10+ Black Friday Marketing Strategies to Get a Week’s Worth of Sales

You’ve surely come across countless Black Friday marketing strategies before you got here.

So, let me say right off the bat:

The strategies here are based on the answers given to that million-dollar question: “What makes you buy on Black Friday?”. So we’re going to talk about real things that attract customers.

Without further ado, here are the best Black Friday marketing strategies for 2024.

Black Friday marketing strategies: how to pick

Yeah, choosing the best Black Friday strategies is important. But how do you do that?

To choose, we need a Black Friday marketing strategy that focus on the reasons influencing customers’ decisions to purchase. The best way to learn them is to ask shoppers that million-dollar question, of course.

Thankfully, somebody did that job for us. Here are the answers:

Although these reasons to buy may sound all too familiar, there are many different Black Friday marketing strategies to target them with.

To narrow down our selection, we’ll base our strategies on:

• Easy navigation for easy shopping

• Time-limited sales that generate urgency (like flash sales)

• Promos (discounts, free shipping, minimum purchase, etc.)

Black Friday Marketing Strategies

1. Define your goals before starting

2. Build the “early access” email list

3. Boost product re-engagement with AI

4. Offer a “Deal of the Hour”

5. Offer targeted discounts

6. Use Black Friday spin wheel

7. Use minimum purchase promo

8. Try countdown timers for limited-time promos 

9. Add new products just before Black Friday

10. Reduce shipping cart abandonment

11. Share shipping times and customer support links

1. Define your goals before starting

Let’s start with a prep tip—

The Black Friday period is nothing but calm, so having clear goals in mind will help you stay focused.

For example, you might want to:

• Make 100 sales

• Get 50 loyalty program sign ups

• Generate 500 more email leads

Defining a goal (or multiple) also is something best performers do because they define the Black Friday marketing strategies to achieve them. Example: a timed sales promotion is perfect for getting sales while coupons work to get both emails and sales.

2. Build the “early access” email list

The “early access” list includes subscribers who will get the first access to your Black Friday deals via emails. To get as many emails as possible, start building the list a few weeks before with a special popup campaign.

That email popup would build anticipation by giving early access to deals, discounts, etc.—like this one below:

And then—

This one about a week before Black Friday, to increase the sense of urgency:

When Black Friday is close, you can send a special email to those who subscribed. There, include a discount code and a link to the early access deals. Or you can give them some exclusive discounts—up to you.

Here’s an example of such an email from PRESS Foods.

If you need a popup app recommendation to start getting leads—

Try Wisepops.

It integrates with all popular email apps (Omnisend, Klaviyo, etc.), so you’ll be able to send “early access” leads directly into your email app. Check out examples of businesses using Wisepops.

Here’s one example of a popup created with Wisepops:

You can sign up in minutes and test popups on your website for 14 days for free:

Zero commitment, no cc needed

No cc needed, free trial. Learn more about AI Wishlist

4. Offer a “Deal of the Hour”

This Black Friday marketing strategy will help you make those “too-good-to-pass-up” deals we’ve talked about earlier.

Here’s the drill:

Make a special campaign with a new deal for every hour on Black Friday.

The “deal” can be anything: a VIP discount, a free gift, a product category discount, or anything else. This way, you can get customers to return to your store multiple times during the day.

Like this one, offering a deal on a specific product:

Another variation of this Black Friday marketing tactic:

Offer a VIP offer for newsletter subscribers for those who missed your main offer (for one hour):

And one more variation of this Black Friday marketing campaign idea (this time, we reduce the time from one hour to just ten minutes):

“Deal of the Hour” might sound like a hard Black Friday marketing strategy, especially given that you will have to pre-make all the deals and publish them.

But—

It’s actually pretty easy to do.

Example:

You can share the deals with Black Friday popups. All you have to do is choose a Black Friday template, copy it, and customize the offers in each campaign version.

Scheduling the “Deal of the Hour” is also pretty straightforward. In Wisepops, for example, you just need to choose the time zone, campaign launch, and end date. The whole thing takes a few clicks.

How to define the start and end time: Frequency settings

5. Offer targeted discounts

A traditional practice says you need to offer discounts to everyone.

But we want our customers to feel special, don’t we? So, let’s take this strategy one step further—

We can personalize our discount types and sizes for different groups of visitors.

Example: a 30% discount might work best for first-time visitors while a $30 discount in a bundle with free shipping could appeal more to repeated customers.

Here’s an example of a discount popup campaign for new customers:

Here's a guide: how to create discount popups.

And 20 discount code ideas.

Now, let's take this Black Friday marketing strategy even further.

If you're using Shopify, you can show targeted popups with discounts based on:

• The customer's first and last name

• The value of the products a customer has in the cart

• How much a customer has already spent in your online store

• The number of days since the last purchase made by a specific customer

And much more.

This is easily done with Shopify properties in popup apps. For example, you can easily make such campaigns in Wisepops:

Learn more about built-in Shopify properties.

Besides popups, Onsite notifications are one more effective way to share targeted discounts.

They are essentially a feed with promo messages for websites. Here's how it looks like on OddBalls, one of the UK's most popular underwear brands:

Read more about: OddBalls onsite marketing campaign study

Or check out what onsite notifications can do:

6. Use Black Friday spin wheel

You can use a spin-to-win wheel or other gamification campaign (see examples of gamified popups) to distribute discounts, coupons, vouchers, and other incentives to encourage visitors to buy. It’s a nice way to gamify the shopping experience and make it more engaging for your customers.

Here’s a template for this campaign.

To engage more visitors with a spin the wheel popup:

• Require only email or name+email

• Add the campaign to pages with the most traffic, e.g. homepage

• Give away different prizes (free shipping, discount codes, free products)

7. Use minimum purchase promo

This Black Friday marketing strategy is easy: offer a free gift with a minimum purchase. 

The free product could be:

• Inexpensive one for you to get

• Popular products that your customers buy often

• Items that need regular replenishment (like cosmetics and self-care)

This way, you will motivate people to make purchases and make them feel good about shopping. That’s why online businesses use this promo strategy for many occasions. 

For example, here’s Blume using it for a weekend birthday sale with a welcome popup:

If you’d like to surprise your shoppers with a cool way of letting them know about your minimum purchase promos, try the onsite notification feed.

It’s a social media-like feed for engaging visitors with promo messages.

Here’s the feed looks on Pedego Harlem—as you can see, it’s full of different promotions! That’s great because the visitors to get all this information in one place:

8. Try countdown timers for limited-time promos 

A countdown timer is a fantastic way to communicate urgency for time-limited deals—those that convince 36% of online shoppers to buy.  So, it’s perfect to add to the list of your Black Friday marketing strategies.

You can add timers to your website popups like that…

… or like that (taken from Priority Bicycles, another campaign made with Wisepops)…

…and to your emails like that. 

Zero commitment, unlimited free trial

9. Add new products just before Black Friday

Fact: customers are always excited about new arrivals.

Why not use that excitement to sell by adding new products to your store? Do that just before—or even during—Black Friday. This way, your ecommerce store will be even more enticing to customers looking for the best deals.

Promote your new products on your website but also in emails sent before the event begins. Here’s how Vessi does that.

10. Reduce shopping cart abandonment

You need as many good ways to prevent abandoned carts as possible.

That’s where exit intent popups come into play. Thanks to exit detection technology, they can catch visitors right before they leave—giving you one more chance to prevent a lost sale.

Let’s see an example of an exit intent popup. This one below has a discount, but you can also make it into a simple, “hey-you-forgot-your-goods” reminder if the customer has already applied discounts.

Recover abandoned carts with a reliable exit-intent detection technology:

11. Share shipping times and customer support links

Buying gifts for family and friends is a popular reason to shop: an average Black Friday shopper spent $224.48 directly on gifts last year.

Knowing shipping times is important because… well, people need to know if they arrive on time for special occasions, family gatherings, and so on. Needless to say, your support team will be quite busy, so you need to give them as much help as you can.

Share links to customers’ FAQs and shipping time updates on your website in prominent places. Faguo uses this popup below to help customers find pages with info on product returns and order tracking.

Black marketing strategies: the bottom line

So—

Pick your goals, the Black Friday marketing strategies, and stick to them. This way, you’ll be focused and have a clear way of measuring how well you perform.

I hope this post helped you get started on preparing Black Friday marketing strategies. I am rooting for you!