6 Black Friday Marketing Ideas You Can Replicate Without Breaking the Bank (Examples, Templates & Best Practices)

Black Friday isn’t just for the Amazons and Walmarts of this world.

Smaller ecommerce and DTC brands can make the most of this holiday, too. All you need are some creative Black Friday marketing ideas that don’t require a monstrous budget. 

Not sure which ideas will help grow your sales? 

In this post, we show you six Black Friday marketing examples from DTC brands that don’t have as deep pockets as the likes of Amazon and Walmart. We also cover campaign best practices and share Black Friday marketing templates to get you going without delay.

Black Friday marketing best practices

A few tips to bear in mind as you plan your Black Friday campaign:

When is the best time to start Black Friday marketing? 

Searches for Black Friday deals start from the end of October and pick up by the mid of November, according to Google Trends. But it all peaks in the week of Black Friday—from around November 21st:

This means you should start creating hype for your Black Friday campaign from around the mid of November. But, make sure you accelerate your marketing efforts from November 21st onward.

Now for six Black Friday marketing ideas backed with real-life examples to help spark your creative wheels:

1. Muddy Bites’ site-wide discount 

Muddy Bites offered 20% off for Black Friday—making it clear that the discount is applicable on all its products but for a limited time. 

In doing so, the brand encouraged buyers to make the most of the discount by “stocking up for the holidays” throughout its marketing:

In addition to using its social channels to announce the sale, Muddy Bites created a sticky bar on its website to alert visitors of the Black Friday discount:

A sticky bar like this stays on top of your site—no matter which pages a buyer visits. This makes it hard to miss, making it an incredibly helpful marketing tool for alerting buyers of your Black Friday campaign.

Beyond this:

Muddy Bites also styles its product pages to align with the Black Friday discount being run:

If a simple discount is all you're running this year, it's crucial to ensure congruency across all your marketing messages and pages like this. It keeps it clear and easy for shoppers to understand and continually reinforces the action you want them to take.

2. Bonobos’ discount + gift cards Black Friday offer

Bonobos used a discount paired with gift cards strategy for its Black Friday marketing. 

The apparel store offered 30% off while also promoting its gift cards. This way, buyers could easily choose a gift card for picky friends and relatives instead of worrying about what to get.

This page did a great job promoting both sides of the sale. Firstly, pushing the discount:

To ensure shoppers acted now, Bonobos also triggered FOMO by clearly specifying that the offer would last only for the week. 

The “Best Week Ever” tagline on its home page did this job effectively. Plus, they added an “Ends Sunday” subtext below the CTA button to set clear expectations. 

What’s also noteworthy here is that Bonobos took another step to make shopping easy by creating apparel categories on the page:

This way, instead of wasting time looking for products on the site, buyers can simply head to the category they’re most interested in. This removes friction from shopping—improving the shopping experience.

Finally, there's the gift card promotion toward the bottom of the page:

Like Bonobos, you can leverage this tactic too. Simply create a product showcase page that organizes all your product categories in an easy-to-explore manner. With each category, you can also add a heading specifying the discount you have on them (example: up to 20% off).

3. Knix’s Black Friday warehouse sale

Knix’s Black Friday marketing campaign is a perfect example of zigging when others are zagging. Instead of creating a Black Friday sale, they hosted a warehouse sale for only two hours on November 10th—instilling FOMO the right way:

The intimates brand announced via its social media and newsletter that there would be no actual sale on Black Friday, encouraging folks to shop early.

What's also great is that the page has sections to:

1. Reinforce the brand's value proposition
2. Showcase specific deals and products

The interesting bit? Knix CEO, Joanna Griffiths, shared that the warehouse sale brought them over $1 million in sales within fifteen minutes before they ran out of stock.

If you plan to create a similar campaign, set up an exit-intent popup on your site to announce your limited-time warehouse sale. This will help you build anticipation for the discount day. 

4. Recess’ discount + freebies Black Friday sticky bar

Another great Black Friday marketing idea is to pair a discount with some freebies, as Recess did. 

The sparkling water store provided a 20% sitewide discount with 25% off on buyers’ first canned water subscription. 

To top it all, they threw in a free meditation class and one month of free access to their mental fitness content library. Talk about a sweet deal!

The interesting bit? The Black Friday deal aligns with Recess’ brand mission of helping reduce stress.

And to make sure its audience didn’t miss the Black Friday campaign, Recess made sure to include announcements on the website via a sticky bar:

Try running a sticky bar of your own. And if you want to leverage FOMO, add a countdown timer to tell shoppers how little time they’ve left to shop for your limited-time Black Friday offer.

5. Casper’s Black Friday offer + quiz 

Like most of the Black Friday marketing ideas covered so far, Casper also offered a discount.

The brand specified various discount amounts on the different product categories. What it managed to do differently, though, was pair it with a “meet your perfect mattress” quiz:

The quiz asks a list of questions, then prescribes a perfect mattress type for each respondent based on their answers:

Quizzes like these help buyers decide which product is best for them, helping save their time on deciding what to get—making shopping friction-free for them. 

Another tactic from Casper’s marketing book is that the mattress company placed the quiz and Black Friday sale announcements side by side in the website hero. This is a smart move because visitors coming to the home page can immediately:

1. See the discount available to them
2. Take the quiz to find the best fit for them

All this makes shopping fun and easy for buyers—something you should try for your store, too. Not sure how to create a product recommendation quiz? Start here.

6. Bombas’ Black Friday give-back approach 

Last on our list of Black Friday ideas is a give-back approach that Bombas took:

Like most brands out there, Bombas offered a 20% discount. But, to encourage people to buy from them, they marketed how they’d be donating items to those in need:

To this end, they took to social media to share the number of donations (11 million) made on Black Friday the previous year:

Ready to launch your Black Friday campaign? Awesome! Let’s get you started with some marketing templates so you can start without having to wait for help from developers.

Simply log in to ConvertFlow, customize these templates, and launch them to generate sales this Black Friday.

Here are your templates: