Discount less, sell more: how to win BFCM 2026 without giving away your margin

Black Friday used to be one day. Then it became a weekend, then a week. Now many brands start their Black Friday promotions weeks in advance.
That’s great for shoppers, but for marketers, it means everyone is competing for the same attention at the same time. This year Black Friday falls on 27 November, so if you haven’t decided your offer yet, the time to lock in is now.

The prize keeps growing
Over Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend 2025, Shopify merchants took $14.6 billion, up 27% on the year before. At the peak, that was $5.1 million a minute, and the average cart was $114.70.
In the UK, shoppers spent a record £26.9 billion online across November and December, up 4.1% year on year. That included £1.16 billion on Black Friday itself and £3.8 billion across Cyber Weekend.
The takeaway: demand is there.

The hard part is getting noticed, and doing it without giving away your margin.

1. Bigger discounts aren’t droving growth
It’s easy to assume you only have two options for Black Friday: either fight or sit out. But last year’s data doesn’t support that assumption.
Across Klaviyo’s brands, the average discount fell from 29.1% to 26.2%, a drop of around 10%. Over the same period, same-site sales rose 11%, average selling prices went up 4.8%, average order value went up 3% and product views climbed 28%. Across the wider market, Salesforce found discount rates on Black Friday were flat year on year, peaking at 28% in the US and 27% globally.

What this means:
Brands discounted less, charged more and still sold more. Before you reach for a bigger percentage off, ask what else you can offer.

2. Your best BFCM customers are the ones you already have
Instead of paying to find new customers, use Black Friday to win back the ones you already have. You’ve already paid to get someone onto your site. They viewed a product, thought about it, added it to their basket…. and then left.
Last year, Klaviyo brands saw repeat buyers grow 13.6% year on year, compared with 9% for new buyers. What worked on those customers wasn’t huge markdowns. It was early access, exclusive drops, VIP perks and personalised offers.

A tip from us: split your Black Friday audience into these four groups:

Browsers: they looked but didn’t add anything to their basket
Abandoned baskets: they got close to buying but didn’t check out
Existing customers: your most valuable audience at peak
Lapsed customers: people who bought once and disappeared

Black Friday gives you a reason to engage with all four groups, but they shouldn’t all get the same message. For example, a high-value customer might get exclusive early access, whereas someone who abandoned their basket might get a reminder with a Black Friday incentive.

3. Add a channel, not another send
Sending more email costs almost nothing, so everyone does it at peak. Last BFCM, Klaviyo brands sent 22.7 billion messages, which was up 25%. Email revenue still grew by 15%, but the inbox is at its most crowded all year.
The brands that stood out added a channel instead. Shoppers who got both email and text placed 11% more orders and added 34% more items to their cart than those who got email alone.
Imagine your customer after two weeks of Black Friday: they’ve had the emails, they’ve seen the Instagram ads, and they’ve probably been offered the same discount multiple time. Then one day, a personalised postcard with their name on it lands on the doormat.

Their letterbox isn’t overflowing like their inbox, and the postcard actually gets read and noticed.
Direct mail shouldn’t be a replacement for digital. It’s an additional, meaningful touchpoint, and one that stands out when screens are hammered with digital notifications. Paperplanes lets you trigger responsive personalised mail from customer behaviour, including browse abandonment, abandoned baskets, next-best-purchase and winback journeys. You get the same reactivity of email, but with a format that’s physical and eye-catching.
We can prove it with the results we’ve helped craft. For Dukes Hill, direct mail delivered a 1,305% return on ad spend (ROAS) and a 22.2% higher conversion rate than customers who weren’t mailed. For Wayfair, it drove a 23% repeat purchase rate for mailed customers.

4. Judge Black Friday in January, not November
November revenue is the easiest number to report and the least useful. It can’t confirm whether you gained new customers or simply brought December’s sales forward using discounts.
These are the metrics that show whether Black Friday was worth it, and they come later:

1. Repeat purchase rate
2. Contribution margin
3. Cohort LTV (lifetime value)
4. January reactivation
5. Growth in your consented list

Five tips for a stronger BFCM
1. Send your first mailer one to two weeks early, so it lands before inboxes fill up rather than after.
2. Recover otherwise lost revenue by triggering mail from abandoned baskets.
3. Combine mail with email and SMS. When used together, these channels outperform any other lone channels.
4. Always split mailed and control groups so you can prove the uplift instead of guessing – do this before you scale volume so you know what’s worth investing in.
5. Lock in print lead times and send dates now. BFCM is print’s busiest season.

Black Friday isn’t getting any easier to win attention. Shoppers won’t get fewer emails or see fewer ads. What a succesful BFCM strategy needs, is a channel that’s nighly personal, a bit different, and most crucially – isn’t going head to head with hundreds of email offers from other brands.

Sources: Shopify, Adobe Digital Insights, Klaviyo BFCM trends, Klaviyo blog, Retail Dive on Salesforce data. Case study figures: Paperplanes client results.ners and targeting methods, direct mail can support both your environmental goals and your brand’s growth.

Want to see what Black Friday could look like in the letterbox?