A 90-Day BFCM Plan for eCommerce Stores: Your Guide to a Record-Breaking Black Friday

For every eCommerce store owner, the Black Friday / Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend is the biggest event on the calendar. It’s a period of intense competition and massive opportunity, with the potential to make or break your entire year. A successful BFCM doesn’t just happen by accident; it’s the result of months of strategic preparation.

While your competitors are scrambling to put up last-minute discount banners in November, the most successful brands will have spent the previous 90 days laying the groundwork. They’ve been building their audience, optimising their website, and preparing their campaigns to capture the flood of holiday shoppers.

If you want to move from reactive discounting to having a record-breaking sales weekend, you need a plan. This guide is your complete 90-day BFCM playbook. We will walk you through the three crucial phases of preparation and show you the exact eCommerce marketing tools you need to dominate this holiday season.

The 3 Phases of a Winning BFCM Campaign

A successful Black Friday campaign isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon with three distinct stages.

Phase	Timeline	The Core Goal
Phase 1: The Foundation	90-60 Days Out (Now!)	Attract organic traffic & build your SEO moat.
Phase 2: The Audience	60-30 Days Out	Grow your email list and build anticipation.
Phase 3: The Conversion	30-0 Days Out	Prepare your offers and execute the sales campaign.

Phase 1 (90-60 Days Out): Build Your SEO Foundation

While everyone else is planning to rely on expensive ads during the BFCM peak, you need to be building your organic traffic engine now. You want customers to be finding you on Google when they start their holiday research.

Your Tools: Keywordly.ai and Surfer SEO

Your eCommerce Marketing Tip: The best time to start your BFCM SEO was yesterday. The second-best time is today.

• The Workflow:
  1. Find Your “Money” Keywords with Keywordly.ai: Your first step is to identify all the commercial keywords your audience will be searching for. Use Keywordly.ai to research terms like:
     • black friday [your product] deals
     • best christmas gifts for [your audience]
     • [your product category] gift guide
     • [your brand] discount code
       This will give you a content roadmap for the next 30 days.
  2. Create and Optimize Your Landing Pages with Surfer SEO: For each important keyword cluster you found, create a dedicated landing page or blog post. Use Surfer SEO to ensure each page is perfectly optimized. For a “gift guide” post, Surfer will tell you which products to feature and what topics to cover to outrank last year’s top guides. For your main “Black Friday Deals” page, Surfer will help you structure it so it’s ready to rank long before the event.

By the time November rolls around, your site will have had weeks to get indexed and start ranking for valuable holiday search terms, capturing “free” traffic while your competitors are paying a premium for every click.

Phase 2 (60-30 Days Out): Build Your Launch List

Your email list is the single most important asset you have for a successful BFCM. It’s a direct line to your warmest audience, and you don’t have to pay an algorithm to reach them. This month is all about explosive list growth.

Your Tool: Beehiiv

Your eCommerce Marketing Tip: Your email list isn’t just for promotions; it’s for building HYPE.

• The Workflow:
  1. Create an “Early Access” Offer: Your primary call-to-action across your entire website should change. Instead of a generic “Join our newsletter,” it should be “Get Exclusive Early Access to Our Black Friday Deals.”
  2. Use Beehiiv for Simple, High-Converting Forms: Use Beehiiv to create pop-ups and embedded forms that promote this exclusive offer. The promise of early access is a powerful incentive for people to subscribe.
  3. Tease and Build Anticipation: Don’t let the list go cold. Use Beehiiv to send one or two “teaser” emails during this period. Hint at the amazing deals to come, share behind-the-scenes prep, and make your subscribers feel like insiders.

The Result: You enter the final month with a large, engaged list of subscribers who are eagerly awaiting your Black Friday offers. You’ve built your own personal hype machine.

Phase 3 (30-0 Days Out): Prepare and Execute the Campaign

This is the final stretch. It’s time to prepare your specific offers and build the automated system that will deliver them.

Your Tools: GetResponse and Thinkific

Your eCommerce Marketing Tip: Don’t just offer a discount. Offer a “bundle” that increases your Average Order Value (AOV).

• The Workflow:
  1. Create Your High-Value Offer: A simple “20% off” is boring. Use Thinkific to create a high-value digital bonus. For example, if you sell fitness equipment, create a “30-Day Workout Plan” mini-course. Your headline offer can now be: “Get 25% Off All Equipment + Our £99 Workout Plan for FREE!” This feels much more valuable than a simple discount.
  2. Build Your BFCM Email Sequence in GetResponse: This is your command center for launch week. Use GetResponse’s powerful automation to build a multi-day email sequence.
     • Day 1 (Early Access): Send an email only to your Beehiiv early access list.
     • Day 2 (Black Friday): Announce the sale to everyone.
     • Day 3-4 (Weekend): Highlight different product categories or customer testimonials.
     • Day 5 (Cyber Monday): “Last Chance! Our Sale Ends Tonight.” – Drive urgency.
  3. Launch and Monitor: Schedule your GetResponse sequence, sit back, and watch your optimized pages and irresistible offers do their work.

Now you have executed a professional, multi-day sales campaign that creates excitement, maximizes AOV with a valuable bonus, and drives a record number of sales.

Stop Reacting, Start Planning

A successful Black Friday is the result of a deliberate, 90-day strategy, not a last-minute panic. By breaking down your preparation into these three distinct phases Foundation, Audience, and Conversion you can move from hoping for sales to engineering them.

By leveraging the right eCommerce marketing tools at the right time Keywordly.ai and Surfer SEO for your SEO foundation, Beehiiv to build your audience, and GetResponse and Thinkific to craft and deliver an irresistible offer you create a comprehensive plan that puts you leagues ahead of the competition. Start planning today, and make this BFCM your best one yet.