Shopify merchants sold $14.6 billion over Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend in 2025, up 27% year over year, to more than 81 million shoppers. Across all of US ecommerce, Adobe tracked $44.2 billion in online spending over Cyber Week.
Most of the planning around that weekend goes into the four days themselves: site speed, discount depth, inventory, email calendars. Far less goes into what happens to those customers in December, January, and February. For a mid-market or enterprise brand, that second half is where BFCM either pays back its acquisition cost or doesn't.
This guide walks through a BFCM tech stack built for both halves. It features five of Smile's partners, each covering a different stage of the peak season, and shows how Smile's loyalty layer connects them.
Why the second order matters more than the first
Smile's data shows a customer has a 27% chance of buying again after their first purchase. After a second purchase, that jumps to 49%. The second order is the point where a one-time discount shopper starts to become a repeat customer.
BFCM produces more first orders than any other week of the year, and most of them come in on a discount. Adobe found apparel discounts reached 25% and electronics 31% during Cyber Week 2025. A stack that stops at checkout leaves the brand with a large cohort of first-time, discount-anchored buyers and no plan to bring them back.
Paid media gets more expensive every November, because every brand is bidding for the same shoppers at the same time. That’s why we plan BFCM around the second order. The weekend buys you the customer. January is when that spend starts to pay back.
Alexis Woerdehoff, Head of Lifecycle & CRM, Fluency Firm
The six tools below are organized by the job they do across the season.
1. Digioh: capture customer data before the rush
Stage: Pre-BFCM list building and zero-party data
Digioh builds onsite experiences like product quizzes, surveys, and pop-ups that collect customer data and preferences before a shopper buys. In the weeks leading up to BFCM, that means growing the email and SMS list you'll market to on the day, and learning what each subscriber actually wants.
BFCM play: Launch a gift-finder or product-match quiz in October and early November. Shoppers get a personalized recommendation. You get their email, their preferences, and a segment to send early-access offers to. Digioh's product recommendation quiz builder is built for this, and Digioh reports that quizzes lifted average order value 46% for the skincare brand Pressed.
How it works with Smile: Smile's Digioh integration awards loyalty points when a customer completes a Digioh quiz, survey, or pop-up. A shopper who finishes a gift quiz in October arrives on Black Friday with a points balance already started, which gives them a reason to buy from you rather than the next brand running the same discount.
2. Orita: send to the customers who will actually respond
Stage: Audience selection for email, SMS, and direct mail
Peak season pushes brands to send more, and to more people. Orita uses AI segmentation to identify which customers are most likely to engage with a given campaign, so brands can reach a larger share of their list without hurting deliverability or burning through unengaged contacts.
BFCM play: Before you expand your BFCM send list, use Orita to find the lapsed and unengaged customers worth bringing back, instead of either blasting everyone or suppressing them all. Orita reports that its customers see an average 30% increase in email campaign revenue and 31% in SMS revenue within four months. Orita's BFCM lifecycle marketing guide recommends starting that engagement audit in Q3, well before the peak-season send calendar locks.
How it works with Smile: Orita decides who gets the message. Smile gives that message something personal to say. A win-back email to a lapsed customer lands differently when it includes their unused points balance or their progress toward the next VIP tier, both of which Smile syncs to Klaviyo profiles for use in campaigns and flows.
3. Judge.me: Build trust while traffic peaks
Stage: On-site conversion and social proof
BFCM brings in shoppers who have never bought from you before. Reviews are how they decide whether to trust you. Northwestern's Spiegel Research Center found that a product with five reviews is 270% more likely to be purchased than one with none, and the lift for higher-priced products reaches 380%.
BFCM play: Run a review push in October on your top BFCM products so every hero SKU has fresh reviews, photos, and video before traffic arrives. Then follow up with every BFCM buyer after delivery to collect reviews for next year. Judge.me's media reminder email automatically follows up with customers who left a text-only review and asks them to add a photo or video. Photo and Video reviews resonate more with potential customers and reduce returns, which we know is still a major challenge for lots of merchants around BFCM.
How it works with Smile: Smile's Judge.me integration rewards customers with points for writing reviews, with separate point values for text, photo, and video reviews. A post-BFCM review request that offers points toward a future reward gives a first-time buyer a reason to come back, and brings in the photo and video content that converts next year's shoppers. (We've covered this in more depth in our Judge.me and Smile guide.)
4. PostPilot: Reach BFCM buyers before the inbox gets crowded
Stage: Post-BFCM re-engagement
By the first week of December, every customer's inbox is full. PostPilot gives brands a channel outside it: personalized direct mail triggered from ecommerce customer data. According to PostPilot’s holdout-tested data analysis, direct mail drives a 3.89x incremental ROAS across all brands sending over BFCM
BFCM play: Send earlier offers to get in front of past customers before the chaos hits, and layer in retargeting so that your BFCM welcome emails don’t get buried. Brands like HexClad reach recent list subscribers with direct mail to drive more net-new revenue and target past buyers to drive more LTV. But that’s the tip of the ROIceberg. PostPilot's guide to post-Black Friday campaigns covers more plays for the weeks after.
How it works with Smile: PostPilot builds its audiences from Klaviyo or Shopify lists and segments, and Smile syncs each customer's points balance, VIP tier, and referral URL to Klaviyo. That means you can mail a postcard only to BFCM buyers with enough points for a reward, and tell them so: "You have 500 points waiting," or get even more specific and show exactly how many Smile points customers have, using PostPilot’s dynamic fields. Orita also partners with PostPilot on direct mail targeting. DTC brands like Tracksmith and Koio have used Orita to decide who receives a mailer, which pairs well with Smile's loyalty data for deciding what the mailer says.
5. Stay AI: Keep BFCM subscribers past the first order
Stage: Subscription retention
BFCM is a common moment to convert one-time buyers into subscribers with a first-order offer. The challenge is keeping them once the promotional price ends. Stay AI is a subscription and retention platform for Shopify brands, with AI-optimized cancel flows and automated win-backs. After moving to Stay AI, OLIPOP grew subscription revenue by 35% and cut active churn by 26%.
BFCM play: Treat every subscriber acquired on a BFCM offer as a separate cohort, and plan for the moment their second or third order bills at full price. Stay AI's guide to capturing first-time subscribers during BFCM covers build-your-own bundles and stacked subscription discounts, and its post on reducing post-Black Friday subscription churn covers what to do once those subscribers are in.
How it works with Smile: Smile's Stay AI integration shows a subscriber's points balance, VIP tier, and referral link inside the Stay AI customer portal, and points earn automatically on subscription orders. When a BFCM subscriber logs in to skip or cancel, they see what they've already built, and how close they are to their next reward.
6. Smile: the loyalty layer that connects the stack
Stage: Every stage
Each tool above does one job well. Smile makes the customer's progress visible across all of them. Points earned from a Digioh quiz, a Judge.me review, or a subscription order all go into the same balance. That balance and VIP tier then show up in the email Orita targets, the postcard PostPilot sends, and the portal Stay AI runs.
For the brand, that turns loyalty data into a shared signal the whole stack can use. For the customer, it means the brand recognizes them the same way on every channel, whether they're opening an email, reading a postcard, or managing a subscription.
BFCM play: Run a points multiplier event for loyalty members during BFCM instead of deepening the sitewide discount. Then plan a double-points or VIP early-access moment for January to pull BFCM buyers back for a second order.
The BFCM tech stack at a glance
An agency’s view: how to sequence your BFCM tech stack
Choosing the tools is the easy part. Getting them live in the right order, with data flowing between them, is where most BFCM plans slip. This is how we sequence a stack like this with the DTC brands we work with.
September to October: set up and seed. Connect the integrations and test the data flow before anything else. Confirm Smile’s points balance and VIP tier are showing up on Klaviyo profiles, Digioh quiz completions are awarding points, and Judge.me review rewards are live. Then launch quizzes and review pushes early enough to build your list and your social proof before paid media ramps up.
Early November: segment and warm. Run the engagement audit, build your win-back and suppression segments, and warm the list before send volume spikes. Lock one BFCM calendar across email, SMS, paid, and direct mail so every channel has a clear job and none of them are competing for the same customer on the same day.
BFCM week: execute and protect margin. Lead with loyalty offers like points multipliers for members instead of deeper sitewide discounts, keep paid spend focused on high-intent audiences, and watch deliverability daily.
December to February: earn the second order. Mail your BFCM first-time buyers, send review requests after delivery, track subscription cohorts as promotional pricing ends, and plan a January loyalty moment to bring the whole cohort back.
Decide who owns what, early. In most of our engagements, the brand owns the offer strategy and the customer experience, and the agency owns channel execution and reporting. Loyalty data is the shared layer both teams work from, so everyone is looking at the same customer.
Build a BFCM tech stack that keeps working after Cyber Monday
The best BFCM tech stack isn't the one with the most tools. It's the one where each tool knows what the others know about a customer, and uses that to earn the next order.
If you're leading ecommerce, retention, or CRM at a consumer brand heading into peak season, talk to our team at Smile. We'll walk through how loyalty connects to the tools already in your stack, what the customer experience looks like across each channel, and how to build a plan for your BFCM cohort well past Cyber Monday.
If you need a partner to build and run this stack across paid media, creative, and retention, Fluency Firm works with DTC brands on exactly that.
