Happy Sunday!

If you're reading this, I hope you got some sun this weekend, you're hydrated, and you've had a minute to look at the calendar, because… Black Friday is 11 weeks out!! This is not a drill!

Today’s newsletter is dedicated to everyone who's going to miss Thanksgiving dinner this year. Those of you eating a plate at the kitchen counter with a laptop open, checking Shopify every four minutes, texting your group chat where everyone else is also eating a plate of food with a laptop open while the rest of the family watches football in the other room. Black Friday is our Super Bowl, and Thanksgiving is the night before the big game.

This year marks 10 years I've been on the BFCM grind. Ten Thanksgivings of my mom making the best of it, 10 Novembers of not sleeping much, and honestly... I still get fired up gearing up for it. There's nothing like it. The traffic, the pace, the group chats at 2am, the website fixes at 4:30am that blow up your phone… for some sick reason, I love it. If you're in it with me, this one's for you.

I've been asked some version of, "What should we actually run for Black Friday?" The honest answer is that most brands are trying to pick one offer. The better question is what you run each day, and why the format changes as the week goes on.

I first wrote about my BFCM sales strategy in 2022, and my thinking hasn't changed much. Big bundles on Black Friday. A tiered promo on Cyber Monday. Something different in between so you've always got a reason to talk to your customer. What's changed is there's a lot more proof now for why that order works. So today is the full offer calendar, day by day, with the reasoning for each one.

But, before we get into that...

Vendor of the Week

Triple Whale — put your media-buying to work, automatically.

If your media buyer already knows when an ad should be paused, they shouldn't have to spend half their morning checking which ads have hit that point. Especially when the account keeps growing and every new creative test adds more to keep track of.

Triple Whale brings your store and advertising data together, and its AI operator, Moby, uses that context to help you manage the account. You can tell it how much you're willing to spend before an ad needs to produce a sale, then have it review performance against that rule and prepare the changes.

You can have Moby review the account every morning and queue changes for your approval, or let it act within rules you've defined. Even if you only use it for analysis, there's time to get back: Dixxon Flannel Company was running roughly 600 ad variations, and its marketing strategist reported cutting weekly creative analysis from about five hours to 10 minutes with Moby.

If your team is spending too much of the week reviewing performance and making the same account changes, I'd bring that exact workflow to a demo and have them walk through it.

Book a Triple Whale demo here.

Get Smarter about CTV

1 in 3 shoppers say CTV ads shaped their gift-giving plans. Don't leave that influence on the table.

I'm sitting down with Paramount Ads Manager on Sept 30 to talk workback schedules, targeting, and how to do this before the window closes.

You're about to become a CTV expert. LFG.

Stop thinking about an offer. Think about a week.

The way I look at BFCM is a 12-day window. Most of the volume starts the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and runs through the Sunday after Cyber Monday. Inside that window you've got Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday, plus the extension days on either end.

Each one of those days is a different reason to show up in someone's inbox, their texts, their feed, and their DMs. If you run the same 30% off sitewide for the whole stretch, you've given yourself exactly one thing to say and eight days to say it. By Sunday your customer has muted you. Worse, they've learned that your "Black Friday" deal is really just your "late November" deal, and there's no reason to buy on Friday if the same thing will be there on Tuesday.

The point of changing the format each day isn't complexity. Every single offer should still pass the "can my grandma understand this?" test. The point is that each day earns you another email (probably three), another text, another set of ad creative, another Instagram community DM blast, another sponsored Messenger push, another nudge to your affiliates. None of that is spam when there's actually something new to say.

Here's how I'd lay it out.

Tuesday and Wednesday: early access, no extra discount

Your list gets the Black Friday offer 24 to 48 hours before the public. Same offer. No additional discount on top. The access itself is the perk, and it's a real one, because the people who open your emails and read your texts are the ones who deserve first crack at the best deal of the year.

This also gets you clean early revenue before CPMs go vertical on Thursday and Friday. And if you want to get aggressive, test pushing your actual BFCM creative to a prospecting-only audience in the days before. Every year this starts earlier. Last year, discounting was already creeping in during October, Amazon kicked off its sale on November 20, and Rockerbox's analysis of BFCM 2024 showed that the brands that started priming audiences earliest saw the biggest lift in gross profit once the promos hit. People are already in the shopping mindset by then, so there's no reason to wait until Thursday to show up.

Black Friday: the big bundle

This is the day, so this is where the biggest, most exclusive, highest-AOV offer lives. I like bundles that retail at 2 to 3x your normal AOV, discounted 30 to 50%. That number should be deeper than anything you've run all year, and it's justified because the margin on a big basket can carry it.

Here's the thinking. Your core customers are showing up on Friday to find a good deal. Give it to them. There's also a huge group of people who've heard of you, they're on the fence, they're excited, and they just need permission to buy. A steep discount on a big bundle that they know won't be around on Monday is that permission. It's a win all around... they rip a high-AOV order, you clear inventory, and everyone feels good about it.

And the bundle does something a percent-off code never will. It lets you merchandise. For an existing customer, you get to package the stuff they already love and remind them why they love the brand. For a net-new customer, you get to control their first order. If you sell anything flavored, scented, or in variants, you know which SKUs turn people into repeat buyers and which ones make someone shrug and never come back. Put the best ones in the bundle. A lot of these people are here because they want a deal and they've heard your name... this is your red-carpet onboarding, and the best way to nail it is variant selection. (You can also sneak a slow-moving variant into a bigger bundle. Nobody's mad about a bonus.)

Quick math. Say your normal AOV is $60. Build a bundle that would retail at $180, sell it at 40% off, and the order comes through at $108. That's nearly double your average order, on one click, from a customer who feels like they got the deal of the year. That's a very different Friday than 30% off a $60 cart.

HexClad is the clearest example of this at scale. Their Black Friday last year was built around big sets, up to 52% off, with the giant "Everything But the Kitchen Sink" bundle marked down over $1,400. They weren't selling a discount. They were selling the whole kitchen.

Saturday and Sunday: a different offer, a different category

Saturday and Sunday get their own offer, and it should be different from Friday's. Smaller. Pointed at a second category or a product line that doesn't move as fast. If you're a bedding brand, Friday was the comforter bundle and Saturday is the sheets. If you're supplements, Friday was the full stack and Saturday is the single hero SKU.

Two reasons. First, it teaches your customer that the Friday offer was real and it's gone. The people who missed it will remember next year. Second, and this is the big one, it gives you a reason to go back out to your entire audience with a fresh message. New email. New text. New creative in the ad account. New reason for your affiliates to post.

Saturday also happens to be Small Business Saturday (thank you, AMEX), and if you're under $100M, congratulations, you're a small business. Use it.

Cyber Monday: tiered spend-to-save, with gifts that unlock

I listed all 12 offer formats in the Promotions 101 email back in February, and tiers are the one I'd pull for Monday. Spend $100, save 10%. Spend $200, save 25%. Spend $300, save 35%. Set the thresholds just above where your AOV bands naturally sit so every tier is a stretch, not a gimme.

This year I'd add one thing to the structure: unlock gifts at each tier instead of only percentages. Free shipping at the first tier, a small gift at the second, a big gift at the third. Now every threshold has two reasons to reach for it, and the top tier feels like an event instead of a math problem.

Why tiers on Monday and not Friday? Because Monday's shopper is a different person. Friday is a permission day. Monday is a comparison shopper on a laptop who spent the weekend building a cart, checking prices, and waiting to see if anything got better. impact.com's Cyber Week data from last year backs this up... Black Friday captured 31% of the entire week's revenue in a single day, but Cyber Monday had the highest conversion rate of any day, up 7% year over year even while clicks dropped 5%. Their read was that Cyber Monday has become a final-execution day for highly qualified, price-comparing shoppers. Tiers are built for that person. They already know what they want. You're just giving them a reason to add one more thing.

Jones Road is a good example of this done well. Last year was their first-ever sitewide sale, and they ran it as tiers... 10% off everything, 15% off at $75, 20% off at $100, including the holiday kits. Simple to understand, pulls AOV up, and it still reads like Jones Road. (For context on how big their BFCM is, the Miracle Balm alone sold over 375,000 units on Black Friday in 2024.)

Giving Tuesday: no discount

Flip the whole thing on its head. Instead of a discount, a percentage of every order goes to a charity, and you tell people that clearly on the site and in every message.

You don't need a partner or a platform for this. Set up a direct donation, then show people it actually happened. Post the receipt, share the number, put it in an email the following week so the people who bought on Tuesday see where it went.

Pick something that's connected to the brand, the product, or a story your customer already knows. Not a random cause the founder happens to love with no tie-in. And you'd be shocked how well these promos go. It's the same psychology as Friday. People are looking for permission to spend, and "a portion of this goes to something good" is a very effective permission slip.

After Tuesday, you've got the rest of the week to flush the funnel. Last chance messaging, maybe the Friday bundle back for 24 hours for the people who missed it, then stop. Don't drag it into December, because that's how the whole thing becomes a "late November" sale again.

The offer doesn't stop at the PDP

One more thing while you're building all this. Your offer needs to show up in the cart, in checkout, and after checkout, not just in the ad and on the collection page.

Promotional upsells in the cart. A reminder of the deal inside Shopify's actual checkout, which is a surprisingly good place to remind someone what they're getting. And post-purchase upsells and downsells that match the BFCM offer, not the evergreen ones you set up in March. During the highest-intent 12 days of the year, the moments right before and right after the purchase are where a lot of the AOV lives.

Your creators are part of the calendar too

Everything above assumes the offer lives on your site. For a lot of you, a meaningful chunk of BFCM is going to happen on TikTok Shop and Amazon, and they need their own row in the plan.

The numbers from last year should settle any debate about whether it's worth the effort. TikTok Shop did over $500 million in US sales across the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, with nearly 50% more shoppers than the year before. Sellers who went live saw 84% sales growth over the prior year's BFCM, and creator affiliates posted close to 10 million shoppable videos during the campaign. That's not a side channel anymore. That's a second storefront with its own traffic.

So mirror the calendar there. Same Friday bundle, same Monday tiers, same Tuesday give-back, all loaded as actual Shop promotions with the deal visible in the video and on the product card. And treat your marketplace listings like a homepage, not a filing cabinet. Update the carousel imagery for each day of the week so the first image says "Black Friday bundle, 40% off, ends Sunday" and the Monday version says something different. Swap the A+ content and the storefront banner on Amazon the same way. Most brands set their listing images in August and never touch them, so their PDP is the one place in the whole funnel where the customer can't tell a sale is happening. Timely imagery is the cheapest conversion lift available to you that week.

Brief your affiliates on the schedule two weeks out so they know what's dropping on which day and what the hook is for each one. If you have a live-capable creator or two, give them a slot on Friday and one on Monday. And if you're running Shop ads, make sure the creative is the creator's video with the offer baked in, not your studio asset.

Here's the move most brands miss. Go back through the last 12 months and pull your top 10 to 20 creator and affiliate videos by conversions. You already know these hooks work, because people already bought off them. Now re-skin them for the sale. Add a text overlay with the offer, drop a new voiceover hook up front ("this just went 40% off for Black Friday"), swap the end card, and run them as Spark Ads and as whitelisted assets on Meta. The creator did the hard part months ago. You're just putting a sale sticker on something that already sells.

Do that for each day of the calendar, not just Friday. Same proven video, five different overlays. It's the cheapest new creative you'll make all year, and it gives your affiliates something to repost when they're too busy to film. On top of that, bump the commission for the 12-day window. If you're normally at 15%, go to 20 or 25. You're going to give that margin to Meta anyway, so give it to the people whose content actually converts.

Be loud

The most common mistake I see with BFCM offers in 2026 has nothing to do with the offer itself. Brands aren't loud enough about it. Not close. What the offer is, what's included, where to buy it, when it ends, how fast it ships... all of it should be everywhere, constantly, in plain language.

I see brands skip posting the offer on Instagram or X or Facebook because "it won't get enough eyeballs." Post it anyway. Put it in the bio, the pinned post, the announcement bar, the pop-up, the SMS, the Messenger blast, the first image on every marketplace listing, the packaging insert. Be insanely LOUD about it. This is like if shopping was a music festival, so PLAY INTO IT.

That's all for this week!

If offers and promo calendars are useful, I'm happy to keep going on this. There's a whole second email in the post-BFCM piece, what you do with the customers you just acquired, and I'll probably write it in a few weeks.

It's Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get a full 9 hours of sleep tonight and have an incredible upcoming week. It's about to get busy... take care of yourself, get outside, drink some water, get a good sweat in.

I'll see you next Sunday. Same time, same place.

Nik