Summary
Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring more shoppers online, but they also bring more competition. Ecommerce brands need to prepare their advertising, email and SMS campaigns, product pages, website performance, and promotional strategy before BFCM begins.
The five Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing strategies covered below can help ecommerce stores prepare for increased traffic and turn more of those visitors into customers.
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Black Friday and Cyber Monday can produce some of the biggest ecommerce sales days of the year. They can also be some of the most competitive.
Shoppers have countless promotions competing for their attention. Advertising costs can rise as more businesses enter paid search and social auctions. Customers can compare products, prices, shipping policies, reviews, and discounts without spending much time on any single website.
Simply putting your products on sale isn’t much of a Black Friday marketing strategy.
Preparation should start before Black Friday weekend. Here are five areas ecommerce businesses should focus on when preparing their Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing for 2026.
1. Start Google and Meta Advertising Before BFCM
Waiting until Black Friday to launch your advertising campaigns puts you behind businesses that started preparing weeks earlier.
Competition for paid advertising tends to increase around major shopping periods. Instead of relying entirely on customers you reach during Black Friday weekend, start building awareness and audiences earlier.
Your Google Ads and Facebook Ads strategy can begin promoting products, collecting traffic, and building remarketing audiences before your biggest offers go live.
Depending on your ecommerce business, your preparation may include:
- Google Shopping campaigns
- Performance Max campaigns
- Meta prospecting campaigns
- Remarketing campaigns
- Customer Match or customer-list audiences
- Updated product feeds
- BFCM-specific ad creative
- Promotional assets
- Conversion and revenue tracking
Your product feed deserves particular attention if you rely on Google Shopping or Performance Max. Check product titles, prices, images, availability, landing pages, and other feed data before traffic increases.
This is also the time to verify conversion tracking.
You don’t want to discover halfway through Black Friday weekend that purchases aren’t being recorded correctly or your campaigns are optimizing toward the wrong action.
2. Build Your Email and SMS Audiences Early
Not every shopper will purchase the first time they visit your website.
Email and SMS give you additional opportunities to reach people who have already shown interest in your products.
Instead of starting your Black Friday email campaign on Thanksgiving night, spend the weeks leading up to BFCM building your lists and preparing customers for upcoming promotions.
You can use email and SMS to announce:
- Early-access sales
- Black Friday discounts
- Cyber Monday promotions
- Product launches
- Limited inventory
- Restocked products
- Bundle deals
- Shipping deadlines
- Sale ending reminders
Segmentation can also make these campaigns more relevant.
A previous customer doesn’t necessarily need the same message as someone who signed up for your email list yesterday. Likewise, someone who previously purchased one product category may be more interested in related products than a sitewide promotion.
Your BFCM communication should also have a clear schedule. Sending too few messages can cause customers to miss the promotion, while sending constant emails and texts can quickly become irritating.
Plan the sequence before the sale starts.
3. Optimize Product Pages and the Checkout Process
Advertising can bring shoppers to your website. Your website still has to close the sale.
Review your most important product pages before BFCM and make sure customers can quickly find the information they need to make a buying decision.
That can include:
- Clear product descriptions
- Accurate pricing
- High-quality product images
- Product specifications
- Size or fit information
- Shipping information
- Return policies
- Customer reviews
- Inventory status
- Clear add-to-cart buttons
- Related products
Do not make shoppers hunt for basic information.
The same rule applies to checkout.
Go through the entire buying process yourself on both desktop and mobile. Add an item to your cart, apply a promotional code, enter shipping information, select a payment method, and proceed through checkout.
Look for unnecessary steps or anything that could make a shopper hesitate.
Black Friday traffic doesn’t mean much if customers abandon their carts because the checkout process is confusing.
4. Test Site Speed and Mobile Performance
A slow ecommerce site is frustrating during any part of the year. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the problem can become even more costly.
Test important pages before your campaigns begin.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights can help identify performance problems and provide Core Web Vitals data.
Pay particular attention to:
- Homepage
- Product pages
- Category pages
- Sale landing pages
- Shopping cart
- Checkout
Don’t test only your desktop website.
Customers may discover your products through Instagram, Facebook, Google, email, SMS, or another channel on their phones and complete the entire purchase without ever using a desktop computer.
Check how quickly pages load, whether buttons are easy to use, how promotional banners display, and whether pop-ups interfere with shopping on smaller screens.
You should also avoid making major, untested website changes immediately before BFCM. Fix performance problems early enough that you have time to confirm everything still works properly.
5. Create BFCM Offers That Give Shoppers a Reason to Buy
A discount is not automatically a compelling Black Friday offer.
Your customers will probably see promotions from many competing brands. Think about what makes buying from your store during BFCM different from simply purchasing another day.
A percentage discount is one option, but it isn’t the only one.
Consider testing offers such as:
- Product bundles
- Buy-one-get-one promotions
- Free gifts with purchase
- Free shipping
- Spending thresholds
- Limited-edition products
- Early-access discounts
- Category-specific promotions
Bundles can work particularly well when you have products customers naturally purchase together.
You can also use spending thresholds to increase order size. For example, offering free shipping or another benefit after a customer reaches a certain order amount can give shoppers a reason to add another product to their cart.
Whatever offer you choose, make the terms easy to understand.
Customers should immediately know what the deal is, when it ends, and what they need to do to receive it.
Start Your Black Friday Marketing Before Black Friday
The biggest mistake ecommerce businesses can make is treating Black Friday and Cyber Monday as a four-day event.
Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing strategy should begin well before the sale.
Build audiences early. Prepare your Google and Meta campaigns. Check your product feeds and conversion tracking. Test your website. Review your product pages. Plan email and SMS campaigns. Decide exactly what you’re going to offer customers.
Then test everything before the traffic arrives.
The businesses that prepare early have more time to find problems, adjust campaigns, and make sure their websites are ready to turn increased BFCM traffic into revenue.
If your business needs help preparing paid campaigns for the holiday shopping season, LuccaAM can help with Google Ads, Meta Ads, ecommerce PPC, and digital advertising strategy.
Contact LuccaAM to start planning your BFCM advertising campaigns.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday FAQs
When Should I Start Marketing for Black Friday?
Start preparing several weeks before Black Friday. This gives you time to build remarketing audiences, grow email and SMS lists, test advertising campaigns, prepare creative, check product feeds, and fix website problems before competition increases.
Should I Run Google Ads During Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Google Ads can be an effective way to reach shoppers actively searching for products during BFCM. Ecommerce businesses should prepare campaigns, product feeds, budgets, promotional assets, and conversion tracking before Black Friday rather than waiting until the sale begins.
How Can I Increase Ecommerce Sales During Black Friday?
Focus on the entire purchase path. Your advertising needs to reach the right shoppers, your offer needs to give them a reason to buy, your product pages need to answer their questions, and your checkout process needs to make purchasing easy.
What Is the Difference Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday Marketing?
The two shopping events increasingly operate as part of the same promotional period, especially for ecommerce businesses. Many brands now run BFCM promotions across several days or weeks rather than treating Black Friday and Cyber Monday as completely separate sales events.
