Black Friday is one of the biggest retail shopping days of the year and, as a retail business, you do not want to miss out on opportunities to boost your sales—both in-store and online—over the Black Friday weekend.
30 Black Friday Marketing Strategies for 2024
This article is part of a larger series on Retail Management.
Black Friday is the shopping holiday that takes place the Friday after Thanksgiving. Black Friday typically represents the official start of the holiday shopping season and is marked by sales and discounts.
While shopping after Thanksgiving has been going on for many decades, Black Friday got its official name in the 1950s when the Philly police dubbed it as such due to the influx of crowds and lack of order that occurred at shopping malls on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The name “Black Friday” originally had a negative connotation, but has since become one of the best days for retailers and shoppers alike—marked by deals, tons of buzz, and bumps in profit.
In this guide, we will look at 30 of the top Black Friday marketing strategies that you can utilize in 2024 to help you capitalize on buying momentum and ring in the holiday season with profits.
Prepare for Black Friday Sales
The first step to a successful Black Friday sale is preparation. While it’s ideal for businesses to start thinking about their Black Friday marketing ideas as early as the start of the new year, it’s never too late to plan a successful campaign.
1. Account for Black Friday in Your Marketing Budget
As a general rule of thumb, small retail businesses allocate 5% to 10% of their annual revenue to marketing. The best thing that you can do to ensure that you have enough funds to execute your Black Friday outreach campaign is to start planning early and get your roadmap sketched out and consider where you will spend your money as you plan your annual budget.
That said, you can accomplish much even if you’re just starting your plans weeks before Black Friday. Nowadays, print and television ads are not the only way to reach your target market. Initiatives such as in-store flyers and social media posts are quick to roll out and will only cost you a few dollars. Ad space and influencer partnerships are great ideas if you have more time and budget to work with.
2. Build Hype Early (But Not Too Early)
Did you know? According to a survey by Bankrate, 48% of holiday shoppers have started checking off their list as early as August of this year.
In an age when people are constantly bombarded with ads, it is more important than ever to have a long-term strategy when marketing for any event. Repetition will help you stand out in customers’ minds and boost the likelihood of people thinking of you on the big day—when their choices are endless.
However, it’s also important to make sure that your ads are timely or risk annoying your customer base by coming off as pushy. Here is a timetable that you can use to guide your Black Friday marketing campaign:
Timeline | Marketing Strategy Action Item |
---|---|
Late September/Early October (Soft Marketing Initiative) | Start with a soft marketing initiative where you aren’t sending customer marketing materials directly or running long-term ads, but rather are using word of mouth or social media posts to begin building recognition and hype around your brand. |
Late October/Early November (Aggressive Black Friday Campaign) | This is when I would suggest you begin your bigger and more aggressive Black Friday campaign. Start sending promotional materials like emails and texts and running Facebook and other ads around this time to maintain top-of-mind recognition and keep your customer base in the loop. |
Black Friday Weekend (Prominent Online & In-store Promotions) | On the weekend of your Black Friday event, it’s time to get loud—online and in-store. Send out emails each morning of your sale to let customers know about your deals and how long they last. Use social channels to show people what your sale looks like and the products they can purchase. Don't hesitate to post both on your feed and in your stories—at this point you want your online presence to be strong so customers get excited about coming. You should also decorate your store, making it as festive and eye-catching as possible to entice any passing traffic. |
You can learn more about how you can plan marketing initiatives and stay on schedule for any event with our 2024 Retail Marketing Calendar: Planning Guide (+ Free Download).
3. Partner with Your Neighboring Stores for Black Friday
You don’t always have to look far to reach new customers and promote your sale. Another Black Friday marketing strategy that you can try is partnering with neighboring stores so you both can expand your customer base and benefit from each other on Black Friday. Your partnership can take several forms:
- You run a joint Black Friday sale or promotion
- You hang flyers in your partner’s shop
- You host pop-up tables in each other’s stores
Whatever the case, looking to your neighbors will help you target traffic already in your vicinity and reach and convert new customers. For example, you could partner with a local coffee shop for the morning of Black Friday. They simply set up a coffee stand outside of the store which, in turn, attracts customers, makes them stay longer, and helps the coffee shop sell lots of coffee and introduce their brand to new customers.
Note that some partnerships may require contracts or cash investment. Be sure to discuss these terms in advance and factor any associated costs into your budget.
4. Make a Holiday Deals Calendar
In addition to hourly deals on the day of your sale, you can also create a daily or weekly deal calendar from your Black Friday sale through the end of the holiday season. This is not only a great way to keep people engaged and excited about your offerings long after your Black Friday sale ends, but it also will save you from having to run massive storewide deals that cut into your bottom line.
For example, you might offer 20% off of one department the first week of the holiday season and then 15% off another category the next. Or, you might just host a Friday deal that changes weekly. The deals can change however you need them to—your calendar is fully customizable. This is another great opportunity to target stock that you want to sell through.
5. Create a Black Friday Discount Code for Your Online Store
There is no longer any way around it—if you want to compete this Black Friday, you have to expand online.
According to research from Adobe Analytics, online holiday spending is picking up momentum as online consumers spent $221.8 billion in 2023, registering a 4.9% growth year-over-year—significantly higher than the estimated $211.7 billion (3.5% increase YoY). For 2024, Adobe Analytics predicts an online holiday spending of $240.8 billion for a whopping 8.4% growth YoY.
While in-store shopping is certainly projected to continue to rebound from the pandemic, you don’t want to miss out on online sales this Black Friday. Provide users with a Black Friday discount code for your website and be sure to market that code throughout your Black Friday marketing campaigns.
Open that code for use at midnight on Black Friday, and be sure you have staff that can manage your online orders as they come in. The last thing you want is to save your orders for the end of the day and realize you sold out of things that people already paid for online.
6. Design a Chatbot
Another Black Friday marketing strategy that you can utilize for your online store is to adopt a chatbot. Chatbots are AI messaging services that customers can use to get answers to product questions, check on their orders, get policy information, get connected to an agent, and more.
They drastically decrease customer service wait times and can help shoppers get back to shopping faster. In fact, 82% of customers (a 20% increase from 2022) say they would rather talk to a chatbot than wait on a human agent.
Chatbots are especially helpful for major shopping holidays as they can provide assistance to customers with no wait times and can save you money on staffing and customer service needs.
Related: Learn more about chatbots and how you can add one to your store with our ultimate guide to ecommerce chatbots.
7. Create a Black Friday Landing Page
To add a spotlight on Black Friday to your ecommerce site, consider creating a Black Friday landing page. A landing page is a specific page where customers “land” when they follow certain marketing links.
So, say you are promoting your Black Friday event in an email. You could then provide a link within the email to learn more, and it would take users to your Black Friday landing page that outlines everything users can expect over the Black Friday weekend. You can even preview specific deals and promoted products to drum up hype. Another popular landing page feature is to add a countdown to your page.
Roll Out Your Pre-Black Friday Marketing
Once you have your Black Friday marketing strategies all planned out, keep an eye on your marketing calendar. Ideally, you should have some marketing activities rolling out a week or so before the actual event to get the word out and gain momentum.
8. Start a Black Friday SMS Marketing Campaign
As part of your more aggressive social media push closer to Black Friday itself, send your customers SMS messages to alert them of your specific upcoming deals and remind them about your store. You can even send them special promotions and offers to build exclusivity.
You can consider a customer loyalty program to collect phone numbers and accrue a customer base. This will allow you to exchange customer information for exclusive deals and discounts while also fostering loyalty. Additionally, you will want to choose a marketing text messaging service like Klaviyo, TextMagic, or SimpleTexting.
Set Up Black Friday Alerts
Another SMS marketing strategy that can boost engagement around your Black Friday sale is to let customers sign up for Black Friday alerts. This way, you can send customers who are excited about your sale instant updates and additional texts without fear of annoying or pestering them.
This is also a great way to maintain top-of-mind recognition on sale day and let your loyal customers gain a sense of exclusivity.
Square has outreach marketing tools for both email and SMS built into its POS accounts so you can keep track of your customers and reach out to them all from one place. Visit Square to learn more.
9. Leverage Social Media (Don’t Forget Those Black Friday Hashtags)
One of the most powerful tools that you can use to promote your Black Friday sale and build hype is social media. In fact, according to a report from HubSpot, 86% of social media marketers say building an active online community is critical to success in 2024.
To begin your social marketing push, you will want to be sure that your brand has active Instagram and Facebook pages, at the very least. You can also add Pinterest, X (formerly Twitter), and other sources, but Instagram and Facebook should reach the majority of your customer base. Here, you can share promotions, images, and sneak peeks to drum up hype around your Black Friday sale.
As we talked about before, even on social media, I would start with your soft push by using stories and hashtags to avoid being overly pushy with your followers. Then, closer to the actual sale, ramp up your social marketing with posts, influencer partnerships, and ads (all of which we will cover below).
I would also suggest making your Instagram shoppable so customers do not have to leave their social platform to browse or complete a purchase.
Let’s look at some of the best social marketing strategies you can use to promote your Black Friday sale:
Influencer marketing is when your brand partners with an influencer, and you agree to compensate them in exchange for promoting your product, brand, or sale. In an age when people seem to follow more influencers than actual friends, working with these quasi-celebrities will help you boost your reach and influence when promoting your Black Friday sale.
Did you know? The market size for influencer marketing is expected to be valued at $24 billion by the end of this year, showing strong growth despite economic uncertainty.
To promote a Black Friday sale, the influencer you work with can:
- Hype your brand by showing off your merchandise and telling their audience more about your brand, only briefly mentioning the upcoming Black Friday sale. This type of promo, which should be done further out from the event, will help expand your reach and create top-of-mind recognition.
- Strictly promote your sale by telling people about the deals, the timing, and the exact discounts you will run. This type of influencer advertising is best suited for closer to your actual event, not as part of your soft push.
As an example, Boyed, a small women’s streetwear brand, recently launched its clothing line and used influencer marketing as the primary way to reach its audience and drum up excitement. Months before Boyed even launched, I started seeing people on my feed showing off Boyed merchandise and telling me more about the brand itself. This intrigued me, and I started following Boyed to stay up to date.
Then, a week before launch, much more detailed information, including pricing and sizing started to come out and get promoted by influencers (and the brand, too). By the time Boyed’s line finally dropped, I had gotten excited, built recognition, learned the products and deals, and was ready to buy.
Check out our guide to influencer marketing for a more detailed roadmap to acquiring and successfully using influencer partnerships.
The final Black Friday strategy that you can use to market on social media is running ads. All social platforms run ads—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube—and you can buy space from them for anywhere from 75 cents to $10 depending on the website, its traffic, and the time that your ad runs.
As we discussed previously, you should reserve running Black Friday ads until a few weeks before the sale as part of your more aggressive marketing push. Your ads should focus on your discounts and deals, letting people know exactly what you will be offering. If possible with your budget, running more ads as your Black Friday event gets closer will also help your brand stay on top of customers’ minds when the sale day finally comes.
10. Advertise in Your Local Paper
A great way to reach local audiences for your Black Friday sale is to advertise in your local Thanksgiving Day paper. Many families look to this source before checking online, and by advertising locally, your ad will be well-situated to reach potential customers.
Most newspapers also have an online website where readers can access content. Ask your local paper whether your ad will appear online as well or if it is restricted to print.
11. Use Your Email List to Promote Black Friday Deals
While social media is a great tool to expand your reach and build brand recognition, marketing via your customer email list will help you reach existing customers and get them excited about your Black Friday promotion. Pitching to people who already shop with you might seem like a waste of resources, but marketing to loyal customers is the best way to boost your sales. In fact, a commonly cited statistic says loyal customers make up an average of 65% of a business’s annual revenue.
As with SMS messaging, to acquire a list of customer emails, you can start a customer loyalty program or, at minimum, collect emails by offering digital receipts. From there, you can start sending soft and hard promotional emails for your Black Friday sale.
Unlike with your other marketing channels, you can actually start promoting your Black Friday sale more aggressively early on in the soft marketing push. Rather than annoying shoppers or feeling pushy, this will feel like a sneak peek or special treatment.
12. Send Black Friday Invites
Another Black Friday marketing strategy you can use to reach your audience and build excitement around the big day is sending out formal Black Friday invitations. This will make the day feel like a holiday party and not just another sale; it will also make your brand stick out and foster a sense of exclusivity that shoppers will want to capitalize on.
Make your invitations festive and holiday-inspired. Anything you can do to make your sale more enticing to your customers will pay off and get people through the door.
Continue the holiday party theme by bringing out the food, drink, and holiday music (or even carolers)—anything to make it festive. This will make coming to your store an experience, help to harness that holiday spending potential, and entice holiday lovers to visit your storefront.
13. Release Holiday Gift Guides
Another way that you can harness that holiday spirit and give people a glimpse of your Black Friday promo is by creating a gift guide with all your discounted products. This will give people an idea of what they can expect to find on sale and give the stumped gift giver some inspiration.
For example, around the holidays, we always got a lot of boyfriends and husbands shopping for their partners. Rather than letting them walk around the store aimlessly, we provided gift guides “for your girlfriend,” “for your wife,” “for your daughter,” etc. These made the shoppers’ lives so much easier and kept them coming back for a stress-free gift-giving experience.
14. Offer Referral Codes
Black Friday marketing strategies don’t all have to be internal, you can also use your customers to market your business for the holiday weekend. Referral codes are links or codes that are tied to a specific person. When that person shares their code, the recipient gets a reward and the referrer also gets rewarded with something like a free gift, an additional discount, or another prize. Oftentimes these referrer’s prizes are withheld until the person to whom they gave their code makes a purchase or signs up for a loyalty program.
For Black Friday, you might send everyone in your loyalty program or email list a referral link. If their link then gets used over the shopping weekend, you could provide them with a December discount or a gift card as their prize. Either way, referral traffic is some of the most lucrative you can have, so any way that you can get people buzzing amongst themselves about your store over Black Friday is a win.
15. Send Cart Abandonment Reminders
One of ecommerce’s biggest stumbling blocks is cart abandonment or when a customer shops and adds inventory to their cart only to leave the site before purchasing. The good news—because Black Friday deals are under a time constraint, you can lure cart “abandoners” back by reminding them that the Black Friday prices they are seeing in their carts won’t last.
I would suggest setting up triggered cart abandonment emails to go out only a few hours after the person has left your site. This will ensure they get a reminder before the Black Friday deals have finished and will give you the opportunity to create a sense of urgency to get checked out.
Read more: 12 Abandoned Cart Email Examples to Inspire Your Own
Launch Your Day-of Campaign
Your marketing ideas for Black Friday should center around offers that you can provide to customers to keep them coming into your store, such as gift cards and discounts on future purchases.
16. Carry In-store Exclusives
With Black Friday increasingly moving online, one of the best ways to drive traffic to your physical storefront is by holding exclusive in-store discounts. You will also want to be sure that you are advertising these exclusives on your website to alert online shoppers and give them a reason to visit and check out your savings.
Did you know? The trend of brick-and-mortar becoming obsolete is reversing itself in the post-COVID age. In fact, Sensormatic predicts that Black Friday will see the biggest in-store traffic than any other day of the holiday shopping rush.
For example, for Black Friday you can release an exclusive color of our top-selling items as an in-store exclusive. If the item has a cult following, the in-store exclusive can draw shoppers in droves.
17. Offer a Free Product with Minimum Purchases
One promotion that you can use to attract customers to your Black Friday sale is to offer a free product with a minimum purchase. For the holidays specifically, you can make your giveaway special by making it holiday-themed.
For example, you can offer a promotion for a free mini Christmas candle with any purchase of $100. While the candles might normally sell for $10, shoppers might spend $20 to $30 extra to reach the minimum and get their free candle.
Another free product that you could tack onto minimum purchases is a gift card. Gift cards are some of the most desirable holiday gifts, so people will be incentivized to reach their minimum to get their prize. Besides that, gift cards work to build loyalty by making people come back after the holiday season.
18. Focus on Gift Cards
As we mentioned above, gift cards are popular items for gift-giving during the holiday season—for 2024, gift cards are expected to make up 65% of holiday gifts. You should, therefore, capitalize on people’s desire to purchase gift cards by promoting them in your Black Friday sale.
In addition to offering free gift cards with minimum purchase, ways you can highlight your gift cards include:
- Discounts: Offer your gift cards at 10% off.
- Merchandising: Use displays and smart placement to draw attention to your gift cards.
- Rewards: Make people want to add more value to their cards by rewarding them with free dollars. For example, you could offer an additional $10 for every $100 loaded onto their card.
19. Utilize Cross-selling to Promote Gift Sets
One of the best ways to boost your Black Friday sale is by using cross-selling promos. A cross-selling promotion is when you sell complementary items together at a discount—say, a scarf and a hat. This is a great way to entice buyers to purchase things they might not have considered, increase the number of items they buy, and inspire ideas on how to use your products.
During the holidays, market your bundles as gift sets to inspire shoppers, make their lives easier when shopping for friends and family, and promote gift sales.
Another way you can promote cross-selling is by merchandising well, or in this case, by cross-merchandising. This means you strategically place (or merchandise) complementary items near each other and showcase how they might work together. You might not even need to run a promo to get them sold as a pair.
20. Offer Black Friday BOGO Deals
Another way that you can boost sales for Black Friday is by running a buy one, get one (BOGO) promotion. This is a great way to move through high-volume inventory and get people to purchase things they might have never considered.
BOGO sales are also great for people shopping in pairs. In my own retail experience, I can’t even begin to count the number of times a pair would come in, and one would purchase a BOGO item just so both people in the duo could have it. Without the BOGO promotion, their buying motivation would not have existed, and we would not have made those sales.
21. Run Hourly Black Friday Deals
For stores that see high traffic flow on Black Friday, hourly deals are a great way to get people excited and promote all-day shopping. You can also structure this promotion to be on top of your storewide deal. So, you might offer 25% off storewide and hourly deals where t-shirts go to 50% off at noon and you get a free pair of socks with your purchases at one o’clock. Keeping things interesting and maintaining elements of surprise are great ways to engage shoppers.
To entice customers to shop outside of peak shopping times, try running your most tempting deals during lower traffic periods.
22. Offer Curbside Pickup for Black Friday Purchases
According to PricewaterhouseCooper’s 2024 holiday outlook, Salesforce’s 2022 holiday findings, nearly half of millennial (48%) and Gen Z (49%) shoppers will opt for a buy online, pick-up in-store (BOPIS) option. With people only getting more accustomed to shopping online this year, offering curbside pickup is a great way to increase your sales and accommodate all shopping preferences. Not only that, but for the savvy shopper trying to hit as many stores as possible on Black Friday, curbside is a convenient and fast option that will make them more likely to visit your business.
If you decide to offer curbside, be sure that you staff a curbside crew, create a curbside pickup area, and incorporate the associated costs into your annual budget. You can check out our guide for additional guidance on setting up a curbside system for your business.
23. Offer Surprise Black Friday Savings & Deals
Maintaining the element of surprise is a great way to get people to check out your site on Black Friday. Surprise savings, however, do not mean that people don’t know they are coming. You should still market your surprise and build excitement for your secret deals like you would any other. You also might consider revealing a storewide deal and saving secret discounts for smaller deals on the day of Black Friday.
24. Give Your VIPs an Exclusive Black Friday Discount
One of my favorite Black Friday strategies is to give special offers to your VIP members. As we said before, your loyal customers are your biggest asset, so rewarding them typically pays off and continues to nurture their loyalty. Try offering early access, exclusive deals, insider information, or other rewards and prizes that will inspire them to shop.
In some shops, VIP members are invited to come in an hour early on sale day. Early access lets VIPs see and shop the merchandise before anyone else, and because the products are in limited quantities and sizes in sale items, this can be a huge draw for loyal customers. Not to mention that you end up opening before other stores on our street, so there is limited competition.
25. Multiply Gift-giving Opportunities with Bundle Discounts
Another deal that you can try for Black Friday is bundle discounts. This is when you offer discounts to people who buy certain combos or quantities of products. For example, you might offer three puzzles for $10, when an individual puzzle is $4. Bundle deals are a great way to get people to make unplanned purchases, buy more than they planned, and clear out old or excess inventory.
Market your bundled products as stocking stuffers or gifts. This will incentivize people to buy because the purchase will multiply their gift-giving potential and save them money. Learn more in our guide to product bundling.
Follow Through with Post-Black Friday Engagement
Black Friday may be over, but your customer engagement efforts should not stop if you want your business to stay in the customer’s mind until the next holiday season. Below are post-Black Friday marketing tips you should try:
26. Donate a Percentage of Your Sales to Charity
Get in the holiday spirit and donate a percentage of your Black Friday proceeds to charity. Not only will this benefit a cause you care about, but it can appeal to shoppers who aren’t reeled in by discounts. The holidays are the season of giving, so there is nothing more festive than donations.
Another way that you can raise money for charitable causes in your store is by creating a place where people can donate, like a toy donation bin or a secure way that customers can give cash. You can also partner with local charities and host events in your store to drive traffic and support a cause at the same time.
27. Extend Your Black Friday Sale
As people have continued to spend more and more money around the holidays, the trend has been to run your Black Friday sale through to Cyber Monday, at the very least, and more often than not, through the next week or longer. This will help to capitalize on buying potential and drive your bottom line.
As we discussed in the holiday deals calendar tip, you don’t have to carry the same sale throughout the extended Black Friday period. You could offer daily deals, limited-time offers, and other promotions to protect your margins. Either way, any promotion will help drive traffic and—with all that holiday buying intent—boost sales.
28. Follow Up on Abandoned Carts
With Black Friday sales in full swing, it’s not unusual to find abandoned carts on your website. Your marketing strategies for Black Friday should, therefore, include ways to remind customers that they have left products in their online carts. Take the temporary lull after Black Friday and Small Business Saturday to send out reminder emails and entice customers with exclusive deals they can get if they return and buy the items left in their carts.
29. Share Highlights on Social Media
Round off your Black Friday event with a recap on social media. Your marketing strategy for Black Friday should include planning a series of social media posts. This can be live video streams during the event, a photo carousel of highlights after the event thanking customers, or a recap of your most popular items that day.
Additional ideas include:
- Story highlights showing your preparation activities for Black Friday
- Post images of your store discounts and promotions
- An appreciation post for all those who visited your store
Don’t forget to tag your customers whenever possible and respond promptly to comments on your social media posts.
30. Tease Your Next Campaigns
Lots of people will be coming through to your store on Black Friday and the extended shopping period it kicks off. Start fostering their loyalty and enticing them with a return visit by teasing your upcoming holiday deals during Black Friday. Put up posters, send follow-up emails with your next campaigns, and train employees to mention upcoming promotions at checkout.
People are ready to spend during the holiday season, so keep them shopping with continuous deals and offers. Black Friday doesn’t end on Friday anymore, or even on Cyber Monday for that matter—it kicks off a season of savings and promotions that lasts through Christmas.
Read: Retail Holiday Readiness
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Click through the questions below to get answers to some of your most frequently asked Black Friday questions.
A Black Friday marketing strategy will help you compete on the day, create hype beforehand, and encourage planning in advance so you can get ahead of the ever-earlier holiday shopping season.
While SMBs can’t offer the steep discounts that big box stores can afford, they can compete by working the small business angle, offering a personalized experience, and providing unique products.
Yes, and you should. Offer deals, send emails, merchandise, and utilize any additional marketing strategies (that you can afford) to capitalize on the day’s massive potential.
You should begin marketing for Black Friday as soon as Halloween has passed. The holiday shopping season is starting earlier and earlier every year (as early as September this year), so you want to have your holiday offerings ready as soon as your customers are.
Bottom Line
There is plenty of consumer buying potential around Black Friday. With the right Black Friday strategy, you can capitalize on this potential and boost your sales for a successful holiday season. Use the guide above to learn about all the Black Friday campaigns you can use to make your sale a hit.