The Ecomm Analyst

The Black Friday email I see most often, from brands that should know better, lands sometime in the second week of November and reads like it was written that morning. Often it was.

The brands that crush BFCM are not working harder during BFCM. They’re working earlier. The week of, they’re mostly executing a plan that was drafted in August and stress-tested in October.

Here’s the rough timeline I work backward from, with the obvious caveat that every brand needs to adjust based on category, audience, and inventory situation.

By August 1, the offer is decided. Not the creative, not the channels. The offer itself, meaning discount level, structure (sitewide vs tiered vs gifting), and any differentiated treatment for VIPs vs general list. This needs to be locked because everything else depends on it. Inventory ordering, paid media planning, creative briefs, all of it.

By September 1, inventory commitments are placed. If you’re going to stock up for the offer, your suppliers need to know. The brands that run out of inventory on Black Friday rarely ran out because demand exceeded all reasonable forecasts. They ran out because they ordered too late.

By October 1, creative is in production. Email, SMS, paid social, and any landing page work. This sounds aggressive. It is. Trying to produce creative in November means producing creative while you’re also running the program, and one of those two will suffer.

By November 1, the warm-up sequence begins. List growth pushes, lapsed customer reactivation, anchoring messaging that establishes what the offer will be. The brands that send their first promotional email on November 24 are showing up to a party where everyone else has been there for three weeks.

By Thanksgiving, the program is on autopilot. The team is monitoring, not building. Anything that requires building during the program window is, almost by definition, going to be done badly.

I track program performance in ThoughtMetric, with a comparison view set against the previous year’s same window. The metrics I watch most carefully aren’t the obvious ones. Total revenue is going to be up. That’s the easy part. What I’m watching is new customer percentage, which tends to dip during promotional windows because existing customers dominate the volume. If new-customer mix collapses during BFCM, the program is more discount-dependent than the team thinks. If it holds steady or grows, the offer is doing real acquisition work.

The other metric I watch is post-BFCM behavior in January. How many of the new customers acquired during the window come back at full price. The honest answer for most brands is “fewer than expected.” This is the trade. You knew it going in. Watching the metric keeps you honest about whether the trade was worth it.

Plan in August. Execute in November. Audit in February. Repeat.