The 10 Commandments of Black Friday

We've been running Black Friday for DTC brands at Growth Collective for over a decade. Every year, we compile what worked, what flopped and what the data showed across the brands we manage, and we bake it into how we plan the next peak.

This year, I brought that playbook to the Learning Stage at eComm North 2026. These are the 10 Commandments, built from last year's BFCM data across 15 DTC brands. Watch the full keynote above, then use them as your checklist for peak. Every slide, stat and framework is in the free keynote deck.

The 10 Commandments

I. Leverage Consumer Behaviour

Study how your customer shops during peak before you build a single offer or campaign. Pull last year's Meta data and Shopify data side by side, and plan around what they show you. Here's what ours showed across 15 brands.

Meta will tell you CPMs rise 150 to 200% at peak. In our data, they rose 70%, and only for a few days. The two weeks before Black Friday, when demand is already building and CPMs haven't moved, are the cheapest reach of the season.

Overnight, almost nothing. Then 7 AM hits, revenue jumps 3.7x in an hour, and it doesn't let up until midnight. Plan your budgets, creative and emails as a 16-hour shift, not a morning launch and a check-in after lunch.

See the day that quietly outsold Cyber Monday in the deck →

II. Define Your Core & Secondary Offers

You live or die in Q4 by your offer. Everything else is execution. Your goal is to multiply the cart, by raising AOV or items per cart, and to bring in high value customers at a lower CPA. Slash prices across the board and you attract price-conscious shoppers who may never buy again. So replace the single blanket discount with two layers.

To decide which offer is core and which is secondary, rate each one from 1 to 5 through the same 5 lenses we use with our clients:

1. Ease & capacity. Can your team launch it fast, with the stock to back it? If your team is confused about how to run it, your customers will be too.
2. Perceived value. Would a customer brag about it?
3. Does the math work? After the discount, is there still buffer in your CPA?
4. Lifetime value. Is it on the SKUs that drive repeat purchase?
5. Marketability. Can it become one scroll-stopping line or hook? This lens usually decides what's core.

Score your own offers with our free Offer Calculator →

III. Know. Every. Number.

When CPMs are up 70%, you can't afford to send traffic to the wrong place. Pull your last 3, 6 and 9 months of ad data and answer three questions before you go live.

1. Where should your ads drive? Break down spend, CPA, AOV and conversion rate by destination. For one brand, the product page had the lowest CPA, but a landing page lifted AOV from $608 to $714 for about $7 more in CPA, with the best conversion rate and ROAS in the account. On peak days, that's the trade you want.
2. Which SKUs should lead? Build your core offer around the SKU with the most volume and the best CPA. A low-spend SKU with a high AOV and strong ROAS is a secondary offer waiting to happen.
3. Which formats and creators earned their spend? Pull a full year of creative data by format and creator. Scale the creators with the best CPA, then ask them for new hooks and end cards built around your offer. You don't need new videos.

See the full destination and SKU breakdown in the deck →

IV. Bigger List = Bigger Result

Grow your list now. Every subscriber you add before Black Friday is revenue you collect on Black Friday, without paying peak CPMs to reach them again.

Start with your pop-up. Here are 3 of the 6 fixes we make for every client, and none of them need a new tech stack:

For Black Friday itself, don't replace your evergreen pop-up. It should already have your best opt-in rate of the year. Keep its design, then add a countdown timer, Black Friday language and a second button.

V. Start Early

Go live about two weeks before Black Friday. Your customers are already shopping, and the data in Commandment I shows the cheapest reach of the season comes before the peak. Starting early gives you five advantages:

1. Lower costs. CPMs are lower two weeks out, so you reach warm and net-new audiences for a fraction of what they cost later.
2. Wallet share. Your customer has a set budget for gifts and for themselves. Show up late and they've already spent it somewhere else.
3. Time for the algorithms. Meta, Google and TikTok need time to learn. A sale that launches Thursday night gives them none.
4. Campaign and creative control. Your media buyer needs time too: to split campaigns by offer, cut losing creative and make budget calls.
5. Budget flexibility. A longer flight lets you choose how to pace your spend.

There are two ways to pace it. Same budget, same flight, very different outcomes:

VI. Creative Abundance & Diversity

Run fewer campaigns and load each one with more creative. Meta's Andromeda update rewards variety, which we've been preaching for a couple of years. Mix statics, UGC, whitelisted creator ads, carousels and catalog, and give the algorithm options to choose from. Use the prep from Commandment III to decide what to build.

Here's one brand's Black Friday on Meta: $48.2K spent in a single day at a 5.3x ROAS, with 7 ad formats live.

See which formats drove the cheapest purchases, plus our BFCM ad swipe file →

VII. Urgency Everywhere

Every year we audit accounts, and the only urgency we find is a headline that says "Ends tonight." Put a live deadline on every channel your customer sees:

1. Email. Add a live countdown to the moment your deal ends, with Sendtric or Klaviyo's built-in timer.
2. Social. Put the deadline in your ad headlines and primary text, not just the creative.
3. Pop-up. Show the time left, then make it feel like they're unlocking something: "Enter to unlock."
4. Google. Use countdown customizers, a dynamic headline that counts down to the end of your sale. They've been around for years and almost nobody uses them. Don't leave Google behind.

VIII. Hourly Optimization

This is the biggest unlock in the playbook. On Black Friday, build a sheet with 24 rows, one for every hour. Each hour, pull spend, purchases and revenue from every ad platform, and pull Shopify sales right beside them. Then run your decisions off MER, not platform ROAS.

1. It gets around attribution delays. Meta's attribution lags. At noon, Ads Manager might say an ad is dead while Shopify shows the sales coming in. Cut it and you lose them.
2. It unlocks scale. You can add budget the hour something works, not the next morning.
3. It unlocks speed. You benchmark against last year in real time and make changes all day, instead of one check-in after lunch.

See our hourly sheet in the deck →

IX. Email: The More The Merrier

Email drives about half your peak revenue, and every brand you compete with is in the same inbox on the same day. Win it with three things:

1. Configuration: widen the audience. All year you protect deliverability by sending to engaged segments. This weekend, add lapsed customers, potential purchasers, segment-specific offers and your gift guide subscribers. In Klaviyo, turn off Smart Sending and Reputation Repair, or they'll quietly hold back the people you're trying to reach.
2. Volume and cadence: send more. Send one piece of marketing communication every 2 to 3 hours, rotating core and secondary offers between email and SMS. A constant flow keeps MER steady through the day.
3. Timing and urgency: beat the hour. About 75% of brands send right on the hour. Send 10 to 15 minutes before it, use local send time, and put countdown timers on your final sends.

Get our full Black Friday send calendar in the deck →

X. Revise Your Core Flows

Leave no flow behind. Your evergreen flows carry evergreen offers that look weak next to your BFCM promo, and most of them run over 3 to 7 days. Rebuild them for the weekend:

1. Reduce the send time. Compress days into hours. Our Black Friday versions send every 20 minutes, all on day zero.
2. Change the messaging. Swap the evergreen offer for your BFCM offer, and add a countdown.
3. Focus on the three that matter most. Welcome, Browse Abandonment and Checkout Abandonment.

Put It Into Action

Ten commandments is a lot to execute in two weeks. Start with the ones that move the most revenue for the least effort: define your core offer, fix your pop-up, and set up your hourly sheet before Black Friday morning.

If you want a second set of eyes on your plan, we're booking 2027 strategy calls for paid media, creative and email. Every call includes a free audit of your account, with three changes we'd make right away. Book a strategy call here.