Black Friday 2025: Best Tips to Drive Holiday Success for Fashion E-Commerce Brands
Black Friday continues to dominate as one of the most lucrative sales events of the year. In 2024, U.S. consumers spent a record $10.3 billion online, a 3.2% increase from 2023 according to Adobe Analytics.
With shoppers researching earlier, buying faster, and using AI-powered search tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT to compare deals, it’s more important than ever for fashion e-commerce brands to prepare strategically.
A well-planned campaign can help you turn this surge in traffic into long-term growth — not just a one-day sales spike.
3 Steps to Prepare for Black Friday
In this guide, you’ll learn three essential steps to prepare your business for Black Friday 2025 success:
- Define your product offers
- Identify and plan your promotional strategy
- Optimize your technology
Define your Product Offers
The first step is to clearly define the products you want to promote, backed by real data from your analytics, customer behavior, and past sales. Balance profitability with excitement to drive conversions without eroding margins.
How to decide what to promote:
- Focus on higher-margin products: Feature items with healthy profit margins and bundle them with complementary pieces to increase your average order value.
- Check inventory levels: Ensure you have enough stock to fulfill increased demand and avoid overselling.
- Plan fulfillment: Prepare your team and logistics partners early. Communicate estimated delivery times clearly on your site.
Promotional Ideas for 2025
Not every brand can afford 50% discounts, and that’s okay. These creative promotions help maintain brand value while still driving urgency:
BOGO (Buy-one, get-one 50% off): This is a classic promotion that appeals to both new and returning customers. By offering a discount on the second item, you not only boost the chances of selling multiple products but also increase your average order value. This type of promotion works well for complementary items, allowing customers to feel like they're getting more value for their money while moving additional stock.
Upsells and cross-sells: This strategy involves encouraging customers to either upgrade their current purchase (upsell) or add complementary products to their cart (cross-sell).
Upselling typically promotes a higher-end version of the product they're considering, such as a premium edition or a larger quantity, increasing the total order value. Cross-selling, on the other hand, suggests related products that complement the main purchase, like matching accessories, care products, or bundled items. These tactics can significantly boost revenue per transaction while providing customers with a more tailored shopping experience that meets their needs. For example, if someone is purchasing a winter coat, you could suggest a matching scarf (cross-sell) or offer an upgraded version of the coat with premium materials (upsell).
Gift with purchase: Everyone loves a freebie. By offering a gift with purchase, such as a small accessory or sample product, you incentivize customers to complete their purchase while enhancing their overall shopping experience. This strategy is particularly effective when the gift is perceived as high-value or exclusive, encouraging shoppers to hit a minimum spend threshold to qualify for the free item.
Early access to new collections: Create a sense of exclusivity by offering early access to your upcoming collections or limited-edition items for loyal customers or email subscribers. This can make your audience feel special and appreciated, while simultaneously driving early sales and helping you gauge customer interest in new products. This promotion can be combined with a "members-only" sale for extra impact.
Free shipping or gift cards with a minimum purchase: Shipping fees are one of the biggest barriers to conversion for online shoppers. Offering free shipping above a certain order value encourages customers to add more items to their cart to avoid shipping costs. Similarly, offering gift cards for future purchases can incentivize customers to spend more now, while ensuring repeat business when they redeem the gift card later.
Limited-time bundles or gift sets: Curate a selection of products into special bundles or gift sets that are available only for a short period. This approach not only helps you move inventory but also provides customers with a convenient, value-packed purchase option that simplifies their shopping experience. Highlighting the savings compared to buying items individually can make the offer even more enticing, especially for holiday gift shoppers.
Pro Tip: Don’t just target loyal customers — position your brand to attract first-time buyers who are open to discovering new brands during Black Friday.
Identify and Plan Your Promotional Strategy
The second step you want to do is define and plan your promotional strategy. BFCM is the most popular shopping day of the year. Your promotional strategy should be aligned with your goals and start well in advance of Black Friday. Here's a breakdown of how to ensure your products and brand stand out.
5 Key Elements of a Great Promotion:
- Define your timeline. Start promoting early to build anticipation. Ideally, begin by late October and ramp up in November with weekly or bi-weekly email campaigns. You can try sending 1 -2 emails per week, featuring the offer you want to promote.
- Prepare your audience. Build anticipation and excitement in advance, perhaps you can work with influencers to post sneak peeks of upcoming promotions, send teaser emails, or showcase upcoming promotions on social media to get your audience excited. This way your customers know what to expect and is ready for your offer.
- Create urgency. You want to create a sense of urgency to have your audience ready to take action as soon as the promotion starts. Use countdown timers and limited-time offers to encourage immediate action.
- Choose the right marketing channels. There are many channels in which to reach your audience. Leverage email marketing, paid ads, social media, and SEO to reach your audience effectively. Focus on the channels that have historically driven the most conversions for your business.
- Create supplementary content. Promote your brand with various content such as blogs, gift guides, videos, and other promotional materials to reinforce your brand's message and engage customers with value beyond discounts.
When to Start Promoting
Depending on the size of your business and resources you have available, you can start as early as October or around Halloween. The critical time for heightened promotions is two weeks before Black Friday, gradually increasing the urgency with daily posts, reminder emails, and retargeting ads.
4 ways to reach your audience:
- Email Marketing: Black Friday emails tend to have the highest open rates, so prioritize a strong email strategy.
- SEO: Make sure you perform quality Keyword Research prior to BFCM so that your know exactly what your audience is looking for. Target holiday-related keywords early to ensure you're visible when shoppers start searching for deals.
- Social Media: Engage with your followers through interactive posts and stories to generate buzz around your offers.
- Paid Media: Make sure to plan ahead and target your ads in a timely fashion. Ad approvals can take longer in November, don’t risk missing your campaign window.
As you can see with all that needs to be done to ensure successful holiday sales, it's important to plan your online marketing ahead of key dates this holiday season.
Don't forget to make sure to follow up with new customers, through the new year and beyond!
Optimize Your Technology
A seamless shopping experience is essential to converting Black Friday traffic into sales. Make sure that your website is optimized for performance, usability, and reliability.
Checklist to Get Your Site Holiday-Ready
First, you want to make sure your tech can handle Black Friday. Here are four key areas to focus on:
- Website UX: Check to see if there are any issues that would stop a customer from converting. Eliminate any barriers to checkout. Review your site’s navigation, speed, and mobile responsiveness to ensure a smooth customer experience.
- SEO: Make sure people can find you and products you are offering. Ensure your website is search engine-friendly with optimized product pages, meta descriptions, and holiday-related keywords.
- Ad Accounts: Ensure your paid ads are set up on the right channels and are optimized for your target audience.
- Analytics: Do you have software in place that can track orders, sales & shipments? Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor site performance, track customer behavior, and optimize your campaigns in real-time.
Plan your campaign in advance (now) and upload your assets early to ensure they are approved in time for the launch of your Black Friday campaign. Creative approvals (paid ads) are a huge pain point and could cause an advertiser to completely miss out on running ads for BFCM.
Reduce Friction for First-Time Buyers
In addition to these tech optimizations, list expected delivery dates, return policies, and payment options clearly on your website to reduce friction for new customers. Remember, first-time buyers also need to be catered to. So make it easy for them to buy on your website. That's why it's important that you take the steps listed above so that you don't lose them dues to a glitch on your website.
Extra tips to give your e-commerce marketing a boost this holiday season:
- Show "order-by" dates when a customer needs to order a product to get it before the holidays
- Show countdown timers on your website and emails leading up to the sale
- Make sure your messaging and branding is consistent from your ads, social posts and make sure your messaging matches on your website
- Have several online payment options such as Paypal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, or Recurly
- Give customers more flexibility with payment installments such as Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, or Sezzle
- Displays scarcity messaging, such as “Only X-left”, "X people have this in their carts", “X people viewing this product now” to encourage quicker purchases.
- Make the return policy easy to find. Have it near the add to cart button
- Make sure chat is prominent and that your support team is able to respond quickly.
- Leverage AI search optimization. Ensure your content is clear, structured, and descriptive so it appears in AI-powered search results like Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity.
- If your brand values conscious consumption, consider participating in Green Friday or donating a portion of proceeds to a cause aligned with your mission.
Final Thoughts
With record-breaking online sales projected again for Black Friday 2025, preparation is the key to success.
By defining profitable offers, planning a strategic promotional campaign, and optimizing your website for speed and usability, your fashion e-commerce brand can capture attention, convert traffic, and keep those new customers coming back long after the holiday season.
✨ Start planning now — the earlier you prepare, the more profitable your Black Friday will be.
