How to Personalize Your BFCM Emails Using Customer Data

Most brands send broadly similar BFCM emails to their entire customer base. The discount may apply to everyone, but the products customers care about and the way they respond to promotions can be very different.

You do not need to create a separate email for every customer to make BFCM more personal. A practical approach is to identify one or two customer differences that matter most, create a few campaign versions around them, and use the same logic across the full BFCM sequence.

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.

For most ecommerce brands, category interest and discount sensitivity are the best places to start.

Decide how many campaign versions you can realistically manage

Personalization becomes harder to execute as the number of campaign versions grows.

If you create three customer groups and plan four emails for each group, you already have twelve versions to manage. Add another way of segmenting customers and that number grows quickly.

Decide how targeted you want to be before you start building the campaign.

A smaller number of well-defined versions is usually better than a large number of segments that the team cannot manage properly.

Create another campaign version only when it changes something meaningful for the customer, such as the products shown, the offer, or the message.

Use category interest if your store has a few clear product categories

Category interest is a strong first choice when your store has three or four major categories that account for a large share of sales.

Customers who usually buy from different categories should not always receive the same product selection.

If one group mainly buys skincare and another mainly buys haircare, you can keep the same BFCM structure and offer while changing the products shown in the email.

Use purchase history to identify the categories customers already buy from. You can also use recent browsing or product interest when that data is available.

Each version should feature products that make sense for that group. In most cases, that means leading with the strongest products from the relevant category rather than showing the same bestsellers to everyone.

This works well when the catalogue has a few clear categories. If the store has many small or unrelated categories, category-based personalization can become harder to manage.

Use discount behavior if category-based personalization does not fit

The next useful difference is how customers usually respond to promotions.

Some customers buy regularly at full price. Others tend to purchase when there is a sale.

Those two groups do not need to receive the same BFCM treatment.

Customers who normally buy during promotions can receive a stronger discount-led message because price is already an important part of how they shop.

Customers who often buy at full price may still receive a BFCM offer, but the campaign does not have to lead entirely with the discount. The email can give more space to the product, what makes it useful, or what is new about it.

The discount can also be milder if the brand does not need a deeper offer to get that group to buy.

The point is not to remove promotions from BFCM. It is to avoid assuming that every customer needs the same level of discount and the same message.

Combine category interest and discount behavior if your team can manage it

Brands with enough time and customer volume can use both.

A skincare buyer who usually buys during promotions may receive one version. A skincare buyer who normally pays full price may receive another.

Both emails can show skincare products, but the offer and message can be different.

The same approach can then be repeated for other major categories.

This gives the brand more control over what customers see and how the offer is presented.

It also creates more work, so the extra versions should have a clear reason to exist. If the team cannot manage them properly, use one personalization dimension instead.

Keep the same personalization across the whole BFCM sequence

BFCM usually involves more than one email.

A typical sequence may include a teaser, the main sale email, a reminder, and a final-hours email.

If you personalize the main email, use the same customer logic across the rest of the sequence.

A customer who receives a skincare-focused launch email should not suddenly receive a reminder built around unrelated categories.

The same applies to discounts. If one customer group receives a milder offer with more product education, do not switch to a very different offer in the next email unless there is a clear reason.

The copy and urgency can change as BFCM progresses. The products and offer logic should stay consistent.

Track exactly what each customer group is receiving

Once you have several customer groups and several emails, it becomes easy to lose track of what is going to whom.

Keep one simple plan that shows the audience, product focus, offer, and sequence for each group.

This does not need to become a large planning system. It just needs to make it clear what each group should receive and when.

AI can handle much of the manual execution

The strategy is simple to understand. The harder part is managing the segments, versions, and sequence.

Someone has to decide which customers belong in each group, make sure they receive the right email, create the different versions, and keep the product and offer logic consistent across all of them.

AI can help with this work.

It can analyze purchase history and customer behavior to suggest useful segments. It can group customers based on category interest or discount behavior. It can create a tracker for the different campaign versions and help build the emails for each group.

It can also help update the audience as customers buy during BFCM, so people who have already converted do not keep receiving the same sale messages.

The marketer still decides how much personalization to use, which offer to run, and what finally gets sent.

Personalize the parts of the campaign that matter most

BFCM personalization does not need to mean hundreds of customer segments.

Start with one customer difference that changes the campaign in a meaningful way. For many brands, that will be category interest or discount behavior.

If the team has enough time and volume, combine both.

Then use the same logic across the teaser, launch, reminder, and final push.

That gives customers a more relevant BFCM campaign without making the plan difficult to manage.

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 →