The holiday shopping season seems to creep up sooner than expected every year. As soon as the dust settles from one year, it feels like it’s time to start strategizing for the next. And when you look at the growth of the holiday shopping season alongside the rise of ecommerce, it’s no surprise why.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still two of the biggest revenue days of the year for ecommerce stores, and they sit snugly within the infamous Cyber 5 shopping spree. In 2024, nearly 200 million people shopped during Cyber 5, which is a stat 7.4% higher than the National Retail Federation estimated (and is the second-highest figure to date).
Once again, the 2024 holiday season smashed records and obliterated expectations as US shoppers spent $241.4 billion online, an 8.7% YoY increase. Despite the lingering worries of inflation and economic uncertainty in the US, consumers still turned out and celebrated friends and family throughout the holiday season.
Each year brings new ebbs and flows, economic and social shifts, and changing consumer trends. By now, though, we’ve learned to count on one thing, no matter what turmoil is happening: The span between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday are undoubtedly the most popular shopping days of the year.
Preparing for a massive Cyber 5 can involve months of stressful work, selecting and securing holiday offerings, ensuring adequate inventory to fill orders throughout the season, tariff-proofing your pricing, planning marketing campaigns, and updating your website.
Simply making out your to-do list can take quite a bit of time (and look a lot like a CVS receipt by the end).
If that sounds overwhelming to you, you’re not alone. The good news is that prepping your online store for the onslaught of holiday shopping doesn’t have to be so stressful if you take your strategy one step at a time and set just a few manageable (yet highly lucrative) goals.
Here are four easy tasks you can do now to reduce the stress, get prepared, and improve your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and every-day-in-between ecommerce strategy this holiday season.
Task 1: Build up the Hype for Black Friday ASAP
Even though you have months to go before Black Friday hits, now is the perfect time to start building anticipation and making your brand everyone’s holiday shopping go-to. What can you do to create a Black Friday ecommerce strategy that will make your store a standout for shoppers?
First, look to the oldest tool of the trade — marketing. Set your sales goals for this holiday shopping season and start to map out tactics for how to meet them. If you want to sell 1,000 products on Black Friday, you have to plant that seed with your shoppers well ahead of time.
You could start by polling your customers. Asking real people about their gifting priorities, who they’re buying for, or wish lists lets them feel heard, engaged, and piques their interest. Give them sneak peeks of this year’s hot items, post teasers on social media, and start creating mini ad campaigns to sprinkle in your email newsletters, social channels, and website popups or landing pages.
These regular promotions, even if small, can reap big revenue. According to Adobe Analytics, brands that rev up their holiday messaging in late summer capture roughly 30% more top-of-funnel traffic in Q4.
In a nutshell, it’s never too early to start talking about your holiday deals and generating some amped-up awareness. When Cyber 5 rolls around, you want your brand to be synonymous with “the best gifts ever” so that shopping your store is a no-brainer.
Give potential customers a reason to get on your email list now, whether it’s with free giveaways, exclusive discounts, exclusive access to products, and early access to Cyber 5 sales. These marketing tactics don’t require a ton of techy know-how or time, and they’re effective for getting your brand on buyers’ radar.
The more excitement you build beforehand means your audience will be ready to shop and spend at your store first when Black Friday and Cyber Monday finally arrive.
Pssst! Remember to reward your loyal customers for shopping with an incentive to return even after Black Friday for more shopping and great customer experiences.
Task 2: Gird Your Email Marketing
Related to the first task, this task is more of a logistical to-do to tackle. Once your Black Friday-Cyber Monday-hype-up content is ready to launch, email marketing is your rocket ship. Don’t be caught off guard and scrambling to segment, schedule, and automate emails.
Now, in the dead of summer, is the perfect time to get sorted.
First, dig into any email marketing insights you’ve gathered since the last holiday shopping season. Did you get any customer feedback you can use to tweak emails and make them more effective? Which subject lines had the most impact? Was button color a deal-breaker? What types of A/B or split testing have you conducted? When was your audience’s prime email open rates?
Making even minor changes from what you’ve learned can mean big jumps on open rates, click-throughs, traffic, and conversion, so consider all the details in order to maximize your Cyber 5 impact.
Pro tip: Nearly half of online merchants don’t bother to test their email campaigns before big sends. If you’re new to A/B testing, here’s an easy step-by-step tutorial to get you started with split testing and help you improve your Black Friday ecommerce strategy. Even light testing will instantly put you ahead of many competitors.
Second, use this lull before the seasonal storm to sort your customer data. That’s right, we’re talking clean and organized data. When you sort your shoppers by what they bought, how much they spent, and how often they shop, you can create highly personalized emails leading up to the holidays. (We recommend also segmenting people by any holiday-specific intel you gather from polls in Task 1.)
At the bare minimum, it’s time to get out the proverbial shears and start pruning your lists to ensure your emails are having the biggest impact possible.
Third, don’t wait until the morning of your Black Friday announcements email to double- and triple-check its content, lists, and more. The last thing you want is to hit a glitch or snag that keeps your emails out of shoppers’ inboxes. Scrutinize your links, your images, your email lists and segments, and your CTA buttons.
Make sure everything is working like a dream so that your Thanksgiving is full of more time with family and less time putting out email fires.
Task 3: Set up Some Holiday-focused Landing Pages
Engaging. Intriguing. Alluring. Irresistible. Those are all adjectives you wanna achieve with your Black Friday and Cyber Monday landing pages, and the good news is that they’re a relatively low lift for ecommerce merchants to set up.
Landing pages are an increasingly vital component of ecommerce shopping, and especially effective ones can reap a 10% conversion rate. When was the last time you landed on an online store that didn’t greet you with a well-timed pop-up offering you a discount or special in exchange for your email address or phone number? It’s probably been a minute, which means these puppies are expected by shoppers searching for deals.
Landing pages and popups encourage customers to join your email marketing, snag some deals, buy ASAP, and head to other pages across your website. Black Friday-focused popups are especially powerful, garnering more page views, engagement, and even 100% more collected emails than a non-seasonal popup.
This is huge news, as a bigger list early on gives you added opportunities to nurture loyalty and ask shoppers for their business as the big shopping days approach. To make the most of landing pages at this time of year, direct customers to special Black Friday or Cyber Monday sneak peeks, limited-time specials, and bundle buys.
You might even consider creating a bit of FOMO and urgency with exclusive deals just for those days, including buy-it-now deadlines, customer loyalty rewards, and countdown timers.
Creating landing pages doesn’t have to be hard work. If your email provider doesn’t already offer landing page templates, consider platforms like Mailchimp and Leadpages. They offer flexible plans that enable you to easily design, schedule, and launch landing pages in hardly any time at all. And with their fast integration and big libraries of templates, you don’t have to lean on your tech or creative teams too much.
Plus, don’t forget to optimize landing pages for mobile shoppers. Over the past two years, mobile shopping has grown 44% and become a preferred channel. In addition to viewing landing pages on your computer, test them on your phone and tablet. We also recommend asking your trusted advisors, associates, friends, and even your mom to try them on their mobile devices to check for speed, ease, and any other funny business.
Task 4: Optimize Your Store for Online Gifting
Last holiday season, 71% of consumers said their preferred way to shop for the holidays was through online retailers. What’s more is that people who planned to shop for gifts exclusively online was up 24% over 2023 (while those who planned to shop exclusively in-store decreased more than 6%).
Modern shoppers are settling into a balance of in-person versus online shopping, choosing each for specific reasons. For example, shoppers are more likely to head to a store in person when they want responsive customer service or to simply enjoy the ambiance of browsing physical store shelves. Conversely, shoppers head to their favorite ecommerce brands when they want to compare prices, get inspired, check product availability, and save time.
That said, online shopping is taking up a big chunk of the holiday shopping pie, especially when it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So, how do you make these online experiences as gift-centric as possible?
In ecommerce, we’ve been made to believe that if the product images are great, the button colors are tested, the copy is ace, and the ads are getting clicked, then the gift-giving experience will work itself out. People will simply know how to buy your products as gifts, right?
All of those facets are critical to the typical online shopping experience, but when your shoppers have to figure out gifting logistics like gift notes, shipping details, endless transactions, and the last-minute scramble, your user experience trumps all.
The concept is simple: To sell more gifts, you need to make it easy for shoppers to buy more gifts.
Thankfully, you don’t have to head to the drawing board right before the holidays to hash out how you’re going to code and create an entirely new purchase journey for eager gifters. Instead, preparing a frictionless, thoughtful customer experience specifically built for swift gifting has already been done for you.
Zest is a first-of-its-kind online gifting platform for ecommerce brands. With features made to simplify and scale online corporate gifting, consumer gifting, and any gifting in between, it’s a must-have for brands looking to scale gifting as a serious sales channel.
With Zest in their tech stack, ecommerce brands streamline their gifting processes with features like:
- Self-service corporate gifting storefronts
- Native Shopify multi-ship checkout
- Concierge gift order management tools
- Instant e-gifting via link, email, and text
- Private B2B gifting storefronts
- Gift order customizations through Add-ons
Each feature is meticulously designed to erase any and all friction in the gift-buying flow. Traditionally, online gifting (especially to more than one recipient) forces shoppers to contact the brand to arrange addresses and gift messages, or they have to go through the checkout again and again.
This process is time-consuming and, dare we say, soul-sucking. The truth is that the DTC purchase journey is made for people shopping for themselves. Endless tools and optimizations have been crafted over the years to help retailers sell as much as possible online, but nothing has been made to cater to someone who wants to send a gift just as swiftly and conveniently as the personal shopping CX.
Zest is the primo addition to any Black Friday and Cyber Monday strategy thanks, in part, to the ability for shoppers to select shipping dates. Which means your customers can snag your Black Friday deals and schedule the gifts to arrive right before Christmas. You can also create separate storefronts for each gift catalog you curate, then send those to your freshly organized email segments for personalized experiences.
(It’s also the perfect fit for your shoppers who need to send gifts digitally because they missed shipping cutoff windows or realized they forgot someone on their shopping list.) If you’re serious about selling more gifts this Black Friday, Zest needs to be in your tech stack yesterday.
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Four Steps to Your Own Record-setting Holiday Season in 2025
This is the year to smash records and unwrap what your store can do during the holidays. These four to-dos will turn the spotlight on your Black Friday promos, benefits, and experiences not available on your competitors’ site.
Zest makes holiday shopping easy for both you and your customers. When you combine its features with your other holiday promotions, you’ll be able to give people not just what they were looking for, but what they didn’t realize they needed until they saw it in your ecommerce store.
Having a creative and simple gifting solution for your customers will give you the leg up this holiday season, especially when they share with their friends how easy it is to shop with you.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge events and critical shopping days for nearly every online business. They can be huge for sales — and for stress if you’re not prepared. Implementing these four simple Black Friday strategies can take little time and yield big benefits for your holiday ecommerce strategy this year.
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