2025 Black Friday Cyber Monday Recap
Lessons from a Black Friday in a year of uncertainty, inflation, and anxiety–coming from a beauty copywriter managing four Black Friday campaigns for skincare, makeup, and lifestyle brands.
2025 has been a year riddled with uncertainty. The anxiety is palpable. Many of my clients have felt the stress that has come with tariff announcements and the associated economic anxiety. This year, we’ve seen many brands shut their doors––both big established brands and smaller ones alike. I was shocked to see many indie brands whose founders I’ve gotten to know close shop. I know whenever there’s an announcement, we all hope we’re not the next ones.
This Black Friday and Cyber Monday came with that layer of uncertainty mixed with hope. Will people buy this year? Will we surpass last year’s numbers?
I managed four Black Friday email campaigns this year, and all of my brands decided to keep things simple and lean into what worked last year. This is what worked for us:
Rewarding loyalty.
We created a VIP segment with our high spend customers and rewarded them with early access or an extra bonus for Black Friday. We made sure to communicate that they were getting this extra perk because they are VIPs. Our VIP campaigns performed just as well, if not better, than the open-to-the-public Black Friday campaign with only a handful of profiles.
SMS.
To piggyback on the previous point, we rewarded our SMS subscribers with extra perks like early access or a better discount. We used the time before Black Friday to build our SMS list using that as an incentive. With 72% of people making a purchase after receiving a text message (Klaviyo report), this is an area we’re actively looking to grow. And, why not use Black Friday to help us grow the list?
Two promos in November.
Running a promotion a few weeks before Black Friday proved to be effective without cannibalizing Black Friday sales. We chose a different promotion, like a gift with purchase or a bonus gift card, and ensured that Black Friday remained our best sale of the year. These promotions lasted 4 days max. We learned that people were already in a shopping mood in November, but we still kept a sense of urgency and appeal by limiting the promo to a short window and differentiating it from our Black Friday sale.
Short Black Friday window.
My clients had different sale windows, with some of them limiting the promo days to just Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, and others running the promotion the entire week. But the window remained short. This added a sense of urgency and drove sales throughout the duration of the campaigns. Our best sale days across the board were:
Promo announcement day
November 28th (Black Friday)
Final day
Sending emails on these key dates was essential.
Gift guides.
Grouping products in different ways made it easy for our customers to know what to get and avoid decision overwhelm. Our emails showing an assortment of products organized by different categories (personas, price point, skin type, etc) performed the best after the ones I shared above.
And, some learnings we will be bringing into next year.
The offer needs to be GOOD. Times are tough, and with inflation on the rise, people are looking for a good deal. The promotion needs to be competitive and worthwhile.
Black Friday still needs to remain the best sale of the year. This is not a new learning, but something that is worth emphasizing. I’ll add that another thing that worked for all my clients, and that is not overdiscounting throughout the year. We’ve trained our audience to understand that Black Friday is the best deal of the year, and that sales don’t come very often.
People now appreciate personalization more than ever. Recognizing loyalty worked wonderfully for us. Additionally, segmenting based on interests and behavioural patterns helped us get more precise with our messaging.
Value-driven content is still necessary during sale season. There’s such a thing as discount fatigue, so we look for different ways to offer value.
The new year is coming with its own question marks. But, we can lean on the learnings we’ve gathered during this season to shape our strategy for the new year. Evaluate your Black Friday campaign, see what content performed best, and lean on that. Let your customers tell you what they want from you.
Now, tell me, how did your Black Friday campaign perform?
