How to win BFCM 2025: The power of early action and customer retention

A successful Black Friday Cyber Monday is all about what you do before the event even begins and long after it’s complete.

BFCM 2025 isn’t just another sales event, it’s a stress test for brands in a rapidly shifting retail landscape. Consumers are more value-conscious than ever, competition is fierce, and AI-driven personalization has raised the bar for audience targeting. In this environment, the brands that win won’t just show up for the main event; they’ll dominate the weeks leading up to it and the months that follow.

Traditionally, the retail industry has thought of BFCM as an event to drive massive sales volume in Q4. While it definitely serves that purpose, brands also need to think longer term and shift their mindset to acquiring NTB (new-to-brand) shoppers before the event, and turning those shoppers into loyalists over time. Playing the game of short-term gains is not sustainable for growth, but focusing on the return on your consumers over time is.

Since last BFCM, Amazon has launched new tools that can give you a competitive edge. With 5-years of purchase data now available through Amazon Marketing Cloud, you can get insight into what products drove growth last year, who your most valuable shoppers are, and what their repurchase behavior looks like after the event. Plus, with AMC Audiences now expanding beyond the Amazon DSP to Sponsored Ads, you can more precisely target the most high-intent shoppers to ensure every marketing dollar is working harder.  

Before we dive into the specific strategies you can use to win at every stage of the event, let’s look at what has worked in the past.

How to use 5-years of purchase data to inform your strategies  

Thanks to the AMC 5-year lookback window of retail purchase data, we’ve built a Consumer Long-Term Value (CLTV) dashboard that helps you gain insight into how your shoppers have behaved in the past, and how your approach to different tentpole events has played out when it comes to driving long-term value. This is key to identifying elements such as:

Your Point of Market Entry (POME) ASINs

Your POME ASINs are the products that get shoppers in the door. These are the products you'll want to put on promotion and focus your advertising efforts around. Make sure your POME ASINs are products that bring shoppers back again and again, increasing your consumer long-term value.  

Our dashboard intuitively shows you the quantity of NTB purchasers by product with total NTB sales. You can see the repeat purchase rate of these products and calculate the long-term value they have driven over the length of the relationship with the consumer. With this information, you know exactly which products to rally around not just for BFCM, but for every tentpole event.  

Purchase frequency

Beyond the repeat purchase rate of your POME ASINs, it’s important to understand your overall shopper repeat purchase rate, particularly following tentpole events. This helps you understand how long it typically takes for a consumer to repurchase, and how often. This can inform the cadence of your retargeting cycles for your lead-out campaigns. Our dashboard has three reports for tracking this:

Monthly Shopper Frequency Groups Report - delves into how often shoppers from a specific monthly cohort return to the brand over time. By analyzing purchase frequency on a monthly basis, advertisers can identify patterns or trends in customer loyalty and engagement.

Monthly Cohort Repurchase Behavior Report - focuses on tracking the repurchase rates of NTB consumers across different monthly cohorts. It highlights how many first-time buyers return for subsequent purchases, helping you see how effectively you are in acquiring and turning first-time buyers into loyal, repeat purchasers.

Weeks Until Second Purchase Report - tracks the time it takes for NTB consumers to make their second purchase, helping advertisers understand the typical repurchase timing for their customer base. With this insight, you can fine-tune retention campaigns and re-engagement strategies to align with actual behavior and maximize your long-term customer loyalty.

Cross-sell categories  

Understanding which categories a shopper purchases in after purchasing one of your products helps you identify which products to retarget with after BFCM is over. For example, if a shopper purchases your protein powder during the event and goes onto purchase a protein bar, you know to start retargeting them with protein bars going forward.

Our Cross Purchase Progression Report in the CLTV dashboard specifically tracks how consumers expand their relationship with your brand after their POME purchase. These insights help identify prime opportunities for basket building, upselling, and developing more effective product journey strategies.

After you’ve used Flywheel’s CLTV Dashboard to understand your past performance, you can start building out strategies to implement throughout each phase of BFCM.

Lead-In to BCFM Strategies

The lead-in to BFCM is all about generating demand for your products and with Amazon’s focus on personalization it’s more important than ever. During this year’s Prime Day, Amazon advanced its personalized shopping experience with AI-driven features like custom homepage layouts, personal navigation tabs, and tailored product bundles. We saw the introduction of “Inspired by your recent search history” and “Deals based on your lists” during the event. However, this level of personalization narrows the discovery funnel, meaning you’ll need to drive brand awareness and optimize your content long before BFCM begins if you want to be considered.  

Generate NTB demand for your products

The lead-in to BCFM is the time when you want to get as many people (or, as we like to say, as much “mass”) into your funnel as possible. The more people you make aware of your product and drive actions like add to cart or add to list, the more likely they are to be shown your products during the event, but not every consumer is worth the effort.  

Your end goal of any tentpole event is to increase your consumer LTV, and that starts with acquiring NTB consumers who are more likely to buy from your brand over time. With the insights gained from the CLTV dashboard, you understand what your past NTB acquisition efforts have looked like, and how consumers have interacted with your brand post-tentpole events. This sets you up to build AMC Audiences that support more precise and efficient campaigns.

Note: BFCM is a gifting event for many, so you may find that it’s tough to drive the LTV that you’re looking for as consumers are making one-time purchases for others. There is still significant value, however, in homing in on your NTB acquisition strategy via AMC Audiences to target those who have indicated that they are in a gifting mindset. With AMC, you can lock in on who has been searching in your category and build AMC Audiences for both ADSP and Sponsored Ads based on those behaviors.

If your goal is to drive awareness for your brand, it’s important to leverage upper-funnel tactics via Amazon DSP. Your ADSP strategy should focus on lookalike-based AMC Audiences of past NTB shoppers, or rules-based AMC Audiences that target those who have interacted with your brand (or even category) recently.  

AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads is a new feature launched earlier this year that enables brands to activate AMC audience strategies from our pre-created templates across all Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns in their portfolio, unlocking more precise targeting than ever before via bid boosting. Advertisers can finally target “who” with their SP and SB campaigns rather than “what.” For this stage of the event, you should focus on targeting lookalike audiences of NTB shoppers.

While many brands focus on purely on awareness during the lead-in, shoppers are still searching for products – which means it’s important to be top of mind within the search grid with your SP and `SB efforts, too.

Optimize your PDPs for content & discoverability

More and more shoppers are using AI search to discover products, so this year you need to make sure your content is set up for traditional search and AI-powered search. That means balancing keywords with more conversational copy that addresses the queries your shoppers will be searching for. For example, on Amazon a consumer may search for “women’s running shoes”, but with AI search the query might be “What are the best women’s trail running shoes?” Optimizing for both types of searches is what will help your brand show up when it counts.

During BFCM Strategies

During the event, it’s all about converting those shoppers you’ve worked hard to expose to your products. There are a variety of ways consumers shop–some search, some browse, and some click the “Buy now” button for all the items already in their carts.

For shoppers who know what products they’re looking for, and use search to find them, AMC Audiences for Sponsored Ads is going to be a powerful tool. Using our templated audiences, you can easily boost your bids for shoppers who have indicated intent to purchase your product by viewing a ADSP ad, clicked on your PDP, added your product to cart, and other behavioral indicators.  

None of your advertising efforts matter if your products go out of stock. Significant inventory planning is critical before BFCM – but during the event, our out-of-stock alerts can help you quickly pivot your spend to a new product if needed.

The last consideration ties back to what products you put on promotion. There needs to be synchronicity between the products submitted for promotion and how you interact with your shoppers throughout the event with your advertising efforts. This is why identifying your strong POME ASINs in advance of BFCM matters as it helps to inform which products make sense to put on deal. An AMC Audience used for Sponsored Products on a brand-new ASIN or a product that historically does not drive LTV/repeat purchases is not going to be worth the spend if you have long-term growth in mind.

Lead-out from BCFM Strategies

While the actual days of BFCM are critical, the real challenge, and opportunity, lies in what happens next. The brands that succeed are those who move quickly to engage these newly acquired customers, guiding them down the funnel and turning one-time purchasers into repeat buyers, loyalists, and long-term value drivers for their business.  

With AMC insights and five years of purchase data, brands now have the tools to identify which NTB shoppers are most likely to become repeat customers and focus re-engagement where it matters most.  

Step 1: Exclude non-converters to avoid wasted ad spend  

If a shopper engaged with your ads or visited your product pages but didn’t convert, even with your best deals, they’re unlikely to buy now that the event is over. Exclude these low-intent audiences to reserve ad dollars for those most likely to engage.  

Step 2: Move BFCM shoppers down the funnel  

Strategies here should be tailored by category and product type, leveraging AMC insights to guide your next moves. For consumables or products with short repurchase cycles, timed replenishment campaigns are key. For longer intervals, cross-sell and complementary product strategies keep your brand top-of-mind and encourage broader catalog exploration.  

Drive repeat purchases from BFCM buyers

With Flywheel’s CLTV Dashboard, you can analyze historic repurchase cycles to identify the optimal timing for your follow-ups. Armed with these insights, you can launch retargeting campaigns that reach out to NTB audiences exactly when they’re most likely to buy again, whether that’s 30, 60, or 90 days post-BFCM.  

Encourage brand exploration by cross-selling

Cross-sell and upsell campaigns are essential for introducing NTB shoppers to other products in your catalog, driving growth long after the event. The insights within our CLTV Dashboard provide visibility into common cross-category purchase journeys, allowing you to tailor your retargeting campaigns for maximum impact.  

Build loyalty & boost Subscribe and Save (SnS)

The ultimate goal is to transform one-time purchasers into long-term brand loyalists, these are shoppers who don’t require constant advertising to keep coming back. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by encouraging adoption of Subscribe & Save (SnS).  

Use AMC Audiences like “High Value Shoppers” (those who spend above a certain threshold) or “Frequent Shoppers” (those with multiple repeat purchases), to zero in on customers already demonstrating strong brand affinity. Target these segments with SnS offers and loyalty messaging to convert them into subscribers and advocates who drive value for your brand year-round.  

Summary

The real power of BFCM isn’t just in the sales you make during the event, it’s in how you turn new shoppers into long-term fans who continue to drive value. By refining your audience, activating strategic lead-out campaigns, and leveraging the full power of AMC and CLTV data, you can transform your BFCM investment into sustainable, year-round growth.

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