Black Friday has become one of the most important trading periods in the e-Commerce calendar. For many retailers, the final quarter can determine whether annual revenue targets are achieved or missed.
And the scale of the opportunity continues to grow.
According to Shopify, merchants on its platform generated $14.6 billion in sales during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2025, representing a 27% increase on the previous year.
Meanwhile, Adobe Analytics reported that online spending exceeded $4 billion on 25 individual days during the 2025 holiday shopping season, compared with 18 days in 2024.
The message for retailers is clear: consumer demand remains substantial, but the opportunity extends well beyond a single promotional weekend.
For performance marketers, however, the bigger question is how profitably that demand can be captured.
At 360 OM, we believe Black Friday success increasingly depends on how effectively brands connect their entire e-Commerce operation, from paid media and product feeds to conversion rate optimisation, customer data and retention.
Here are seven areas e-Commerce leaders should be prioritising ahead of Black Friday 2026.
1. Stop Treating Black Friday as a Four-Day Event
The traditional Black Friday playbook was relatively straightforward.
Increase advertising budgets, launch promotional creative, send a series of emails and maximise revenue over the final weekend of November.
That approach is becoming increasingly restrictive.
Consumers are researching products earlier, comparing prices across multiple retailers and responding to promotional activity throughout November.
For brands, this creates an opportunity to influence purchase decisions before the most competitive advertising period begins.
Rather than concentrating the entire strategy around Black Friday itself, retailers should consider a phased approach.
October: Build demand
Use paid social, video and prospecting campaigns to introduce products, build engaged audiences and test creative messaging.
Early November: Capture intent
Increase visibility across relevant Google Search and Shopping queries while introducing promotional messaging and growing owned audiences.
Black Friday week: Convert demand
Prioritise proven products, strong offers, conversion-focused creative and responsive budget allocation.
December: Retain and reactivate
Use post-purchase communications, cross-selling and customer segmentation to turn seasonal transactions into longer-term customer relationships.
The brands that enter Black Friday with an established audience and a clear understanding of demand will be better positioned than those attempting to generate everything during the promotional weekend.
2. Your Google Shopping Feed Could Be More Important Than Your Next Budget Increase
Google Shopping and Performance Max remain important acquisition channels for e-Commerce retailers.
Yet product feed optimisation is still frequently overlooked when brands prepare for seasonal campaigns.
Retailers can spend considerable time adjusting campaign budgets and bidding strategies while neglecting the underlying product information that helps Google’s systems understand their inventory.
Product titles, descriptions, attributes, categorisation, pricing and availability all influence how products are represented and matched to relevant shopping opportunities.
During Black Friday, these details become particularly important.
Retailers should be reviewing:
- Product titles and attributes for relevance to high-intent searches.
- Promotional pricing and sale-price accuracy.
- Inventory availability and feed freshness.
- Product-level profitability and historical conversion performance.
- Opportunities to segment products by margin, demand and commercial priority.
The objective should be to direct advertising investment towards products with the strongest commercial opportunity, rather than simply increasing spend across the entire catalogue.
For retailers managing thousands of SKUs, this requires more than occasional manual feed updates.
It requires a structured approach to product intelligence, merchandising and ongoing optimisation.
3. Creative Volume Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage
One of the biggest challenges facing e-Commerce advertisers is creative fatigue.
Meta and other advertising platforms have become increasingly reliant on automated delivery systems, making creative inputs an important lever for influencing performance.
For retailers, this changes how Black Friday campaigns should be planned.
Producing three promotional graphics and running them throughout November is unlikely to provide sufficient variation for a sophisticated testing programme.
Brands should be developing multiple creative approaches, including:
- Product-led demonstrations and benefit-focused messaging.
- User-generated content and creator-style advertising.
- Promotional offers and urgency-led messaging.
- Lifestyle imagery and aspirational product storytelling.
- Short-form video and motion-based creative.
- Category-specific and audience-specific variations.
Artificial intelligence is also changing the economics of creative production.
AI-assisted production workflows can help brands develop concepts, visual variations and advertising assets more quickly, reducing the time between identifying a creative opportunity and testing it.
However, producing more assets should not become the objective in itself.
The real advantage comes from combining creative production speed with disciplined performance testing.
Brands need to understand which messages, formats and visual approaches are generating incremental demand, rather than simply producing more advertising content.
4. Conversion Rate Optimisation Could Deliver More Value Than Additional Media Spend
During Black Friday, most retailers focus heavily on traffic acquisition.
But additional visitors have limited commercial value if the website fails to convert them efficiently.
Consider a retailer generating 100,000 sessions with an average order value of £75.
A 0.5 percentage-point improvement in conversion rate generates an additional £37,500 in revenue without increasing traffic.
This is an illustrative scenario, but it demonstrates the commercial importance of conversion performance.
Ahead of Black Friday, e-Commerce brands should be examining their entire purchase journey.
Are product pages communicating value clearly? Are delivery charges visible early enough? Are mobile visitors experiencing unnecessary friction? Are promotional codes working correctly? Are customers abandoning checkout at particular stages?
Even relatively small problems can become expensive when traffic volumes increase.
There is also a growing opportunity to use e-Commerce platform data, behavioural analytics and automated anomaly detection to identify potential conversion problems earlier.
A sudden decline in checkout completion, for example, could indicate a payment issue, unexpected shipping charges or a technical problem.
Identifying that issue within hours rather than days could materially affect Black Friday revenue.
Conversion performance should be monitored with the same urgency as advertising performance.
5. Revenue Growth Means Little Without Understanding Profitability
Black Friday can produce impressive revenue figures.
But revenue alone provides an incomplete picture of commercial performance.
Aggressive discounting, increased advertising costs, delivery subsidies and product-level margin differences can all affect profitability.
A campaign generating £100,000 in sales at a strongly reported ROAS may still produce disappointing financial results if the products sold have limited contribution margin.
This is why e-Commerce leaders should be looking beyond individual platform metrics.
Important measures include:
Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER): Total revenue relative to total marketing investment.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The cost of acquiring a new customer.
Contribution margin: Revenue remaining after relevant variable costs, including product costs, discounts, fulfilment and marketing.
New versus returning customer revenue: An indication of whether growth is coming from acquisition or existing customer demand.
Product-level profitability: Understanding which products and categories contribute most effectively to the business.
These metrics become particularly important when advertising budgets are being increased rapidly.
Google and Meta can each report strong performance while the wider business experiences declining efficiency.
A more complete commercial view helps retailers make better decisions about where to allocate their next pound of investment.
6. Email and CRM Should Be Central to Your Black Friday Strategy
For many e-Commerce brands, customer retention remains an underutilised growth opportunity.
Black Friday creates an ideal opportunity to reactivate existing customers, increase purchase frequency and strengthen customer relationships.
Yet email marketing is often treated as a supporting channel rather than a central component of the commercial strategy.
A more sophisticated approach starts with segmentation.
High-value customers, recent purchasers, lapsed customers, first-time buyers and engaged non-purchasers should not necessarily receive identical promotional messaging.
For example, existing VIP customers might receive early access to a sale, while lapsed customers receive a more targeted reactivation incentive.
Brands should also review their automated customer journeys ahead of the peak period.
Welcome sequences, browse abandonment, checkout abandonment, post-purchase communications and replenishment flows can all contribute to incremental revenue.
Platforms such as Klaviyo allow retailers to build increasingly sophisticated customer journeys using behavioural and transactional data.
But the greatest opportunity comes from connecting CRM activity with the wider acquisition strategy.
Paid media can introduce customers to a brand. Email and SMS can help convert and retain them. Customer insights can then inform future media and merchandising decisions.
The most effective Black Friday strategy connects acquisition and retention rather than managing them as isolated disciplines.
7. The Biggest Opportunity May Be What Happens After Black Friday
One of the most overlooked aspects of Black Friday is the value of customers acquired during the promotional period.
Retailers frequently assess success by comparing weekend revenue against the previous year.
While useful, that approach can miss a much larger commercial opportunity.
A customer acquired during Black Friday may go on to make several additional purchases over the following 12 months.
Alternatively, that customer may purchase once at a substantial discount and never return.
The difference has significant implications for the economics of acquisition.
Brands should therefore be asking:
- What proportion of Black Friday customers are new to the business?
- How does their acquisition cost compare with other periods?
- Which products attract customers with stronger repeat-purchase potential?
- How quickly do customers make a second purchase?
- What proportion of promotional customers return at full price?
Understanding these patterns allows retailers to make more informed decisions about promotional investment.
For some brands, accepting a lower initial margin may be commercially sensible if the acquired customers demonstrate strong lifetime value.
For others, aggressive discounting may attract customers who are unlikely to purchase again.
The answer lies in customer data, not simply the volume of orders generated during the sale.
The Next Competitive Advantage: Connecting Data, Media and Technology
The performance marketing industry has undergone a significant transformation.
Advertising platforms are increasingly automated, creative production is being accelerated by AI, and e-Commerce businesses have access to more data than ever before.
Yet many retailers still operate with disconnected systems.
Advertising teams optimise campaigns. e-Commerce teams manage websites. CRM teams focus on email. Commercial teams monitor profitability.
Each function may perform well individually while opportunities across the wider business remain unidentified.
We believe the next stage of e-Commerce growth will be driven by brands that connect these disciplines more effectively.
At 360 OM, our approach combines performance marketing expertise with proprietary technology, automation and e-Commerce intelligence.
This includes connecting advertising performance with product-level data, identifying search opportunities, accelerating creative testing and using e-Commerce insights to support conversion and commercial decisions.
The objective is to give brands a clearer understanding of where growth opportunities exist and how to act on them faster.
Black Friday provides an important test of that approach.
When competition increases and decisions need to be made quickly, the ability to connect information across the business becomes particularly valuable.
Final Thoughts: Black Friday 2026 Will Reward Better Decisions, Not Simply Bigger Budgets
There will always be retailers willing to spend more during Black Friday.
But increasing advertising investment without addressing creative performance, product selection, conversion efficiency and customer retention is unlikely to deliver sustainable growth.
The strongest e-Commerce businesses will approach Black Friday as a coordinated commercial operation.
They will understand which products deserve investment, which audiences offer the greatest opportunity, which creative messages generate demand and where customers encounter friction.
They will also look beyond the promotional weekend, recognising that the true value of Black Friday extends into the customer relationships built afterwards.
Black Friday success in 2026 will be determined by how intelligently brands deploy their budgets, data, creative and technology together.
And for e-Commerce leaders, that preparation needs to start now.
About 360 OM
360 OM is a performance marketing and e-Commerce growth agency combining Google Ads, paid social, CRM and AI creative and proprietary technology to help ambitious retailers achieve profitable growth.
Our integrated approach connects media investment with e-Commerce intelligence, enabling brands to identify opportunities, improve performance and make better commercial decisions.
Planning your Black Friday 2026 strategy?
Speak to 360 OM about building a more connected, commercially focused e-Commerce growth strategy.
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