Black Friday and Cyber Monday planning: a week-by-week checklist

Everything else depends on these decisions.

Set the revenue and margin target, not just revenue. A sale that doubles revenue at zero contribution margin is a bad sale. Model the offer at three volume scenarios using last year's data where you have it.

Choose the offer structure. Options in rough order of margin protection: gift with purchase, tiered thresholds ("spend $100, get $25 off"), bundles, free shipping, sitewide percentage off. US shoppers expect something meaningful on the weekend itself, typically 20% to 40%, but a strong brand can hold that with a bundle instead of a blanket discount. Decide also whether the deal escalates through the week or stays flat; flat is simpler to execute and communicate.

Fix the pricing baseline now. FTC and state rules on reference pricing mean a "was $100, now $60" claim needs $100 to have been a genuine, recent price. Do not inflate prices in October to discount them in November.

Lock inventory. Confirm purchase orders, lead times and safety stock on hero SKUs. Decide now what you will do when the hero sells out: a waitlist, a substitute offer or a pre-order.

Set the calendar. Early access window for subscribers, public launch, Cyber Monday extension, shipping cutoffs for Christmas delivery, and the January plan.

List growth is the highest-leverage October activity. Every subscriber captured now is a person you can reach free during the most expensive advertising weeks of the year. Run an early-access sign-up ("Get the Black Friday deal first"), a quiz or giveaway, and SMS opt-in with proper TCPA consent language. Target capturing 3% to 5% of visitors.

Brief and produce the creative. One campaign idea, then every format: email headers, SMS copy, Meta and TikTok video in 9:16, Google Shopping feed titles, site banners, product page badges. Produce more variants than you think you need; creative fatigue during Cyber Week is real and you will not have time to shoot again.

Build the landing experience. A dedicated sale page with the offer, the hero products, a countdown to the real end date and the shipping promise. Our landing experiences work typically starts here, since this page will carry more traffic than any other in the year.

Warm up paid audiences. Run prospecting now while auction costs are lower, building video viewers, site visitors and engagers into retargeting pools for November.

Load test. Traffic can be several times normal on Black Friday morning. Confirm your hosting and checkout can hold it. On Shopify, check app load and third-party scripts; elsewhere, work with your infrastructure team on caching and capacity.

Speed. Get mobile Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds. Remove apps you do not use. Compress every image in the campaign.

Checkout. Guest checkout on, accelerated wallets (Shop Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal) above the form, shipping shown in cart, discount logic tested with every combination of offers you plan to run. Automatic discounts are safer than codes at scale.

Accessibility and compliance. Check that sale banners, badges and forms are keyboard navigable and readable by screen readers. ADA-related complaints spike against retailers during the holidays. Confirm your email footer and SMS disclosures are correct.

Freeze. Set a code freeze date roughly two weeks before launch. Nothing new ships to the site after that except emergency fixes.

Email and SMS. Build the full sequence: teaser ("something's coming"), early-access announcement, launch, mid-weekend reminder, Cyber Monday extension, last call, and shipping-cutoff reminders. Segment: VIPs get the earliest access, engaged subscribers get the full cadence, dormant subscribers get two or three sends at most. Keep SMS to a handful of messages across the whole week, within quiet hours set by recipient state.

Paid media. Build the campaigns in advance with the launch creative, set budgets and bid caps, and write down the decision rules: at what return on ad spend do you raise budget, at what point do you cut. Load catalog and feed updates with sale prices. Set up exclusions so purchasers stop seeing acquisition ads.

Customer service. Write the FAQ and macros for shipping times, price adjustments, stacking and returns. Decide your price-adjustment policy for customers who bought the week before. Staff for two to three times normal volume and set a response-time target.

Reporting. Build the dashboard before launch: revenue, orders, contribution margin, spend, blended cost per order, email and SMS revenue, conversion rate by device, inventory on hero SKUs. If it does not exist on launch day, you will fly blind.

Send the teaser and confirm deliverability on a small segment first. Watch complaint and bounce rates.

Open early access to subscribers two to five days before Thanksgiving. This rewards the list, spreads load off the peak day and gives you real conversion data to adjust creative and budgets.

Daily checks: inventory on heroes, site speed, checkout error rate, ad disapprovals, discount code abuse. Assign one owner per check.

Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday is execution, not strategy. Rules for the week:

• Review the dashboard at fixed times, morning and evening, and make budget moves only at those times.
• Shift spend toward retargeting and the segments that are converting; cut prospecting that is not hitting the return threshold.
• Rotate creative when frequency climbs and click-through falls.
• Send the mid-weekend reminder to people who clicked but did not buy, not to everyone.
• Have a backup offer ready for when the hero sells out.
• Resist the urge to add a deeper discount midweek. It punishes the customers who bought early and trains everyone to wait.

Cyber Monday gets its own message and, if you choose, a slightly different hook such as online-only bundles or free shipping on everything.

A large share of Cyber Week buyers are first-time customers acquired at the highest cost of the year. The post-purchase experience decides whether they come back.

• Ship fast and communicate every step by email and, for opted-in customers, by SMS.
• Run a post-purchase flow with usage tips and a review request timed after delivery.
• Watch returns and support volume; staff accordingly.
• Hold a holiday gifting campaign through the shipping cutoff dates, then switch to gift cards.
• Plan a January message that is not a discount: new arrivals, a loyalty invitation or a replenishment reminder.

Then run the review: what sold, what the real contribution margin was, which creative and channels performed, where the site broke, and what the list did. Write it down while it is fresh; it is next year's plan.

• Deciding the offer in November and discovering the margin does not work.
• Launching ads with one creative and nothing to rotate in.
• A site that passed testing on desktop and broke on mobile at scale.
• Treating email and SMS as a single blast rather than a segmented sequence.
• No reporting until the Monday after, when the budget is already spent.
• Ignoring the January customer and wondering why retention is poor.

Discover: we start in September with last year's data, margins by SKU, inventory position and list health, and set revenue and contribution targets. Plan: a single campaign plan covers offer, calendar, creative, messaging, paid media, site readiness and reporting with owners and dates. Build: the creative team produces the campaign system, the web team makes the site fast and the landing experience ready, ecommerce growth builds the email and SMS sequences, and performance marketing sets up and runs the paid campaigns with pre-agreed decision rules. Improve: during Cyber Week we run the dashboard twice daily and make the calls, then the post-mortem feeds the retention plan and next year's build. Because brand, growth, web and automation sit on one team, the ad, the landing page and the follow-up email are built as one experience and the data flows into one report.

The Performance Growth Sprint is the representative pattern for the paid side of a peak-season plan: a paid-media reset built around measurement, creative testing and commercial decisions. Applied to Black Friday, that means setting the measurement and the decision rules before spend ramps, testing creative variants in October so the winners are known by November, and judging the week on contribution margin rather than on revenue or return on ad spend alone. The sprint format fits the season because the window is short and the cost of learning slowly is high.