Black Friday and Cyber Monday Checklist

What is Black Friday?

Black Friday is originally an American tradition. The day after Thanksgiving is considered the start of the Christmas season. High discounts are offered in all stores, so that everyone can buy Christmas gifts at a bargain price. In the Netherlands, Black Friday is now also celebrated every year. Although the name suggests that high discounts are only given on Fridays, stores nowadays offer discounts valid for the entire weekend, the entire week (Black Week) or even the entire month of November.

The concept of Black Friday is simple: sell as much as possible thanks to the highest possible discount. Traditionally, retailers give the very highest discounts of the year on Black Friday.

When is Black Friday?

The special holiday takes place every year the day after Thanksgiving. The American celebration that is! America always celebrates Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November, which automatically causes Black Friday to fall on the fourth Friday of November. In 2024, Black Friday will be on November 29. Agenda tip: in 2025, Black Friday will take place on November 28.

Many shops don't just stick to Black Friday. They hold promotions throughout the weekend, ending on Monday. At some shops, you can even enjoy deals for a whole week: they hold a Black Week!

Where did the name Black Friday come from?

This is a tricky question, considering we have been using the term Black Friday for a very long time. Therefore, there are several theories where the origin of the name "Black Friday" comes from.

We start with the theory from the US city of Philadelphia. The term was first used in the year 1965. The term was then used for the huge crowds in the city on the day after Thanksgiving. This could be a link to "Black Saturday", which is what we use in Europe when everyone goes by car to their holiday destinations.

The second theory dates back to 1981. This theory claims that the day after Thanksgiving was the first day when shops came out of the red and thus "went into the black". In the US at that time, a company's losses were recorded in a book with red ink. Profits, in turn, were recorded with black ink.

What is Cyber Monday?

Cyber Monday is the Monday after Black Friday. The main difference between Black Friday and Cyber Monday is that Cyber Monday generally only applies online, where Black Friday applies in both an online and offline shop. Hence the name "cyber". Cyber Monday otherwise does not have a nice backstory like Black Friday does. It is an addition of the big sale weekend, which is a nice catch-up moment for you as a marketer or shop owner.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the Netherlands

The holidays Black Friday and Cyber Monday continue to gain in popularity in the Netherlands. Even in 2022, even more money was spent on these days compared to the previous year. Emerce writes that the growth of Cyber Monday is even higher than the growth of Black Friday! Many consumers know how to find the competitive offers and spend a lot of money.

Consumers are searching massively for Black Friday promotions. In fact, the first (small) peak in the number of keywords around Black Friday takes place as early as the beginning of August. The real, the biggest peak usually starts in October. Over a month before Black Friday actually takes place. So it's time to make some plans for your online shop!

What deals can you expect at Black Friday?

It seems like online shops and retailers go further with Black Friday every year. Discounts of 50 to even 75% are no longer exceptional. Fortunately, you don't have to go that far. Offers like 1+1 free always work too, or give away an extra with every order.

Black Friday is the perfect day for online shoppers to compare shops. So don't miss out on any sales by not participating in Black Friday.

Why run a Black Friday promotion?

Black Friday sounds fun and seems to be hugely rewarding. Yet every year the backlash grows. In 2022, for instance, retail chain Dille en Kamille decided to actually keep its doors closed on Black Friday. Even the webshop went black! Well you can also see this as Black Friday action: at least it got the shop a lot of publicity. ;-)

A day with so many offers and counter offers, why should you, as a webshop, participate in the Black Friday action? We'll give you 3 simple reasons:

You get the chance to clear out your warehouse. Leftovers can be sold at rock-bottom prices. That way, your leftovers still make money!
Discounting inspires confidence in new customers. Not only that, new customers have a positive association with your shop thanks to discount shopping. Tip: use e-mail marketing to build relationships with new customers.
You can sign up for various affiliate websites. This way, you can promote your deals cheaply and get even more new customers.

The ultimate e-commerce guide to Black Friday 2024 - Step by step

Time to get started with a plan de campaign for Black Friday. We'll get you started with the step-by-step plan below!

Step 1: Create a buying/selling analysis

We start at the beginning. What kind of offer are you going to run? Which products are you going to stunt with? Don't make this decision based on a gut feeling. Look at all the data from your webshop. Let the data speak for you in terms of your best-performing products, your worst-performing products, all high-margin products and your lowest-margin products. Make analyses of previous promotions and check with yourself whether this previous promotion is worth including again in your Black Friday promotion.

Will you become a company that cleans out the warehouse on Black Friday? Or will you highlight one product at a very high discount, just to attract as many customers as possible? These are all choices that have to be made. And let's be honest: your Black Friday sales stand or fall with well thought-out promotions.

Step 2: Set up pre-goals for Black Friday

Running a campaign without a goal is always unwise. Without an objective, you have no idea whether you ran a successful Black Friday and whether it was worthwhile. Therefore: set a (SMART) goal for Black Friday as well. Some examples:

The average order value that day is €170 instead of €50
The number of orders tripled in one day
The promotion of the day completely sold out on Black Friday itself
The ROAS (Return On Advertisment Spending) is 150%
The clear-up items for your warehouse sale are at least 70% sold out
Brand X, Y and Z are selling 80% better than on other days
Sales should be high this weekend X

As you can see, Black Friday goals can vary tremendously. This is precisely why it is good to have the goal (or goals) clearly in mind. Only then is it possible for your entire e-commerce team to work efficiently towards this important weekend.

Step 3: Look at your competitors too

Not entirely unimportant: also take a look at your competitors. Keep an eye on what's happening in your industry during Black Friday. Let this inspire you! Take a good look at what your competitors have been doing in recent years and with what discounts. Try to learn from this. Also check when exactly they start advertising around Black Friday. Fair is fair: Pre-Black Friday seems to start earlier every year. Be on time with your plans!

Step 4: Create a Black Friday action list

Compile a list of good actions. The "good" factor depends on the purpose of your Black Friday action. For example, the following items could be on your action list:

Which products do you want to stunt with?
What is the margin on these products? Is there enough space to offer discounts?
What kind of discount do you want to offer? Will you go for a maximum discount immediately, or will you build it up throughout the Black Friday weekend?
Can you just stunt with the prices of specific products? Some suppliers do not allow all promotions just like that. So always get information from your supplier about the target selling price and any room for promotions.
Does your discount only apply on Black Friday, or do you hold a Black Week? What about Cyber Monday?
How will you promote the Black Friday promotion?
When do you start promoting your Black Friday promotion?

As you can see, preparing a successful Black Friday promotion is no easy task. Start planning in good time. Tip: especially get colleagues from the Purchasing, Sales and Marketing departments involved in drawing up the action list. They have answers to the questions of what is possible in terms of margins and what will make the customer happy.

Is everyone in agreement? Great! In that case, it's time to buy in. After all, you don't want to advertise a product that sells out after just one hour.

Step 5. Optional: gamification before or during Black Friday

Playful actions get noticed. Webshops and shops get more creative with Black Friday every year! Gamification is ideally suited for this special day. Think of a Wheel of Fortune on your website. Or work with a new day deal every day. That way, you keep it exciting every day to see which deal comes along today. Make it as fun as possible for your customer!

To increase time on the website, you can put a search action on your website. For example, hide an easteregg. Yes, an easteregg! Not only fun at Easter. ;-) Give customers who have found the easteregg a discount code.

You'll be amazed what customers will do for discounts. In 2021, for example, IKEA had a playful promotion: hand in your old IKEA products to get a discount. In turn, the old IKEA products were placed in the bargain corner, for a second life. Another angle that comes up more often is Green Friday. Here, shops show how sustainable they are. But... Black Friday still remains the most popular.

Step 6. Which channels do you use for (and during) Black Friday?

With Black Friday, you really go all out. Therefore, everyone should know what you are doing on Black Friday. Think carefully about which channels you want to use to promote your Black Friday actions, and when you start this promotion.

Your website
Google Shopping
Google Ads
Social media
Affiliate websites
Email marketing

6.1 Your website

The most important business card: your website. How do you want to position your Black Friday promotion on your website? A banner on the homepage, a pop-up, a landing page or a combination of all of these? Choose a strategic spot on your website for your expressions, where you are sure your message will stand out. For example, use Hotjar, which uses heatmapping to record for you what your visitors are looking at on your website.

In short, important points to think about on your website:

A landing page, where you put all the Black Friday information. With this page, it will be possible at a later stage to re-target the visitors who viewed this page.
A possible separate category where you collect all Black Friday discounts.
Place an (extra) subscription field for your newsletter on a landing page or in a pop-up. This will give you more email addresses to mail, and your customers will be aware of all promotions sooner.
Check via Google PageSpeed Insights whether your webshop loads fast enough. A fast website is greatly appreciated. The benchmark to consider is under 3 seconds per page.

Be ready for the spike that may occur on your website during Black Friday. Check if your website and web server can handle it.

6.2 Google Shopping

Google is a hugely important channel for many webshops. Consumers still use this search engine en masse. As a result, Google Shopping is also used by many more consumers to make their purchases. It is therefore a very smart move to advertise on Google Shopping!

Did you know that you can offer special Google Merchant promotions in Google Shopping? With this feature, your online promotions are displayed in Shopping ads. Users will then see a link with a special offer. With this link, the appeal of your Google Shopping ad is greater and you ultimately boost the click through rate. Are you eligible for Google Merchant Promotions? With Google Merchant promotions, you can include:

Promote discounts (1+1 free, X per cent off or cashback)
Promote free gifts, such as free promo items or gift vouchers

Google Merchant promotions works with your own product feed. You send this to Google once, then it is possible to add your promotions.

6.3 Google Ads

Google Ads is definitely a channel to remember for Black Friday. Everyone wants to rank well on the keywords "Black Friday" from the end of October to the end of November. This makes the keyword extra expensive, considering there is a lot of competition. Therefore, think carefully about how you want to distinguish yourself, so that you can be found properly during Black Friday. Do you want to be found specifically on certain brands or categories? Or on very specific products? Tip: also think about collaborations between different (brand) suppliers. That way, you can get extra exposure cheaply.

What is useful to think about are promotional extensions via Google Ads. Google Ads has various extensions, including the promotion extension. The promotion extension was specially created for special days such as Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, but also Black Friday. When you choose the occasion "Black Friday", all your Google ads are immediately labelled with "Black Friday". This makes the ad super recognizable. This way, website visitors can see at a glance that it is a Black Friday promotion. This makes them more likely to click through visitors.

Through social media, you can reach a different target group than through your Google Ads. It is therefore smart to include these channels. Or, in the best case: make them work together.

Because retargeting your audience is very easy to do with Meta. Customers who previously clicked around on your website, for example, can be retargeted via Facebook and Instagram. A clever example of this is setting up a "coming soon" landing page. You can easily retarget all this traffic later on Facebook and Instagram.

In addition, think about possible collaborations with influencers. The influencer market is getting bigger and bigger, and since 2022 they have had to comply with legislation. This legislation has made promoting articles fairer. Influencers often create recognition, at least among their target audience. It is therefore not a crazy idea to include influencers' faces in your own expressions.

Does your company already have a TikTok account? Then it is not new for you that you can advertise with TikTok. The TikTok Ads Manager makes it easy to create an ad for Black Friday via your laptop. Setting up your ad is a bit like the Facebook Business manager: choose your objective, budget and decide which video/photo you want to show. Add a Call To Action and you're done.

6.5 Affiliate websites

Everyone wants to be highly visible with their webshop during Black Friday. Therefore, there are a host of collectives that gather Black Friday deals on one website. Some examples are:

https://www.blackfridaynederland.nl/deals/
https://www.blackfridaydealz.nl/
https://blackfridaydeals.nu/
https://blackfridaysupersale.nl/black-friday-deals/
https://www.actuele-aanbiedingen.nl/black-friday-aanbiedingen
https://www.blackfridayshoppen.nl/

All these websites are scoring very high in the Google search results with the search term "Black Friday deals". Hardly anyone can beat this. It is therefore smart to "buy in" to these websites. This is called affiliate. You buy in to appear on such a website with your offers. In exchange, the website sprinkles cookies. When a potential customer clicks through to your website from such a website and then makes a purchase, cookie tracking determines that the conversion came from this site. The site in question has set a certain "fee" per transaction to which they are entitled. That is the revenue model of an affiliate website. You have to weigh up for yourself whether this fee can stand up to your conversions.

6.6 Email marketing

Email marketing is also one of the indispensable channels for Black Friday promotion. It is advisable to go wild with your e-mail marketing. Both before, during, and after Black Friday. You know better than anyone that consumers' inboxes are very busy during this period. What is the best way to get the most out of your email marketing?

The easiest way is to plan all communications around Black Friday. An example of such a schedule:

From 1 October: Active pop-up on website to subscribe to newsletter for all Crazy Black Friday deals
16 October: first newsletter announcing Pre-Black Friday (from 13 to 23 November).
23 October: second newsletter; reminder, soon to be Pre-Black Friday. Save the date!
30 October: third newsletter; announcement of first three deals
6 November: urgent newsletter; 1 more week until the Pre-Black Friday sale starts!
11 November: urgent newsletter; countdown to Pre-Black Friday sale
13 to 23 November: Pre-Black Friday sale
13 November: newsletter; the Pre-Black Friday sale has started!
November 23: newsletter; last day Pre-Black Friday sale
24 November: newsletter; Black Friday! Here are all the deals you'll be shopping at a high discount this Black Weekend
25 November: newsletter; Saturday deal Black Weekend
26 November: newsletter; Sunday deal Black Weekend
27 November: newsletter; Cyber Monday

Overall planning for email marketing around Black Friday will get you a long way. Looking for examples of Black Friday marketing campaigns? Later in this blog we will show you best practices from Black Friday.

Step 7: Complete planning for Black Friday

Once you have a clear picture of what you want to do around Black Friday, it's time to map out when you will carry everything out. High time to make a schedule. Tip: make a schedule in Excel or Spreadsheets. Use a number of standard columns for this:

Channel
Duration
Work start date
Delivery date
Responsible
The promotional brand/product
Type of discount
Optional: products on display

When you work in an online document (e.g. in Google Drive), your changes are made live. For example, do you change your task to a certain colour because you finished it? A colleague will see this live. How convenient! Want to build in some extra security for yourself? Then add a feedback session to the document. That way you can be sure that the work you have completed has been viewed and assessed by another colleague.

Step 8: Keep your development team on standby during Black Friday

On a day like Black Friday (and the run-up to it), nothing can go wrong. You simply cannot afford this. It is important that everything runs as smoothly as possible. You are asking a lot from your team, but also from your website. Therefore, be extra alert for mistakes. Arrange with your development team or website manager that there is always someone on standby to help you immediately.

What are things that absolutely must not go wrong during Black Friday? A few examples:

Stocks not being updated on time (or not at all), leading to a lot of backorders that you can't ship out
The wrong prices being uploaded to the website
There is so much traffic that your website is down
Customers can't checkout / check-out is broken
The wrong items are discounted

Step 9: Scale up your customer service during Black Friday

It's the same story every year: during the holidays, there is a huge amount of online ordering. Therefore, if your customers have to wait a long time for their package or have other complaints, they will call. If your customer service department also keeps them waiting, you will have angry customers. Make sure your customer service has enough capacity around this time. It is also important that they are aware of the Black Friday promotions that apply at that time. Should questions about these come in, they can act on them immediately.

Step 10: Listen to your carriers during Black Friday

Often, a PostNL, DHL or another carrier will give certain tips far in advance on how best to logistically handle shipping your parcels. If everyone handles this logistics process well, we all have the best chance of providing our customers with their parcels as quickly as possible. And that in turn means less pressure for your customer service as well as for your carrier. Reason enough to consider your carrier!

Best practices in e-commerce for Black Friday email marketing

Need inspiration for your email marketing around Black Friday? Below you can see and read:

examples of Black Friday emails;
Black Friday e-mail tips
Black Friday email subject lines.

Black Friday email marketing examples

Check out some examples of Black Friday offers from Reloadify customers:

As you can see above, there is no standard template for Black Friday emails. Some make it very clear with one big banner. The other adds a playful video. Anything goes on Black Friday. In Reloadify it is possible to put a countdown timer in your e-mail, which reinforces the sense of urgency. Highly recommended! More tips? Read on!

Pre-Black Friday email strategy tips

Announcing Black Friday is something you want to do early. But really: early. On Black Friday itself, the inbox is flooded with Black Friday offers. With a Pre-Black Friday sale, you get your customer's attention earlier and you can spread the rush on your website and in your warehouse a bit. There are several ways to announce your Pre-Black Friday sale.

1. A "regular" announcement e-mail to sign up for promotions

Not every customer in your customer base is subscribed to the newsletter. Time to take active action on this, before Black Friday starts. Bax Music cleverly capitalises on this, by actively emailing customers who are in their customer base to sign up for the "Early Bird Email", to be the first to benefit from Black Friday deals.

2. Place a discount code in your newsletter

What Drankgigant does very cleverly is offer a discount over a certain range with a discount code. The advantage of this is that you don't have to discount all items. By adding 'the discount code is only valid for a few more days', you create urgency to use the discount code now. Soon it will be too late. This creates extra urgency with your customers.

3. Make it an entire cyber week

Vichy also spreads the rush of Black Friday by stunting the whole week with offers in their "Cyber week". This way, you release the notion of Black Friday a bit and grab the attention of your customers for the whole week.

4. Let customers create an account in advance

Loavies handled it very cleverly. Before Black Friday started, they urged their customers to create an account with them. When you created an account, you were sent a special access ticket on your phone. This ticket gave you earlier access to the Black Friday promotions, so you could be sure that your favourite must have was still there. This is clever in several ways:

Customers create an account with you en masse, which often makes checkout faster.
Profile enrichment to the max: people are even willing to give up their mobile number for the special "early bird ticket".

5. Spread the crowds around Black Friday with a pre-sale

Bargain Drugstore takes a smart approach to spreading the Black Friday crowds. Before Black Friday arrives, they already hold a pre-sale. Through the newsletter, they announce that you can already grab high discounts on the "coming soon" page for Black Friday. Smart for themselves and nice for customers.

6. Black Friday with a giveaway

Mark Bongers takes a very different approach. To attract customers to his online training courses, he stunts a Black Friday action: come to the online training course and win great prizes through the prize wheel. The online training is free, so it's a real win-win situation.

When you link a contest to a purchase, it becomes even more exciting to order from you. You get a high discount and have the chance to win something afterwards.

7. The email with an extension of deals

A typical example that Dekbeddiscounter uses more often: a last-minute extension of deals. It may happen that your customer does not have the opportunity to enjoy Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Play smartly into this by extending your deals at the last minute. Your competitors have already stopped stunting, where you will continue for a while. The email highlights the key points:

Extension of the promotion
2nd + 3rd item free

8. Last chance e-mail

Is Black Friday almost over? Give your customers one last chance by showing them the promotion again. Pig & Hen's email creates extra urgency by clearly stating in the email that:

The promotion only applies today
The promotion is only valid while stocks lastThe message here is very clear: shop now, before it is too late.

9. Give away a gift on Black Friday

Not in a position to offer discounts on your range? Then give away a free gift! That way you will still participate in Black Friday and not miss the boat. Black Friday is the time to reconnect with your customers. Sometimes it is possible to make an agreement with brand owners on this, sometimes you have to be creative with what exactly you can give away. In most cases, offering a free gift is easy to set up in the back-end of your webshop.

10. Pre-Black Friday email with eye-catching images

Festyfashion wanted to stand out extra for the pre-Black Friday sale. A good tip is to use GIFs. GIFs stand out extra and people often enjoy looking at them. The most important information is highlighted: everything under €15. It is clear at a glance what the promotion is.

11. Tailor all your email communications to Black Friday

The very best thing is to tailor all your email communication to Black Friday. Because how nice is it that your customers receive an abandoned shopping cart e-mail in the style of Black Friday? This way, you maintain one style in all your communications. And it stands out even more when your customer abandons a shopping cart.

Black Friday e-mail verlaten winkelwagen

Black Friday and Cyber Monday email subject lines for high conversion rates

Do you find it difficult to come up with subject lines that stand out during Black Friday? We'll get you started with the best email subject lines for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Of course, you want a high open rate and a high conversion rate. The trick is to entice your customer in the header and pre-header. Why should your customer want to click through? Check out subject lines for a high open rate during Black Friday here:

Ready for the Pre-Black Friday Sale?
70% Discount for Black Friday. Open quickly and discover
Sneak peek for Black Friday? Online now!
The discounts you've been waiting for!
Started NOW: Black Friday Sale
Only 6 hours to go before all Black Friday deals are over
50% Discounts for Black Friday + free shipping
Black Friday Alert! Be quick!
Deals, deals, deals! Save now with high discounts
Ready or not: high discounts!
Shop now70% off! What are you waiting for?
Shop 'till you drop with Black Friday sale!
Deal Alert! Black Friday Deals all-over the place
TOP DEALS with Black Friday!
(Name), you don't want to miss these Black Friday Deals
Look and Buy during Black Friday!
BLACK FRIDAY EARLY ACCESS STARTS NOW
Black Friday Week is in full swing!
Pssst... Black Friday Week starts tomorrow!
🔥 CYBER MONDAY DEALS 🔥
Extended due to success: 1 more day of Cyber deals
Black Friday warning: Deals from 9.99 sell out!
Score our great deals now!
How do you feel about 50% off?
Reminder: Black Friday sale is almost over
Surprise! 25% Discount on the entire webshop!
The biggest sale we've ever had! 50% Discount!
Exclusive sneak preview of the Black Friday deals
Black Friday 3-dayScore the top deals now!
50% Discount. Free Shipping! BLACK FRIDAY!
Countdown: 6 more hours to take advantage of Black Friday Deals
Hello, with Black Friday: up to 40% off!
Cyber Monday: 50% off!
OMG! High discounts for Cyber Monday!
Cyber Monday sale!All items at a high discount!
Unlock your exclusive Black Friday Deal now
Biggest sale of the year
Exclusive deals
The clock is ticking, the final hours of Black Friday are upon us

Black Friday and Cyber Monday email subject lines tips

In addition to ready-made subject lines, we have some tips to get extra noticed in your customers' inbox during Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

Make it personal and use the customer's first name in the subject line. Personal emails are more likely to be opened than general emails.

Use a personal sender. Personal contact remains important to consumers. Online, you already see this a lot: chatbots on various websites have a name. For a newsletter, using your sender is a very good method, e.g. 'Tom from Reloadify'. The most optimal combination is a personal name with your company name. For example, Billie is the face of Bol.com.

Use emojis to stand out. 🔥 For quite a while, it has been trendy to put different emojis in the subject line. Think hearts, hourglasses, eyes and suns. It's a great way to stand out, but don't overdo it. If you use too many emojis, it detracts from your name and your customers will take you less seriously. And you don't want that.

Make use of A/B testing during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Especially if you are talking about your subject line, this will pretty much determine your open rate. Experiment with different subject lines and find out which variant produces the most results for your webshop. With the results of the A/B test, you can certainly get to know your target group better and learn from this for next year.

Important: stay connected even after Black Friday and Cyber Monday

What many companies forget is to turn your holiday shoppers into regular customers. Get some feedback after the holidays. Make sure your customers don't forget you and stay top of mind. You do this by actively continuing to e-mail your customers and seeking engagement on social media, for example. It would be a shame to have worked so hard and for it to remain a one-off.

After reading this blog, you will be ready to pop on Black Friday.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Checklist: get your webshop ready