Happy Sunday, Everyone!

I hope you’re all enjoying the last few days of November (hard to believe we’re a week away from December) and getting ready to spend some wonderful days with friends, family or just relaxing. That is, unless you work in eComm…then your Thanksgiving is really just BFCM prep with a heaping helping of excess calories.

Black Friday–Cyber Monday isn’t just a retail event. It’s a behavioral anomaly - a four-day capitalistic bloodbath (now increasingly a ten-day window) where every “traditional” rule of marketing goes out the window. For a fleeting few days, consumer intent compresses, competitive messaging saturates every possible channel, acquisition costs spike and the entire digital ecosystem shifts into an accelerated, distorted mode that defies conversion, logic and reason.

In other words, it’s four of the most fun days of the year.

To treat BFCM like a holiday sale is to fundamentally misunderstand the game.

Typical brands approach it with shallow tactics - sitewide discounts, heavier budgets, more emails - and a vague sense of optimism that “the weekend will take care of itself.”

But great brands - the ones that ultimately win BFCM (from a revenue, margin, customer acquisition & LTV standpoint) - operate using a completely different playbook.

The best way I can describe it: those brands treat the weekend as a liquidity event. As an asymmetric opportunity where customer demand increases so intensely that the constraints are neither competition nor CPMs, but the structural maturity of your business.

Put another way: BFCM is the rare time where demand is near-infinite. And, for that reason, great brands don’t improvise during BFCM; they execute a system with the precision of a Russian ballet.

I understand there are precious few days between now and BFCM. For most brands, the proverbial cake is baked - your offers are your offers. Your creative is commissioned. Your tech stack is what it is. That all being said, the opportunity for brands during this weekend is so monumental that even if you only take a few points from this guide and execute them over the next few days, the payoff can be immense.

This is one of the more comprehensive resources I’ve ever written. It’s a compilation of the multi-dimensional strategy, financial modeling, creative frameworks, operational planning and expected-value decision-making used by the best-performing brands I’ve worked with over the years. And while this is explicitly written for DTC/eComm brands, many of the lessons and ideas here are broadly applicable to the B2B context or B2C lead generation.

My approach to BFCM starts with one counter-intuitive premise: BFCM is won not through bigger discounts or more expensive promotions, but rather via a more intelligent, more integrated, more operationally disciplined system.

Why the Rules of Consumer Behavior Break (and What It Means for Your Strategy)

Every BFCM strategy must begin with acknowledging a critical truth: Consumers do not behave normally during BFCM. Every foundational assumption about how buyers move through your funnel should be thrown out the window. This is not a normal time. Your business-as-usual playbook will not work.

During BFCM:

1. Conversion Windows Collapse:

The typical discovery → consideration/comparison → validation → purchase journey shrinks from days to hours (or, with time-limited offers or last-minute drops, mere minutes). From a marketing perspective, this means:

• Retargeting windows shrink
• Multi-touch journeys shorten
• Attribution models go haywire
• Last-touch attribution looks spectacular
• Creative clarity matters more than creative storytelling

2. Competitive Sets Increase:

The paradox of BFCM is that while the consideration time collapses, the number of competing alternatives increases. The best way I can describe it is that consumers carry around a “mental cart” during BFCM: a mix of your products alongside competitors’ alongside wildly different alternatives. Your brand isn’t competing against one or two alternatives - you’re competing against dozens of sometimes-insane promotions in massively different categories, all while your audience tries to figure out what to buy for themselves, their loved ones and/or their colleagues/friends.

The saving grace of BFCM is that your audience’s pocketbook also increases - consumers will often spend more in this 4-day stretch than they would in entire months.

3. Inbox Saturation Peaks:

Email is no longer a channel - it’s a battleground. Every brand a user has ever interacted with resurrects itself to try for a piece of pie. You name it, they show back up: non-profits, local businesses, brands you bought from 10 years ago and unsub’d from shortly thereafter, alumni networks, random marketplaces, SaaS tools, credit card companies - you name it, they find an excuse to show up in the inbox.

Practically, this means you should be sending A LOT more email than you think – simply because doing so is a numbers game: the more of your emails that hit your audience’s inbox, the higher the probability that they actually see one.

4. Auction Dynamics Detach From Normal Logic:

As marketers, we’ve become accustomed to the fact that digital ad markets operate under relatively constant rules – all things being equal, each impression is more expensive than the last. As you scale, your expected cost per acquisition increases. Volume + efficiency tend to move in opposite directions. But during BFCM, those rules break. Yes, CPMs will explode - but conversion probability increases faster - the net result being that while CPMs are sky-high, your expected value per impression is HIGHER during BFCM than it is during the rest of the year. Put another way: you’ll pay 5x more for the impression, but it’s worth 7x. You still come out ahead, even if your CFO has sticker shock.

This creates unique conditions where:

• Higher cost still yields higher ROI
• Incremental spend can remain efficient at scale
• Spend ceilings are far higher than normal
• ROAS declines on a micro basis but rises on a blended macro basis

5. Attribution Systems Go Haywire:

Modeled conversions swing wildly. Branded search skyrockets. CAC appears “broken” on some channels and “miraculous” on others.

This is not a data breakdown - it’s essentially mass psychosis. Most attribution models are trained based on years of data - 99.5% of which occurs on days that are NOT BFCM. Yes, some models try to adjust, but most are bad at it.

The reality is this: your customers are not behaving the way your models assume they will. Buying cycles are orders of magnitude shorter. Traditional journey points (i.e. comparisons, reviews) are ignored in favor of last-minute deals. Friends and colleagues share details of their favorite/”best” offers via text, Slack, group chat, IG messenger, whatever.

6. Operational Constraints = Financial Constraints:

Inventory, fulfillment reliability, site speed and customer support capacity become direct drivers of contribution margin. If your website crashes for even a few minutes, your BFCM strategy collapses. If your shipping timelines are unclear/uncertain, consumers move on to other brands (remember that mental shopping list from above?). If you’re out of stock, consumers go elsewhere.

BFCM is a commercial distortion field. If you approach it like a normal week, you will lose; if you build a strategy designed to exploit each of these oddities, you’ll extract disproportionate value. It’s really that simple.

The Almighty Offer

Most brands think “offer” = “discount.” That’s the lowest-resolution version of value you can provide. Great brands build offers like portfolios: multiple dimensions of value, all designed to maximize expected return.

The offers that tend to “win” create value across four primary axes:

1. Economic Value:

Discounts matter, but blanket discounting is lazy and often wildly expensive to the broad. Better brands use:

• Tiered incentives (“Spend $150, get 30%”)
• Category-specific offers/deals
• Bundle pricing
• Limited-Time Offers/Limited Drops
• Free Gift With Purchase
• High-margin upsells
• Rebates or future credits
• Gift Cards

If you’re curious about other offers you can deploy that will both appeal to customers AND make your CFO smile, check out this article.

2. Experience Value:

Let’s just be honest - the holidays are high stress and high stakes. No-one wants to be the person whose gift doesn’t show up, or who is frantically running around on Christmas Eve for a last-minute gift because the one they bought was still out-of-stock. To that end, BFCM shoppers deeply value:

• Free shipping
• Expedited shipping upgrades
• Extended returns
• “Guaranteed holiday delivery”
• Frictionless checkout

These often create more perceived value than discounts themselves.

3. Future Value:

BFCM is an ideal moment to deepen the relationship beyond the initial transaction. High-intent periods like this lower the psychological friction required to commit to longer-term relationships with a brand - especially when the “ask” is positioned as part of the value exchange rather than an upsell. It’s the moment when consumers are actively primed to say yes if the commitment feels like a bonus rather than a burden.

This is where subscription, auto-replenishment, trial programs or loyalty enrollment shine:

• A shopper who’s already mentally anchored to your BFCM pricing is far more likely to view ongoing replenishment as “locking in value”
• A customer who just discovered your brand is disproportionately likely to opt into a small trial, sample set or onboarding bundle because the perceived risk is lower during promotional periods
• First-time buyers who join your SMS or email programs at checkout immediately become higher-LTV assets because you’ve secured a persistent, permissioned communication channel at the very moment their interest is the highest.

These future-value elements compound. They increase the probability that you will turn a one-time BFCM buyer (who may otherwise disappear until next year) into a repeat purchaser with predictable revenue potential. They also generate downstream revenue at almost no incremental acquisition cost, which directly improves the blended CAC and contribution margin of your BFCM cohort. In a weekend where margins are often under pressure, future value is one of the cleanest ways to counterbalance the immediate economics of discounting.

4. Emotional Value:

Scarcity, exclusivity, early access and limited-time SKUs are deeply persuasive during BFCM.

Notice what’s missing? Percentage-off fixation. Discounts are one ingredient, not the entire dish.

The brands that extract disproportionate value during BFCM are the ones that add value at each level above, not just the economic one. While most marketing people will tell you to discount more, my advice to brands during BFCM is to discount less (or, at a bare minimum, to discount differently). BFCM does not have to be a race to rock-bottom prices.

The Tech Infrastructure: More Brands Should Use Identity Resolution

Identity resolution is one of the most misunderstood technologies in eComm, yet it’s quietly one of the most powerful. At a technical level, it works by leveraging unique identifiers from otherwise-anonymous website sessions (think: partial email hashes, device IDs, IP-to-household mappings, browser signatures, and behavioral fingerprints). These identifiers are then matched against an identity graph (a continuously updated database containing millions of consumer profiles, each tied to known attributes like name, email, phone number, postal address, demographic information and household-level data).

When the identity graph recognizes enough matching signals, the anonymous visitor becomes a known contact - and the brand suddenly has the ability to treat that visitor as an addressable individual rather than a transient, unremarkable session. Deterministic matches (like MAIDs or hashed emails) provide high confidence. Probabilistic matches (like device + location + IP + behavioral patterns) provide scale. The best identity platforms blend both, resolve matches in milliseconds and push enriched profiles into your ESP, CRM and/or ad platforms immediately.

It sounds crazy (and often, too good to be true) - but it’s not. A visitor shops your BFCM lander, checks out the non-stick cookware bundle and leaves. Your Identity Resolution platform identifies the user + what page s/he visited, sends the data to your ESP and enrolls that user in a re-engagement flow for the cookware bundle. Less than 10 minutes after the user left your site, there’s an email in his/her inbox for the bundle s/he just viewed, along with a special “bonus” offer, expedited shipping, $25 gift card for another purchase, whatever.

To the customer, it feels both cool and creepy. For the brand, it’s recovered revenue.

This matters because over 95% of website visitors are anonymous, even on high-intent days like BFCM. You pay for the traffic, but once they leave, those users effectively disappear. Identity resolution breaks this pattern.

In most cases, the technology can reveal 30–50% of these “invisible” visitors. That may not sound wildly impressive, but even at the low-end, the economics are wildly impressive. Most decent eComm brands will have a revenue per email sent of $0.75 to $1.05 (obviously varying based on industry). BFCM traffic will be 20,000+ visitors for a small-to-mid-7 figure eComm brand; for 9-figure brands, that number is likely in the millions. 30% of 20,000 = 6,000 IDs. Send 3 emails to each at $1.00 RPS, and you’ve added $15k+ in “recovered” new customer revenue. $15k might not sound impressive, but over 4 days = $60k. That could be the brand’s entire December ad spend.

One of the reasons I’m bullish on ID resolution is because it creates leverage for businesses on multiple levels: remarketing becomes cheaper because you’re not relying on expensive in-platform retargeting alone. Lifecycle marketing becomes more effective because you can trigger specific flows - abandoned browse, product education, offer reinforcement - based on the exact pages those visitors viewed. Audience building becomes easier because you can enroll known-but-not-yet-purchased visitors into nurtures, direct mail and platform lookalike audiences.

The economics become even more compelling during BFCM because the cost of each visitor skyrockets, which makes the value of each ID increase. If everyone is paying a premium for traffic, the brands that win are the ones that maximize the value of each visitor. This is one way to do that. Instead of reacquiring the same user five times at inflated holiday CPMs, you can reach them directly by email at almost no incremental cost.

At scale, this reshapes BFCM economics.

It reduces effective CAC because more traffic becomes re-engageable. It increases conversion probability because more shoppers receive post-visit reminders. It lifts revenue because offers become more contextually targeted. It stabilizes efficiency because your most expensive traffic becomes your most monetizable audience.

During hyper-competitive periods like BFCM, identity resolution becomes the difference between paying for traffic once and paying for it repeatedly. The brands that win BFCM aren’t the ones who generate the most sessions. They’re the ones who extract the most value from every session.

Creative: Clarity Is Your Competitive Advantage

Creative that performs during the rest of the year fails during BFCM because the context changes - people aren’t going through a normal process. They aren’t operating on week-long decision timelines. They’re frantically trying to get everything on their list before the deals run out (or the kids wake up). Creative designed to work in a traditional context is unlikely to work in a non-traditional context.

BFCM buyers aren’t leisurely evaluating a brand - they’re scanning, skimming, tabbing and triaging dozens of inputs in a compressed time window. From the brand’s perspective, the creative’s job isn’t to inspire interest or build narrative; it’s to accelerate decision-making. The brands that understand this dramatically outperform those that don’t.

From all the data I’ve seen, the one fundamental truth of BFCM creative is this: the ads that win are brutally direct.

On a practical level, that entails several things: the offer, product and value are front-and-center, with zero ambiguity. Narrative flourishes are eliminated and replaced with relevant particulars (discount amount, value, shipping timelines, current stock), communicated in a rapid, cognitively efficient format. The best BFCM ads use similar principles to high-performance UX: fast recognition, high contrast, obvious value transfer and immediate clarity on why whatever it is you’re selling meets the user’s need better than the 14 other tabs open on their phone.

This is why so many creative teams fail during BFCM: they optimize for aesthetic differentiation rather than processing efficiency.

A beautiful ad that requires five seconds to interpret is a liability when the shopper is giving you two seconds or less. A clever headline that requires reflection loses to a blunt one that lands instantly. A visually stunning ad will lose to the simple one that telegraphs value the moment it appears. During BFCM, ads don’t win because they’re pretty; they win because they’re cognitively easy to interpret + evaluate. Most creatives hate it, but as a marketer, your job is to serve your audience. In this context, that means making it easy for them to evaluate what you’re offering.

The operational side of creative is equally important.

BFCM accelerates creative fatigue far faster than most teams anticipate. The deadly combination of wildly higher spend and higher frequency combine to burn out even strong ads within hours, not days. Brands accustomed to weekly or biweekly creative updates suddenly find themselves stuck with stale assets in the most competitive auction environment of the year. High performers counter this with an entirely different creative operating cadence: multiple new variants per day, rapid kill/scale rules, hourly performance reviews (more on the war room later) and an obsessive focus on protecting top performers before they fatigue.

And the best brands go one step further: they segment creative by behavioral + emotional state, not by demographics or top-level audiences. As an example: a low-funnel audience might be served hyper-functional messaging that pushes the offer and eliminates doubt. Mid-funnel audiences will be served trust/social proof and product specificity. High-intent product viewers get SKU-level offers/specifics based on what they browsed. High-probability gifters (i.e. women who are browsing a menswear page) are served social proof from other women who purchased, along with free gift wrapping. This is where identity resolution and creative strategy converge: the more you know about the visitor, the more precisely you can tailor the creative to their unique situation.

The underlying principle is simple but critically overlooked: during BFCM, creative is not the wrapper around the offer - it is part and parcel with the offer. It’s the first moment where the value you’re offering becomes intelligible to your audience, which makes it the first point at which the shopper can decide whether to continue or move on. In a high-intent, high-competition environment, the brands that articulate value fastest win.

The Post-Click Experience

Most brands lose money during BFCM not because their offer is weak or their paid media is underperforming, but because their landers are fundamentally misaligned with the psychology of the moment. Put another way: sending high-intent traffic to a generic /shop or /sale page is the digital equivalent of sending someone into a warehouse with a flashlight and hoping they find what they came for.

BFCM is defined by overload and urgency. Ambiguity is the enemy. When you send people to a page that requires a significant amount of processing (review dozens of product tiles), followed by a minimum of four clicks (one to a PDP, another to add to cart, a third to start checkout, a fourth to check out) to get to a purchase, you’re kneecapping yourself in the worst possible way.

If you want to maximize throughput and conversion rates (which has the nice side effect of minimizing acquisition costs), you’ll need purpose-built landers engineered to shorten decision time and minimize friction. Each core offer/bundle should have (at least) 1 dedicated lander (ideally 2-3 of different types - if you’re not sure which ones to use, check out this article to find your perfect match…because the title has Hitch in it…get it?) that is tightly aligned to the creative you’re putting in market.

These pages aren’t “themed versions” of your existing PDPs or generic collection pages. They’re strategically designed, self-contained experiences that reduce complexity: a clear articulation of the offer, the specific SKU(s) being promoted in your creative, prominent trust / social proof signals, shipping details, some light psychological manipulation (countdown timers, limited stock, number of people shopping this offer, whatever) and relevant upsells tailored to the specific offer (i.e. if you’re selling non-stick pans, you might include a relevant upgrade for a gorgeous wooden cutting board or some Damascus steel knives).

The reason these pages work so well is simple: it responds to the fact that your visitors aren’t browsing - they’re triaging. They have dozens of tabs open. They’re comparing products, pricing, shipping - all while skimming reviews, evaluating competing offers and dealing with kids/family/guests/Thanksgiving cleanup. In that context, every bit of friction - every unnecessary click, every required scroll, every unclear offer, every dead-end - directly translates to lost revenue. A dedicated BFCM landing environment strips away that friction and replaces it with the two things shoppers want most: clarity and simplicity.

Brands that dramatically out-perform during BFCM often create multiple BFCM-specific landing pages: 2-3 core BFCM offer pages per hero offer. A gift-guide-driven experience for gifters. A few bundle-focused landing pages designed to lift AOV on lower-volume/lower-margin SKUs. Creator-focused pages for audiences driven by influencer partnerships. Each one is tuned to a different behavioral pathway and acquisition source. This allows the brand to align the post-click experience to the ads – which is one of the easiest ways to increase conversion rates.

The lander is one of those widely-acknowledged-but-often-underutilized tactics for improving BFCM performance. Even a modest 10% - 20% lift in CVR (most LPs will do 2-3x that) will result in $50k+ incremental revenue for a small brand, and 20x that for a larger brand.

If you’re looking for more details on what makes a great lander, check out this article.

Send More Email If You Want To Win

Every year, brands make the same mistake: they approach BFCM with the belief that email frequency should be managed to avoid subscriber fatigue. That model is rooted in the behavioral patterns of normal weeks, where inbox competition is moderate, attention is fickle but manageable and brands can rely on relevance and their existing “relationship” with the recipient to drive opens/clicks/sales. Most brands have this down to a science: we send X emails per month, and that drives a very predictable $Y in revenue.

BFCM is not a normal week.

It is the single most competitive inbox environment of the year. The best metaphor might be a high-velocity barrage where every brand the customer has ever interacted with (and many they haven’t) starts peppering their inbox offering everything and the kitchen sink. Don’t take my word for it - go look at your inbox from last November. I maintain an inbox just for promotional emails. I received 7,820 emails from 11/26 - 12/2/2024. That’s 20x more than a “normal” week.

If economics teaches us anything, it’s that when demand (number of emails being sent) spikes and supply (your audience’s attention) decreases, the expected value of each email declines. Your audience is overwhelmed. Inundated. They’re shopping, comparing, hosting, thinking, dealing with screaming kids, trying to get to their next event – all while their inbox is blowing up.

The risk is no longer fatiguing your audience; the risk is being invisible.

The best-performing brands send 6, 8, 10+ emails per day during BFCM. That volume is a recognition of the inbox reality during this time. When a shopper wakes up on Black Friday, their inbox is chock-full of promotions. Your first email is no longer competing with five or ten others; it’s competing with hundreds. Every hour, dozens (maybe hundreds) more arrive. Your email - the one that would ordinarily be in the top-50 on gmail for a day or more - is buried in an hour.

The only countermeasure is frequency: repeated, strategically varied touchpoints that catapult your brand back to the top of your audience’s inbox, giving you another shot at being seen.

The way to do this isn’t to simply send more of the same emails; it’s to engineer email velocity. Most of the brands we work with do this in waves: early-morning clarity messaging, mid-day highlights, afternoon inventory updates, evening last-call reminders and late-night “final hours” lifts. Each email serves a different psychological function: informing, reminding, guiding, reassuring, pushing. The variance keeps the email fresh and the relevance (tying emails to both our business + the audience’s needs) increases the probability of a purchase. If you want to get fancy, map your sends to some of the “lull” moments during Black Friday & Cyber Monday – the 10 am / 11 am hour, mid-afternoon, dinnertime, etc. – you’ll maximize your chances of being seen and avoid being one of a hundred during the morning deluge.

The second misconception about BFCM email is that the content must remain uniform. Your audience doesn’t want eight identical reminders (in fairness, they might read 2 of them). Where you (as a brand) can add disproportionate value is helping your audience navigate the chaos. A gifter wants curated lists. A loyal buyer wants early access, better deals or reassurance that what they buy will show up before Christmas. A new subscriber wants education wrapped around urgency. And everyone wants clarity on shipping, availability and the offer. The more you can tailor each message to the audience receiving it (segmentation is your friend), the higher the probability that it’ll catch the eye/attention of the recipient.

The economics of email during BFCM are what make it non-negotiable. Paid traffic is at its annual peak in cost. If you’re paying a premium for acquisition, it is irrational to rely solely on ads for re-engagement. Email becomes the counterweight - the low-marginal-cost channel that stretches the value of every paid impression. When identity resolution is layered in, the math becomes even more compelling: the more anonymous visitors you can identify, the more of your most expensive traffic you can reach again for (essentially) free.

Here’s the blunt truth about email during BFCM: brands that hesitate to increase email volume don’t avoid fatigue - they guarantee irrelevance. Brands that engineer high-frequency, high-clarity messaging reap disproportionate rewards.

The Post-BFCM Cohorts

One of the most persistent misconceptions in eCommerce is that “BFCM customers are low LTV.” The reality is more nuanced - and far more actionable. BFCM does not create a single monolithic cohort. It creates multiple distinct behavioral profiles that differ in motivations, likelihood of repeat purchase, offer sensitivity and long-term value. If you treat every person who purchased from you during this magical weekend as a single group, you’ll wind up destroying lifetime value, misallocating retention resources and masking the real opportunities hiding beneath the surface of those holiday sales.

At a behavioral level, BFCM shoppers fall into four broad archetypes.

1. Extractors: the people who show up exclusively for discounts. They’re not loyal, not attached to the product, and they churn quickly unless continuously incentivized
2. Brand-Compatible Buyers: these are the people who would have purchased eventually, but the BFCM offer simply accelerated their journey.
3. Prospective Loyalists: often convert because the economic + emotional friction is removed/reduced. This group is often the highest-LTV segment when nurtured correctly
4. Gifters: the people who purchase on behalf of someone else. They will behave differently after the holidays and require a different lifecycle strategy to unlock repeat revenue

The problem is that most brands collapse these 4 segments into a single “BFCM Cohort”, then proceed to send them through identical retention sequences.

The effect is predictable: brands overspend trying to retain Extractors who will never become profitable, while simultaneously under-serving high-potential Loyalists who would respond exceptionally well to deeper product education, UGC reinforcement, replenishment options and/or subscription pathways. Gifters, meanwhile, are forced through post-purchase flows that assume they bought for themselves, creating irrelevant touchpoints and missed opportunities to convert them into future gifters or eventual self-purchasers.

The operators who outperform build differentiated post-BFCM flows that align content, offers and timing to each behavioral archetype. As an example, Extractors may receive limited-time credits/gift cards to maximize short-term value without diluting future margin. Brand-Compatible Buyers tend to value “exclusive” options - think early-access drops, exclusive opportunities, etc. Prospective Loyalists crave education, social proof and expansion content that creates emotional attachment to the brand. Gifters need communication that acknowledges gifting, enables post-holiday follow-ups and repositions the brand for self-use.

What makes this a BFCM superpower is the magnitude. BFCM forces a critical mass of distinct buyer types into a compressed window. If you can identify, sort and nurture each one correctly, you don’t just generate revenue - you fundamentally reshape Q5, Q1 and beyond. If you can’t, you’ll end up with a cohort of buyers that underperforms those around it by treating everyone the same and resonating with no one. The tl;dr: cohorting is the difference between a spike of seasonal revenue and a long-term profit center.

Measurement During The Madness

One of the biggest differentiators between brands that crush BFCM and those that fail is how they approach measurement. To be blunt, this weekend is an absolute nightmare. CAC swings wildly hour to hour. Platform ROAS surges and falls without explanation. Modeled conversions inflate or disappear. Real-time reporting lags.

The mistake is assuming something is broken. It isn’t. The data is behaving exactly as it should inside a compressed, high-intent, multi-tabbed, high-touch environment where millions of consumers are making billions of decisions in minutes instead of hours or days.

The operators who panic end up turning off winning campaigns, constraining budgets when they should be scaling and making decisions based on statistical noise rather than economic reality.

The brands that win approach BFCM measurement with a fundamentally different mental model: they don’t optimize for precision, they optimize for directionality. That starts with defining two things: (1) the thresholds that matter: blended CAC, MER, AOV, contribution margin and (2) the expected performance by hour (not day). Building an hourly forecast doesn’t have to be crazy - look back in Shopify (or whatever) to each day last year. Export visitors by source (email, paid, etc.), conversion rate, AOV, contribution margin. That’s your baseline. All you have to do is adjust it for this year’s offers/angles AND outbound communications (i.e., all those emails you’ll be sending). It is certainly possible (and advisable) to get more sophisticated, but we’re a few days away - something is better than nothing.

Use your ad platform data as a leading indicator, not a single source of truth. If blended economics are on track, scale. If the contribution margin is stable, push. If MER holds within acceptable ranges, increase budgets (yes, even when platform ROAS seems erratic).

The only way to navigate BFCM is to accept volatility, plan for it and make decisions based on economic reality vs. lagging metrics.

Spending Into Demand

Every November, paid media teams feel the same tension: CPMs climb, CPCs rise, competition intensifies and platform-level efficiency becomes more volatile. For most brands, the reflexive response is to protect budget - to scale back, stabilize or slow spend until metrics “look normal again.”

That instinct feels rational, but it is structurally misaligned with the underlying economics of BFCM. Rising costs aren’t a signal to retreat. They’re a signal that demand is surging.

The core misconception is treating BFCM as if it behaves like any other period. It doesn’t. During BFCM, conversion probability increases faster than CPMs do. Shoppers move with urgency, not curiosity. The vast majority of people are not passive scrollers, they’re active buyers. That means the relationship between cost and return changes dramatically. CPMs can double while ROAS holds. CPCs can rise while CAC stays at an acceptable level.

Mathematically, efficiency metrics become nonlinear. The brands that scale into this dynamic extract enormous revenue because they’re capturing the incremental buyers their competitors are too cautious to pursue.

This is not an invitation to scale recklessly, but to scale conditionally. I operate from pre-defined economic guardrails: acceptable CAC ranges, contribution margin targets, MER thresholds, minimum acceptable ROAS. When the fundamentals hold, the smart play is to deploy additional capital even if platform metrics look noisy. BFCM is one of the rare windows where incremental spend often delivers incremental contribution margin, not diminishing returns. In other words: BFCM is the moment where capital efficiency peaks if you’re willing to spend into the curve. Not spending enough isn’t safe - it’s expensive.

This is where many teams go wrong.

360 days out of the year, media buyers are smart to pull back in the face of short-term volatility. BFCM is the exception, not the rule.

BFCM rewards aggression - not recklessness, but disciplined, economically responsible aggression that acknowledges the reality of demand elasticity. When the economics hold, the rational move is always the same: pour it on. Push more chips onto the table.

Inventory: Align Unit Economics With Auction Dynamics

Inventory is one of the most deceptively powerful variables in BFCM performance, yet it’s consistently underappreciated by marketing teams. Most operators treat inventory as a constraint to navigate rather than a strategic asset to weaponize. But during BFCM - when volume surges, acquisition costs spike and conversion rates surge - the alignment between what you promote and what you can profitably fulfill becomes one of the clearest determinants of contribution margin.

The fundamental issue is that not all SKUs are equally capable of supporting paid acquisition during BFCM. Some have the margin profile to absorb deeper discounts. Some have the velocity to convert efficiently at scale. Some have replenishment timelines that make aggressive promotion safe. Others - often your most popular items - are precisely the ones you cannot afford to push aggressively because inventory constraints, shipping limitations or low margins quickly shift them from revenue drivers to profit killers.

Your BFCM strategy must begin with mapping which products can carry your acquisition load and which must be repositioned, bundled or suppressed.

The optimal way to do this is to design your offer architecture around your inventory:

• Promote high-margin heroes for prospecting, where CAC is highest
• Use bundles to accelerate slow-moving SKUs (essentially liquidating inventory) while improving AOV and protecting margin
• Deploy limited-time discounts selectively — not across the entire catalog, but on SKUs/lines with favorable unit economics
• Always feature SKUs with predictable/durable supply chains
• Avoid pushing anything you’re not sure you can fulfill (or that you don’t know when it’ll actually be back in stock)
• Finally - and most critically - direct promotional resources into products that generate LTV vs. one-time purchases

The “trick” of BFCM marketing is integrating inventory intelligence into real-time decision-making. During BFCM, sell-through will accelerate unpredictably. SKUs that have 14 days of projected coverage on Monday can sell out in 4 hours on Friday. If your acquisition campaigns are still driving traffic to borderline-out-of-stock inventory, you’re wasting budget, crushing conversion rates and alienating would-be buyers.

Monitor inventory-to-demand ratios continuously throughout the weekend and adjust creative, landing pages, email content and paid media as inventory dynamics change. This is one use case for Optmyzr (this week’s sponsor) - the Rule Engine can connect your inventory to your ad account, so as soon as a given SKU reaches a certain inventory level (say, 10 units remaining in-stock), your ads turn off.

The big unlock is recognizing that inventory is not a constraint, it’s a strategic control lever. The brands that treat it that way create margin stability while scaling aggressively. The brands that ignore it end up with mismatched campaigns, burned budget, poor customer experience and a BFCM that looks good at the top-level, but is often in the red from a bottom-line perspective.

Audience Re-Engagement

The most valuable audience you’ll have in December is not your existing customers. It’s not your cold prospects. It’s the massive cohort of high-intent, high-quality non-buyers who engaged with your brand during BFCM but didn’t end up buying. Most brands overlook them entirely, assuming that if they didn’t convert during the biggest promotion of the year, they’re unlikely to convert afterward. That assumption is not only incorrect - it’s economically disastrous.

BFCM non-buyers aren’t “uninterested.” They’re displaced demand. Many of them were comparing options, overwhelmed by choice, uncertain about gifts, constrained by timing, waiting for payday and/or simply lost in the chaos of the weekend. These shoppers often have higher purchase intent than your existing remarketing pools, are already educated (or, at the very least, aware of) about your brand and have self-selected into your category.

All they need is the right invitation to finish the job.

The strategic error most brands make is immediately reducing spend after BFCM ends, right when this audience becomes easiest - and cheapest - to convert. Auction pressure drops, competition retreats, and attention becomes more focused as shoppers move from deal-hunting to holiday task/checklist completion mode.

The first few weeks of December are the quiet after the storm - the moment when structured re-engagement can drive some of the highest-ROI spend of the entire quarter.

High-performing brands treat these non-buyers as a primary December acquisition audience:

• Build dedicated re-engagement funnels using lower-cost channels like YouTube, AppLovin, programmatic video and/or low-frequency remarketing to maintain presence without overspending
• Adjust messaging from discount-led to friction-led: shipping deadlines, curated gift guides, product carving, social proof and last-minute decision support
• Treat this audience segment as pre-qualified, high-probability December buyers

The principle is simple: BFCM demand doesn’t end when the weekend does - it spills into December. The brands that capture this residual demand win Q4. In a season defined by attention volatility, non-buyer re-engagement is the most structurally undervalued opportunity out there.

Competitive Intelligence During BFCM

Most brands collect competitive intelligence during BFCM like tourists: casually, superficially and with no operational impact. They look at a few competitor emails, glance at Instagram ads and scroll through landing pages, all without extracting the strategic intelligence. There’s a saying that people reveal more about themselves in an hour under pressure than a week on vacation - and that’s true of brands, too. During BFCM, your competitors will reveal more about their priorities, constraints and economic posture in 72 hours than they do all year.

In advance of the weekend, subscribe to your competitors' emails. Visit their sites (you can often poke around their sitemap for /bfcm or visit the Meta Ads library to find their BFCM creatives, then go click on the link). The secret is to focus on their offer architecture, not the discounts or promotions. Pay attention to which SKUs competitors emphasize, which ones are conspicuously absent, which bundles are featured and where your competition chooses to protect margin (i.e. lower discounts, FGWP, etc.).

These choices reflect your competition’s margin, inventory and/or operational fragility - and they can shape how you position your own offer. If a competitor is leaning heavily on shallow discounts but advertising “lowest prices of the year” - that’s a signal that their margins are slim / differentiation is weak. If a competitor refuses to discount hero SKUs, they’re either supply or margin constrained - and you can position accordingly.

The language your competition emphasizes during BFCM is rarely arbitrary. Heavy “gifting” language indicates reliance on gifting categories. Aggressive “last chance” or “doorbuster” framing signals demand concerns or inventory excess. Excessive reassurance around shipping timelines hints at operational instability. Even ad visuals - lifestyle vs. product-forward, value-led vs. aspirational - signals the psychological frame where your competition believes they can win.

The point of all this isn’t to copy your competition - it’s to exploit their weaknesses and shortcomings during the highest-volume, highest-intent, highest-leverage moments of the eComm year.

If a competitor is sending all their BFCM traffic to a /shop page, lean in further to tailored experiences. If their bundles are bloated or complex, highlight simplicity. If their creative looks chaotic, focus on clarity. If their offer structure is competitive (i.e., they’re offering a larger % discount than you are), reframe the comparison to total savings (forces shoppers to compare % to $ - and they’re more likely to judge the $ as being more valuable), free gift with purchase, or something else.

In BFCM, you will never win by matching your competitors - you win by positioning yourself in relation to them, which requires you to read what the market is doing, understand the incentives driving that behavior and capitalize on the opportunities it presents. The more intelligence you have, the easier it is to do that.

The TL;DR

BFCM is chaos - but it’s predictable chaos.

Every year, the same patterns show up: buyers move faster, think less, compare more. Inboxes detonate. Auctions misbehave. Attribution goes haywire (at least in the short-term). And yet, most brands show up with the same tired toolkit: a bigger discount, a few more emails, some extra spend and the hope that “this year will be different.”

As the old saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, all while expecting a different result.

The throughline in everything above is simple: BFCM rewards systems, not stunts. The brands that win aren’t the ones with the biggest promos or the deepest discounts; they’re the ones whose entire organization is tuned to the reality of the weekend.

Their offers are architected to maximize contribution margin. Their landers are designed to accelerate time-to-purchase. Their ads clearly communicate value instead of demanding attention. Their email strategy reflects inbox realities, not internal comfort. Their media spend follows expected value, not fear. Their inventory strategy informs what they promote, not the other way around.

And underneath all of that, they’re singularly focused on a single question: “How do we extract the maximum possible value from every single visitor who comes to our site this weekend?”

You probably don’t have time to rebuild your entire system this year. Your offers are mostly locked. Your tech stack is what it is. Your creative is largely done. That’s fine.

Perfection isn’t the bar. If all you do in the days between now and BFCM is:
1. Revise your landers so each major offer has a clear, purpose-built destination;
2. Turn on identity resolution so fewer visitors stay anonymous;
3. Double or triple your email frequency with smarter segmentation and clearer messaging;
4: Predefine your economic guardrails so you can spend into demand instead of away from it…

Then you will be operating on a fundamentally different level than 90% of the market.

Once the dust settles, don’t treat this as a one-off.

BFCM is the best diagnostic of your brand you will ever get. It exposes every weakness, every underutilized asset, every system that only works when things are slow and calm. Audit what worked and what broke. Refine your offer architecture. Update your lifecycle strategy. Take your heatmap/scrollmap data and use it to inform your landers going forward. Tighten your financial and measurement frameworks. Next year’s “liquidity event” should feel less like a gamble and more like a controlled harvest.

At the end of the day, that’s the entire game: moving from hoping BFCM works to knowing what it will do for your business.

BFCM is one of the few times each year where demand is, for all practical purposes, near-infinite. The constraint is no longer interest - it’s how well your system can capture and convert that demand.

You don’t have to out-discount your competitors. You don’t even have to out-spend them.
You just have to out-operate them.

Treat BFCM like the liquidity event it is. Build (or start building) a system that can exploit it. And then, when everyone else is talking about how “wild” and “unpredictable” the weekend felt, you can sit back, look at your numbers and think, “That went almost exactly the way it was supposed to.”

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving & a profitable Black Friday!

Cheers,

Sam

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are three ways I can help you operate at a higher level:

1 — Agency Support

If you want an agency built for operators, our team at Warschawski works directly with 7–9 figure brands to scale profitably across Meta, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Programmatic + more. Our team is 100% in-house - with everything you need to grow - strategy, creative, content, UI/UX, performance media, analytics, data science & lifecycle. If you're looking for a partner who actually acts like an owner and partner, reply to this email and we'll see if there's a fit.

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