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

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 tactics that increase sales on ecommerce websites.

Without further ado, here are the best Black Friday marketing strategies for 2025.

Click to see sections:

• How to choose strategies for Black Friday

• Onsite playbook for your Black Friday marketing

• List of Black Friday marketing strategies

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.)

Onsite playbook for your Black Friday marketing

If maximizing visitor engagement during Black Friday 2025 is one of the projects you'd like to focus on, this playbook breaks down the highest-performing upsell popup campaigns ecommerce brands use today.

Click them to see how they work.

Black Friday marketing strategies

1. Define your goals before starting

2. Build the “early access” email list

3. Use popup workflows for email capture, cart recovery, and product recos

4. Boost product re-engagement with AI recommendations

5. Offer a “Deal of the Hour” to everyone

6. Offer targeted discounts based on browsing and cart content

7. Add gamification to your offers with interactive formats

8. Use minimum purchase promo to increase AOV

9. Try countdown timers for limited-time promos 

10. Add new products just before Black Friday

11. Reduce shipping cart abandonment

12. 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) is also 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 capture 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 a few days away, 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:

3. Use popup workflows for email capture, cart recovery, and product recommendations

Popup research shows that some popup designs, when optimized, can improve online sales much better than one-size-fits-all or untested campaigns.

Here are the top-performing campaigns:

• Welcome offer: Offer an instant discount combined with social proof and product recommendations, leading to increase in list growth

• Cart recovery: Utilizes AI-powered timing or exit intent to recover abandoned carts

• Spin-to-win wheel: Gamifies Black Friday email capture with a prize wheel, resulting in up to a 30% higher signup rate.

• Cart upsell offer: Suggests related add-ons immediately after an item is added to the cart, increasing average order value

• Sales announcement: Highlights sales or free-shipping deals, leading to an increase in more product page views

Here are example of some of these campaigns optimized for mobile—

Click to take a closer look!

4. Boost product re-engagement with AI recommendations

One effective Black Friday marketing strategy is to offer product recommendations based on visitors' browsing history. Rather than limiting these recommendations to product pages, you can make them easily accessible from any page.

Example—

I visited three products on Sud Express but I didn’t make a purchase. Instead, I chose to return to the homepage. That’s when an animated "bell" icon in the website's header caught my attention.

With just one click, I could view the products I had explored:

As you can see, it's an onsite feed, with the list of viewed products prominently displayed at the top. That's AI product recommendations—a tool that automatically generates a product list.

Using a machine learning algorithm, it strategically organizes the suggestions, placing those with the highest likelihood of purchase at the top of the feed.

This Black Friday marketing strategy is proven to be effective:

Shopify stores such as OddBalls and émoi émoi have achieved an 11.4% order rate from clicks in recommendations.

If you'd like to try AI product recommendations:

5. 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 effective variation of this Black Friday marketing tactic:

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

And there's also 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 the right template template and customize the offer 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

6. Offer targeted discounts based on browsing history and cart content

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 10% discount might work best for first-time visitors while a $10 discount in a bundle with free shipping could appeal more to repeated customers.

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

• 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 customer

And much more.

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

7. Add gamification to your offers with interactive formats

Add a spin-to-win wheel or other gamification campaign (see examples of gamified popups) to your website: according to research, this format improves conversions by 6% on average.

You can distribute discounts, coupons, vouchers, and other incentives to encourage visitors to buy. It’s a proven way to improve email capture on Black Friday to have more leads to nurture later.

Here are some good examples for inspiration:

8. Use minimum purchase promo to maximize order values

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 offer popup:

9. 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 popup builder)…

…and to your emails like that:

10. 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.

11. Reduce shopping cart abandonment with exit offers

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

That’s where exit intent popup campaigns come into play. They can catch Black Friday visitors right before they leave—giving you one more chance to prevent a lost sale.

Let’s see an example of an exit intent popups that can increase your cart recovery rate during Black Friday.

This first campaign combines playful copy with multiple urgency triggers—a countdown timer showing hours/minutes/seconds and "24 hours" validity creates immediate pressure to act. The strategy works by mixing entertainment with scarcity psychology, making the exit experience memorable—a perfect tactic for Black Friday.

12. Share shipping times and customer support links

Needless to say, your support team will be quite busy on Black Friday, 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

Pick your goals, 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 your Black Friday marketing strategies for 2025. Here's to your success!

Summary

Tailoring popups to display related products or special offers not only enhances the shopping experience but also boosts average order value. Creating a Shopify upsell popup therefore can improve your sales by encouraging customers to add more items to their cart.

There are other ways to implement upsell popups, but I hope this tutorial gave you a good start.

If you'd like to learn more about popups:

• Ecommerce popups: examples

• Guide: Marketing strategy for Shopify stores

• Discount pricing strategy tips