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Effective Black Friday Facebook ads: Tips to maximize sales

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Black Friday Facebook ads are an unmissable opportunity to reach eager shoppers during this peak spending event, and you can maximize success with several strategies.

Quick tips include starting early with campaign testing, creating eye-catching visuals with clear discounts, building remarketing audiences, and strategically scheduling ads for peak shopping hours to ensure maximum ad spread.

You can also combine Facebook ads with email marketing to amplify your reach, retarget potential customers, and create a cohesive multi-channel campaign that drives more sales.

Join us below to discover how to generate sales with Facebook ads this Black Friday.

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Why use Facebook ads for Black Friday?

Your Facebook ads can tap into millions of potential shoppers actively seeking Black Friday deals, with online sales reaching $9.8 billion in 2023. Facebook ads can drive immediate conversions by capitalizing on high purchase intent, reinforcing the urgency and ROI potential for Black Friday.

You can showcase multiple products and offers through various ad formats while tracking real-time performance to optimize campaigns.

Plus, targeting capabilities let you reach existing customers and new audiences through custom and lookalike segments for maximum sales impact. 

Start campaigns in early November before CPMs double during the weekend, and you’ll benefit from lower advertising costs. 

The bottom line: Facebook ads are one of the best Black Friday opportunities to boost your customer base and holiday season revenue.

7 effective Black Friday Facebook ads strategies

Black Friday Facebook ads require strategic planning, from starting campaigns early and testing multiple ad formats to refining audience targeting and monitoring performance metrics for optimal return on investment.

Follow these tips for optimum results:

1. Start early

It’s important not to make the same mistake that so many other merchants are making: starting way too late.

You should start early by building your traffic and creating your audiences long before the Black Friday weekend. And that’s because people are already primed to start looking for these amazing deals earlier each year.

So, how long before the big event should you start your Black Friday sales? Three to four weeks should give enough space for your Black Friday Facebook ads. You’ll want to take this time to “warm up” your audiences since cold traffic will cost you much more during the Black Friday weekend.

So that should give you a start date of the end of October or roughly November 1. During this time, you should get in front of your audience, build a remarketing list (more on that later), and give the final push during Black Friday.

An equally important point in tandem with starting early is to come up with an irresistible Black Friday offer and BFCM ads that your ideal audience will have a hard time ignoring. 

2. Check tracking

You’ll need to have a Facebook Pixel installed on your site in order to track your visitors’ activity. Before Black Friday, make sure that the event codes are in their correct place and your priority events (such as Page Views, Add-to-Cart, Purchase, Scroll Depth, Time on Page, etc.) fire correctly after users perform a particular action.

You can always check the diagnostic tab in Facebook’s Event Manager or Test events to see if they’re being received correctly.

facebook pixel

This is one of the most important tools for increasing the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, so you shouldn’t be shooting in the dark here.

You’ll also need to make sure that your data feed is up-to-date and uploaded correctly in the Commerce Manager Data source section. If you’re planning on getting new products just before the Black Friday period, change the schedule of your feed update accordingly.

Tip: Check if your key products are approved in the Catalogue Items section, or else you won’t be able to run remarketing dynamic ads showing those particular products.

facebook commerce manager

3. Leverage custom audiences

Facebook’s custom audiences help your ecommerce business reconnect with past website visitors and customers during Black Friday for increased holiday sales.

How does it work?

You upload your customer data (emails, phone numbers) or track website visitors (via Pixel), and Facebook finds matching user accounts for advertising.

These matched audiences can include recent website browsers, past purchasers, or newsletter subscribers to retarget specific customer segments.

Setting up custom audiences is easy: access Meta Business Manager and select Custom Audiences from the Audiences menu. Choose your data source (customer list, website traffic, or engagement), then follow the upload prompts to create your audience.

The benefits of custom audiences

Your Facebook ads become more relevant and convert better since you’re reaching people familiar with your brand and products. 

Segmented audiences let you create specific offers based on past purchase behavior and browsing history. You can also exclude recent buyers and focus your ad budget on unconverted interested prospects. 

Ad spend efficiency increases as your budget targets people most likely to make holiday purchases. For instance, retargeting recent website visitors who browsed product pages can deliver higher conversion rates than cold audiences.

Lookalike audiences

Another powerful way to target Facebook users is with lookalike ads. 

Lookalike audiences expand your reach by finding Facebook users who share similar traits with your existing high-value customers. 

Facebook matches characteristics like demographics, interests, and behaviors to identify new prospects who resemble your best customers.

Starting with your most valuable customers as the source audience can deliver better results this Black Friday than including all customer data.

facebook lookalike audience

4. Use automation to your advantage

A lot of your Facebook campaigns can be automated. 

Firstly, you’ll want to start with a campaign budget optimization so that the budget you set for your Black Friday Facebook ads can match the demand across the Black Friday period.

facebook campaign budget optimization
Image via Facebook

You can also use automatic placements, which can optimize where your ads are placed in order to generate the greatest returns. If you’re planning to use this feature, it is strongly recommended to match your creatives (images, video, text) to placement-specific sizes.

Shopify data shows that 70.19% of online shoppers abandon their carts. This is where you can step in with dynamic ads and return them to their journey to complete their purchase. 

Show the right product ads to the people who have shown an interest in them earlier on. Don’t forget to adapt the message according to your segment (recent buyers, abandoned carts, highly-engaged, etc.). For the Black Friday period, you should also allow a higher frequency for your BFCM ads than you normally do.

5. Build engaging creative and ad copy

To stand out from the crowd during the Black Friday weekend and its month-long buildup, make sure to use visually appealing, catchy creatives.

Also, don’t forget that video content is still the king and the most engaging ad format. Maintain the visual and textual appeal in both your BFCM ads and the video to ensure that your audience is highly engaged.

At this point, you shouldn’t introduce new color palettes or drastically new designs that can stop your customers from quickly recognizing your brand amongst lots of other ads. Including numbers in your ad headlines makes it more likely that users will click on them. In general, when users see numbers, it makes it easier to understand offers.

That being said, it’s important to remember that you’ll need to provide real value (not clickbait) with your ad offers in order for people to take action. Make sure your ad copy emphasizes how your product will help your audience (and ensure that your product can deliver on these promises). If this seems too complicated, you can use tools to generate your ad copy.

sonos ad on facebook

Add social proof to your Black Friday Facebook ads to help create trust and contribute to higher engagement rates. 

thirdlove post on facebook
Image via Agorapulse

You should also make sure to split-test your Facebook ad elements before you assign a large budget to a single ad variation.

And lastly, don’t forget about personalization, holiday carousel frames, and using different overlays.

6. Combine Facebook ads with email marketing

Integrating social media with email marketing creates multiple touchpoints to reinforce your Black Friday offers and boost conversion rates.

Modern shoppers switch between social media and email daily, making single-channel marketing increasingly ineffective. Your strongest sales will come from customers who engage across email and Facebook, as each channel reinforces and complements the other’s strengths.

Building your email list with Facebook

One way to combine email with Facebook ads is with Facebook’s lead generation ads to capture email addresses by offering exclusive Black Friday previews and early access to deals. 

Your ads can display a pre-filled form on Facebook, making it easy for interested shoppers to sign up, and therefore grow your email list.

Omnisend’s integration automatically pulls this data into your chosen email list when someone completes your Facebook lead form. You can then trigger automated welcome workflows designed for these Facebook-sourced leads.

Retargeting across both channels

Another way to use email with Facebook ads is to sync your email platform with custom audiences for automated retargeting campaigns.

Omnisend’s Facebook custom audiences integration automatically updates your ad targeting whenever customer behavior changes. 

Facebook custom audience

For instance, when someone abandons their cart, this triggers an email sequence and Facebook ads showing the forgotten products. 

These workflows help to re-engage prospects when they’re most likely to convert, such as during the competitive Black Friday period.

You can also use these synchronized campaigns to upsell recent buyers with complementary products and cross-sell related items. 

Silver Street Jewellers uses Omnisend’s integration to sync its Facebook ads and email marketing campaigns. The cross-channel approach generated $100k in the first three months, with 60% of total income coming from its coordinated retargeting program.

Read the case study

7. A/B test ad elements for maximum performance

Facebook’s A/B testing tool lets you compare different versions of your ads by changing one variable at a time to determine what drives the best results. 

Start testing weeks before Black Friday to identify the best creative, copy, and offer combinations. Compare video against images or carousel formats versus single product shots, and compare different placements, such as News Feed, Stories, and Messenger.

Setting up for success 

Ensure each test runs with equal budgets and targets similar audience sizes for accurate comparison. 

Facebook automatically splits your audience to prevent overlap, delivering each version to different segments and helping provide a fair and accurate comparison of the performance of the different ad variations.

Your tests need a sufficient budget and audience size to generate statistically significant results. If your budget for each test variation is too low, the ad sets may under-deliver and not get enough impressions and conversions to produce reliable data.

Run tests for at least a few days before making decisions, focusing on one variable at a time. Changing multiple elements makes it impossible to identify what drove improved performance.

Building your winning strategy 

Start by testing major elements like Facebook ad format and placement, then refine specific components like headlines and calls to action. 

Here’s an example of an email marketing A/B test with Omnisend, comparing two different headlines and descriptions:

A/B testing
Image via Omnisend

When a test shows no clear winner, create more dramatic variations for the next round. For instance, you could create different ad concepts with contrasting visual elements for the next A/B test instead of testing minor tweaks to the ad copy or image.

Integrate your results into your Black Friday campaigns, combining winning creatives with your most responsive audiences and best-performing placements to maximize holiday sales.

Wrap up

Boost your Black Friday revenue by launching your Facebook campaigns in early November — when CPMs are lower and shoppers are already hunting for deals. 

Set up precise tracking, build custom audiences, and implement automated campaign optimization to dynamically control budgets, placements, and creative delivery.

Your ads need strong offers, consistent branding, and relevant messaging that resonates with your target audience and drives action.

Maximize your campaign impact by integrating Facebook ads with Omnisend’s email marketing to create powerful multi-channel customer journeys.

Join Omnisend to turn holiday browsers into Black Friday buyers with email and Facebook ads
Bernard Meyer
Article by

Bernard is the Sr. Director of Communications & Creative at Omnisend, with a passion for good research, helping ecommerce businesses with their marketing automation needs, and beating absolutely everyone in Mario Kart 64.