What was once a single Friday became a weekend, then a week, and now seems to merge seamlessly into the holiday shopping season. With so many brands' annual performance riding on Q4, planning for this bumper trading period starts with the first pumpkin spice latte of the season, long before sweater weather and the snow starts falling.
But while much of the focus is on discounts, campaign calendars and driving traffic, some of the most important decisions happen long before the first sale goes live.
The brands that perform best aren't necessarily those sending the most messages or offering the deepest discounts. They're the ones that know who their shoppers are, understand what they're interested in and can act on that intent at the right moment.
In a recent masterclass with League of Originals, Wunderkind experts Daniela Cubillos and Amy Erdelsky explored what it really takes to make Cyber Week more profitable.
Drawing on Wunderkind's exclusive Cyber Week data and real-world brand examples, they shared four strategies that deserve a place in every eCommerce marketer's BFCM playbook.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Black Friday is that consumers are shopping significantly earlier every year. Wunderkind's analysis of six years of data tells a different story. While brands have expanded their promotional calendars, the timing of consumer demand hasn't shifted nearly as dramatically.
What does change is shoppers' willingness to identify themselves. Email and SMS opt-ins more than double during Cyber Week, with a significant surge occurring in the final 10 days before Black Friday.
That's great for list growth, but it creates a challenge. By the time these shoppers subscribe, there's little opportunity to nurture them, understand their preferences or test which messages resonate.
The smarter approach? Give shoppers a reason to identify themselves earlier. Rather than relying exclusively on discount-led sign-ups, brands can experiment with early sale access, exclusive product drops and waitlists for high-demand items.
These strategies help build an addressable audience before peak demand, giving marketers more opportunities to engage shoppers ahead of the busiest trading period.
Driving more traffic is an obvious BFCM priority, but what happens when shoppers arrive on your site and you can't recognize them?
A returning customer might browse in June, disappear for months and return in November ready to purchase. Yet expired cookies, different devices and fragmented customer data can make that shopper appear completely anonymous.
That creates a significant gap between the customers a brand has acquired and the customers it can actually recognize and engage. It's why identity resolution matters.
By connecting customer identity and behavioral signals across sessions and devices, brands can recognize more returning shoppers and respond to their intent with relevant, personalized engagement.
For marketers, the opportunity isn't simply to reach more people. It's to make better use of the traffic they're already paying to acquire. And when acquisition costs are at their highest, that distinction becomes particularly valuable.
Cyber Week inboxes are crowded. Every brand is competing for attention, often with remarkably similar promotions. But Wunderkind's Cyber Week analysis reveals just how much more effective relevant, behavior-driven messaging can be.
Across the brands studied, behavioral text messages accounted for just 3% of SMS message volume but generated approximately half of all SMS click revenue. That's a striking difference.
While broad promotional campaigns announce sales to entire subscriber lists, behavioral triggers respond to what individual shoppers are actually doing.
Someone browsing a particular product, abandoning a cart or showing interest in an item that's running low on stock has demonstrated intent. Responding to that behavior creates an opportunity to engage while their interest is still fresh. The lesson isn't to abandon promotional campaigns. It's to be more deliberate about when, why and to whom messages are sent.
For brands looking to improve BFCM performance, fewer, more relevant touches can be far more valuable than simply increasing campaign volume.
Personalization becomes considerably more complex during Cyber Week. Brands are managing multiple channels, overlapping campaigns, changing inventory and thousands of shoppers demonstrating different levels of intent.
Deciding which message to send, when to send it and which product to feature quickly becomes difficult to manage manually. This is where AI-powered decisioning can make a meaningful difference.
By using real-time behavioral intelligence, brands can make more informed decisions about message timing, product recommendations and which customer interactions should take priority.
But that doesn't mean handing over the entire strategy. Marketers still need to determine promotional offers, audience priorities, early-access strategies and appropriate messaging frequency.
The opportunity is to combine human commercial judgment with AI-powered decisioning, allowing teams to deliver more personalized customer journeys without manually managing every interaction.
It's a shift from static, one-size-fits-all campaigns toward more adaptive engagement that responds to customer behavior.
Winning Cyber Week isn't just about attracting more shoppers, it's about recognizing the people already engaging with your brand and making every interaction more relevant.
That starts with building addressable audiences earlier, understanding customer intent and using behavioral intelligence to deliver timely engagement across channels.
For marketers, the question is no longer simply how much traffic they can generate or how many campaigns they can launch, it's how much more value they can create from every customer interaction.
In How Smart Brands Win Black Friday Before Black Friday, Wunderkind and League of Originals go deeper into the data, strategies and real-world examples behind more effective Cyber Week marketing. Discover how to strengthen your audience strategy, improve shopper recognition and use AI-powered decisioning to make your BFCM campaigns work harder.