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As a marketer, Black Friday has likely been on your radar for months—and you have countless strategy meetings on your calendar to prove it. But before you get executive-level approval for your plan, we’d like to pass on some valuable insights for gift-giving season. After all, the stakes are high: Last year, online retailers in the U.S. alone racked up almost $10 billion in sales—and that figure is likely to go up this November.

Few know Black Friday better than Director of Enablement Maya Gorlicki. Approaching her seventh Black Friday at Dynamic Yield by Mastercard, she has worked alongside countless brands to craft battle-tested personalization strategies for major seasonal events.

Here are her best practices, which readily apply to many industries beyond retail this holiday season:

JR: What should brands pay special attention to this Black Friday? 

Maya: The window for Black Friday seems to be getting wider every year. Some retailers offer early access to sales on certain items, and price drops happen a lot sooner than in prior years. You may want to factor in a longer timeline as you build out your seasonal campaigns.

How can brands use the data and insights they gleaned from last Black Friday to set a good foundation for their campaigns this year?

Start sleuthing to find where most of your traffic comes from—social media, paid ads, wherever. You’ll gain a sense of your best performing channels and where you come up short. Plan to invest most of your efforts where you are already performing.

You should also examine your personalization campaigns. Identify your top performers from last year, further refine what worked, and experiment where you can improve.

Pay close attention to these KPIs:

• Average session time: How deeply are customers engaging with your site?
• Average page views: Are your customers researching or purchasing?
• Average order value: Are customers responding to any free shipping thresholds or product bundles you’ve created?
• Purchases per user: Are customers responding to personalized product recommendations and other cross-sell opportunities?

When building out a personalization strategy, we recommend starting with audience segmentation. How do seasonal events like Black Friday affect audience strategy and what tweaks should marketers make to their approach?

To create effective audiences, you need a holistic picture of your customer—and that applies year-round. Put the infrastructure in place now to better understand your customer journey going forward. If you have an offline retail presence, try to bridge in-store and eCommerce experiences. Loyalty programs allow you to make online product recommendations based on in-store purchases, and/or you can upload offline CRM data into your personalization engine.

During the year, your site visitors typically shop for themselves, but when the holiday season rolls around, they’re often looking for gifts for their friends and family. A personalization approach based on long-term data will be less effective for this audience.

That said, almost half of millennials buy for themselves on Black Friday, and they made up the largest share of online shoppers (43%) in 2023. Plus, there are certain products and big ticket-items like appliances that most purchasers buy for themselves. You can still use your year-round personalization strategy to target these returning site visitors.

How do you recommend marketers consider these customer nuances?

Black Friday attracts more site visitors than any other time of the year. Use this as an opportunity to gather as much zero-party data as possible. You can roll out a quiz that asks for preferences upfront and if they’re shopping for someone else. You can also engage customers with a personal AI assistant like Shopping Muse, which initiates a conversation and captures their intent.

Consider sending return visitors an email that asks them to double-check their preferences and note whether they’ll be shopping for someone else this go-around. From there, marketers can personalize offers, content, and products accordingly and tailor their campaigns to optimize for the most relevant KPIs.

If a site visitor is shopping for someone else this season, you can segment them into a temporary audience that deprioritizes personalized recommendations based on affinity and focuses more on short-term site behavior instead. Gift shoppers tend to have high bounce and low engagement. One way to keep them on the site is an attention-grabbing overlay with reviews and testimonials when they show exit intent. This can help them feel confident that they’re grabbing the perfect gift and drive them back down the marketing funnel.

A personalized exit popup offering a limited time offer after detecting potential site abandonment.

Knowing that consumers are likely facing choice overload and getting dozens of emails and texts around this time of year, what can brands do to reach customers without pushing them away? 

Brands should empathize with their customers: As campaigns and promotions fill up customers’ inboxes and messaging apps, they’ll likely feel overwhelmed. If you send out too many messages across too many channels, customers will unsubscribe. To reduce over-communication, implement a channel prioritization strategy.

How else can customers cut through the noise and make their messages stand out?

Customers feel a greater sense of urgency during the holidays. With a typical personalization strategy, you would gradually move customers toward conversion over time, but a seasonal shopper can traverse the customer journey all in the same day. It’s important to deliver what they want quickly.

For Black Friday, countdown timers that show the timeline of a sales event can help convert more holiday shoppers, both on your website and in your email campaigns. I’d also recommend using badges with messaging like “best seller” or “most loved” for products that are selling fast. And for those who are on the fence about a certain item, you can send a price drop SMS message or email to build a greater sense of FOMO.

Two countdown timers indicating the start of a Black Friday sale and an early-access VIP Black Friday sale respectively.

As the holiday season continues, one of the best things marketers can do is to generate urgency around shipping. If a customer has abandoned a cart full of products, or has been looking at a product recently, brands can trigger an email send that notifies them that a shipping deadline is approaching, and their desired items won’t show up in time if they wait to purchase. If a shipping deadline has already passed, brands can also use geolocation data to offer an in-store pickup option.

What are some takeaways from Black Friday for industries that may not have as much of a seasonal push?

I think the Black Friday approach can still apply for other industries, with a few contextual differences and caveats. Marketers in FI should use this moment to collect as much zero-party data as possible, since big holiday spenders are likely to apply for credit cards so they can fund their purchases. Grocery brands can still drive urgency for holiday meals by using product badges to highlight when a particular food item is low in stock or popular. And personalized, triggered emails and texts around price drops could easily slot into a travel company’s personalization strategy—especially as people book accommodations for the holidays.

Make the Most of the Holiday Season This Year

With Black Friday just around the corner, brands should give their personalization strategy a kick of the tires today. They can start by analyzing data from last year’s performance, segmenting gift buyers from repeat customers, and catering to customers’ seasonal shopping behaviors—be it through personalized shipping offers, countdown timers, or timely messaging. Brands who get this right have an opportunity to turn the Black Friday flood of traffic into a steady stream of loyal customers.