreach results
For email & mobile marketing campaigns: the total OPENS & CLICKS of your messages.
Evaluating your overall strategy
In addition, for those who are more ambitious, a very important result is the RETURN ON AD SPEND or ROAS of all actions (not just ads). Meaning, what you invested/gave in total and what you got back in total. E.g. I invested 1000 euros/dollars I got 4000 euros/dollars in return. ROAS = 4. You realize that the higher the ROAS the better your overall strategy was.
Summary - the best results for Black Friday & Cyber Monday
The Black Friday and Cyber Monday period is an opportunity to achieve more sales. If you provide products or services with real value and great deals, you will get great results. In this article, you saw how to prepare a complete digital marketing strategy with all possible promotions for your business. Us applying this strategy, we have delivered incredible results which have been awarded many times with a total ROAS of 20-60. Obviously, no strategy guarantees the same results across different businesses, products, or services. However, the steps and tactics can be the same. Good luck!
Want to learn more about digital marketing?
For those looking to stay ahead in the digital marketing industry, Knowcrunch offers:
- Self-paced video e-learning courses: Masterclass in Digital & ΑΙ Marketing, which is 100% online video-on-demand and much more.
- Class & virtual class live training: The Masterclass in Digital & ΑΙ Marketing, held every quarter and much more.
About the author
Tolis Aivalis is the CEO of Knowcrunch, founded in 2010, an international digital marketing training organization, with over 30 years of experience in digital marketing, advertising, technology, entrepreneurship, and education.
Since 1996, and for over 30 years, he has built an extensive track record of innovation across digital marketing, AI, gaming, media, and entertainment. He has founded and led several businesses, including AIVAL, Social Brands, Adweb, and Knowcrunch.
Recognized among the Most Influential CEOs by CIO Views and the Top 100 Digital Marketers in Greece by Marketing Week, he has received 32 awards for innovation and excellence across multiple industries.
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Table of contents
- Your pricing strategy comes first
- Time for your digital marketing strategy
- Optimizing your landing pages
- Optimizing your online sales funnel
- Prepare the XML feeds of products
- Check the conversion tags & events on your website
- Update your ad creatives
- Set up your email & mobile marketing funnel & messages
- Launch your organic social media marketing strategy
- Launch your advertising campaigns
- Choose your influencers
- Launch your sales tactics
- Monitor & evaluate results during and after your campaigns
- Summary - the best results for Black Friday & Cyber Monday
- Want to learn more about digital marketing?
- About the author
Table of contents
- Your pricing strategy comes first
- Time for your digital marketing strategy
- Optimizing your landing pages
- Optimizing your online sales funnel
- Prepare the XML feeds of products
- Check the conversion tags & events on your website
- Update your ad creatives
- Set up your email & mobile marketing funnel & messages
- Launch your organic social media marketing strategy
- Launch your advertising campaigns
- Choose your influencers
- Launch your sales tactics
- Monitor & evaluate results during and after your campaigns
- Summary - the best results for Black Friday & Cyber Monday
- Want to learn more about digital marketing?
- About the author