Black Friday isn't a choice between two philosophies, and the right answer depends on your business. Gross margin, product mix, and where you want the brand to go all shape how much room you have to discount. For some, that room is small, and holding back is a perfectly good call.
Black Friday isn't a choice between two philosophies, and the right answer depends on your business. Gross margin, product mix, and where you want the brand to go all shape how much room you have to discount. For some, that room is small, and holding back is a perfectly good call.
Still, the day itself and the following Cyber Monday is one of the biggest single-day opportunities most brands get all year to bring in new customers, at volume. The real question is what happens to those customers afterwards.
Ehrenberg-Bass's Double Jeopardy Law is one of the most tested findings in marketing science: growth comes from penetration, meaning new and light buyers, not from loyalty alone.
By design, Black Friday is a penetration event. Whether it becomes an actual growth engine for your brand or a one-off discount hangover, depends on what you build around it, not on the depth of the discount itself.
Yes, Black Friday does bring new customers
Okay, let’s look at the data. Because it cuts against the usual assumption that Black Friday doesn’t bring in new customers.
Bluecore found that 64% of Black Friday 2024 purchases came from new customers ; their 2025 benchmark still put it at 34.8% . Optimove found new-customer acquisition up 370% on Black Friday compared to a normal day .
****Black Friday is genuinely good at bringing in new names. The real question isn't whether it works. It's what you do next.
Black Friday gives you two kinds of reach
Black Friday is very good at one thing: putting a new name in your CRM. Let’s call it “transactional reach”. However, what it doesn’t automatically deliver is a customer who buys again five months later. That's “extended penetration”: a repeat, ongoing buyer, the kind that actually compounds into growth over a year rather than a day.
Most Black Friday planning stops at the first part. The brands that get real value from the day plan for the second.
Loyalty alone won't grow your business
It's tempting to treat "focus on our loyal customers" as the safer, smarter alternative to chasing new ones with a discount. For most retailers, the data says otherwise.
The less obvious part: under the Double Jeopardy Law, loyalty follows market share instead of driving it. Brands with more buyers also tend to have slightly more loyal ones, so growing the base comes first.
But that's a retailer's math. If you're a brand selling through retail partners, the calculation looks different. Going loyalty-first on Black Friday can be a deliberate choice rather than a missed opportunity, if it keeps you from undercutting the retailers who carry your products the rest of the year. Competing on discount depth against your own channel isn't really growth. It's cannibalization with extra steps.
In practice, the line between the two is blurrier than that. A brand with a strong direct-to-consumer shop still has its own acquisition to worry about. A retailer with a loyal core may have good reasons to reward it first. What matters is where your growth actually comes from, and who you'd be competing with if you discounted. Loyalty-first can be the right call. Just make it a choice, not a default.
Are Black Friday customers worth keeping?
Well, it depends on who you ask. Because the data on customers life-time value following Black Friday is genuinely mixed.
Datitude found that Black Friday–acquired customers had 20% higher LTV and 40% higher average order value than full-price customers, with half repurchasing within seven weeks . Ometria's 2025 data found close to the opposite: only 4% of 2024 Black Friday customers repurchased within 12 months, and they were six times less likely to return than other customers .
Whether a Black Friday customer becomes a repeat one has less to do with the discount than with category, product fit, and what happens after checkout. LTV isn't fixed by the discount. It's decided by the follow-up.
Tactics are a dial, not a menu
When it comes to events like Black Friday, you can't just pick one lane and then stay in it. Every brand is calibrating the same dial: how much to discount, and to whom, in service of one goal, turning penetration into lasting customers.
For most brands, it’s considering these three dials:
1 – Broad discounting brings the highest volume of new buyers, but comes with a margin cost: a 20% discount roughly needs double the volume to match the same profit. Without a deliberate plan for what happens after checkout, those buyers could end up hurting your LTV severely.
2 – Early access and loyalty-first campaigns strengthen the relationships you already have and put less pressure on margin. While this might seem like a retention play, it can also be a growth tactic. Offering early access in exchange for an email signup can be a way to expand your customer base.
3 – Holding the line on price makes sense for brands whose value doesn't rest on price, e.g. like category leaders, brands with real pricing power, or businesses where a Black Friday discount would undercut everything they stand for the rest of the year. However, this also means sitting out the industry's biggest acquisition moment, and it only works if there's something other than price pulling people in.
The work that actually decides the outcome happens off the day
Black Friday's value as a growth engine gets decided in two windows: before and after the day.
Before the day, it's visibility: media presence and list growth in the weeks leading up, so the day itself converts more efficiently instead of leaning entirely on discount depth. McKinsey found that two-thirds of US shoppers now start their holiday shopping before Black Friday , which makes this less a single day and more a month-long window.
After the day, it's the 30 to 90 days that follow, when a first-time Black Friday buyer either turns into a repeat, category customer or disappears for good.
What to watch out for before, during and after Black Friday
The metric that matters most isn't day-of revenue. It's the 30 to 90 day repeat-purchase rate of your Black Friday cohort, the clearest signal of whether the day worked as a growth engine or just a discount event.
Beyond Black Friday
The same logic applies to every seasonal spike, not just this one. Valentine's Day, Christmas sales, any moment that pulls in a wave of new traffic. Each is a penetration event. Brands that grow treat these moments as connected, feeding one ongoing conversion engine, rather than restarting the same strategic debate every time the calendar turns.
Double Jeopardy is clear on this: growth comes from penetration, not loyalty alone, and Black Friday is one of the few days a year that hands most brands real penetration at scale. Arguing over discount depth misses the point. The question worth asking is simpler and harder: is your business built to keep what Black Friday brings in?
