Most brands approach BFCM in a similar way. They decide on the promotion, build a calendar around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and then start filling in the products, audiences, and creative.
That does give the team structure, but it can also lock the plan too early. Customer interest changes, some products move faster than expected, some customers buy before the main promotion, and new opportunities appear while the campaign is already running.
A good BFCM email plan should account for that from the start. The plan should decide what the business wants to achieve, what products matter most, which customers each offer is meant for, how the promotion should change over the period, and what should happen once someone buys.
BFCM stands for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In ecommerce, it usually refers to the wider promotional period around those two events, when brands run some of their biggest sales and email campaigns of the year.
Start with the decisions that shape the whole BFCM plan
Before you decide how many emails to send, decide what those emails are meant to do.
| Planning decision | Question to answer |
|---|---|
| Business goal | What does BFCM need to achieve? |
| Products | What do we actually want to sell? |
| Offer | What promotion makes sense for those products? |
| Audience | Which customers should receive which version? |
| Sequence | What changes from one email to the next? |
| Exclusions | Who should stop receiving the promotion? |
| After purchase | What happens once someone buys? |
| Execution | What needs to be prepared before BFCM starts? |
These decisions are connected. The products affect the offer. The offer affects who it is relevant for. The audience affects the message. Once someone buys, the plan changes again.
Decide what BFCM needs to achieve for the business
BFCM can serve very different goals.
One brand may want to clear seasonal stock. Another may want to bring in new customers. Another may want to grow a specific category or drive more repeat purchases from existing customers.
Those goals should change the plan.
If the priority is clearing inventory, products with high stock levels may deserve more attention. If the goal is new customer acquisition, the brand may lead with products that are easy for a first-time buyer to understand. If the goal is repeat purchase, existing customer history becomes much more important.
The number of emails comes later. First decide what BFCM needs to achieve.
Choose the products and offers together
A common mistake is to decide on the discount first.
The team picks a sitewide offer, then works backwards to decide what products should appear in the emails.
It is better to look at the products and the offer at the same time.
Check what has enough inventory, what has healthy margins, what is already selling well, what is moving slowly, and which categories the business wants to push.
Then decide what kind of promotion makes sense.
That may be a sitewide discount. It may be a category-specific offer, a bundle, a gift with purchase, or a spend threshold.
Not every product needs the same discount.
A bestseller with limited stock may not need much help. A slow-moving product with plenty of inventory may need a stronger offer. A new product may need better presentation more than a deep discount.
The product and the offer should support the same goal.
Decide which customers should receive which version
BFCM does not require dozens of customer segments.
It does require enough segmentation to avoid sending the same product mix and offer to everyone.
A recent buyer is different from someone who has not purchased in a year. A customer who normally buys at full price is different from someone who waits for promotions. A customer who repeatedly buys from one category may care little about another.
The useful question is simple: does this difference change what we should send?
If it changes the product, offer, message, or whether the customer should receive the campaign at all, the segment matters.
A recent buyer may need to be excluded from a sale on the product they just bought. A customer with clear interest in one category may need a different product selection. A full-price buyer may not need the same discount as someone who normally shops only during promotions.
The goal is not more segments. It is better decisions.
Plan what changes from one email to the next
BFCM usually involves more than one send.
You may have an announcement, a launch email, a reminder, a final-day message, Cyber Monday communication, and follow-up after the promotion.
That does not mean every brand needs all of them.
Each email should have a reason to exist.
Something should change from one send to the next. It could be the offer, the products, the urgency, the audience, or the stage of the promotion.
If two emails say the same thing to the same customers, there may be no reason to send both.
The sequence should follow what is actually happening during the promotion, not a standard template copied from another brand.
Change the plan once a customer buys
A customer should not keep receiving the same BFCM messages after they have already purchased.
Once someone buys, they may need to leave later sale audiences. The promoted product may no longer be relevant. A complementary product may make more sense. A first-time buyer may need useful post-purchase information instead of another reminder about the same sale.
This matters more during BFCM because customer status can change quickly.
Someone can move from “has not purchased” to “just bought” between two scheduled emails.
The audience should change with that.
Make sure the plan can actually be produced
BFCM often creates more work at exactly the time teams have less room for mistakes.
There may be more emails, more designs, more customer groups, more product changes, and more last-minute updates.
That makes execution part of the planning process.
Not every campaign needs a completely new design. Not every customer group needs its own email. Some content can be prepared early. Other parts, such as product availability, may need to stay flexible until closer to the send.
A complicated plan is not automatically a better one.
If the team creates too many versions to manage properly, the extra complexity stops helping.
Use current data to change the plan when needed
A data-driven BFCM plan should not stay fixed just because it was approved two weeks earlier.
Customer behavior can change during the promotion. One category may start getting more attention than expected. A product may sell faster than planned. Some customers may buy early, while others may show strong interest without purchasing. Inventory may change. That information should affect what comes next.
A campaign should not go out unchanged if the data now points to a better decision.
This is also where AI can help.
AI can continuously look across purchase history, customer behavior, product interest, and inventory to surface changes worth paying attention to. It can help identify customer groups or campaign opportunities that would be difficult to find manually during a busy period.
The marketer still decides what should run.
AI helps find the opportunity faster. The final decision stays with the marketer.
A good BFCM plan starts before the calendar
The calendar matters because the team needs to know what is going out and when.
But the stronger decisions happen before the dates are filled in.
Decide what the business wants to achieve, what products matter, what offer makes sense, who should receive it, and what changes once someone buys.
Then use current customer and business data to adjust the plan as BFCM unfolds.
That gives the team structure without forcing it to follow decisions that no longer make sense.
Nexie is a retention marketing agent for e-commerce brands. It reads your customer data across engagement, recency, category interest and lifetime value together, surfaces the audiences worth campaigning to, and builds those campaigns for your team to review and approve, inside the guardrails and marketing policies you set. See how it works →