How to plan an ecommerce promotional calendar for steady, profitable growth

When this episode goes to air, it’ll be 11 weeks out from the official Black Friday promo date. Many of you will already be in the thick of your campaign plannin… Some with excited anticipation, some with exhausted dread creeping in… So I want to offer you a few ideas and a different perspective to consider when it comes to planning an ecommerce promotional calendar that delivers steady, profitable growth (including 7 ideas that are not a discount).

Let’s begin by setting the scene: It’s the third week of October. It’s about half past nine at night, and you’re still at the laptop.

You’ve got a spreadsheet open with about forty rows in it. Email one, email two, email three, the early access one, the reminder, the last chance, the extended-by-popular-demand one that you already know you’re going to send even though you swore you wouldn’t. There’s a tab for the ad creative. 

There’s a tab for the products you’re putting on sale and the ones you’re holding back, and you’ve changed your mind about that list four times. Somewhere in your inbox is a message from your 3PL asking whether you want to book extra pick-and-pack hours, or perhaps a recruiter seeing if you want to hire some casuals for November and December, and you haven’t answered it because answering it means committing to a number, and you don’t know the number.

And underneath all of it, there’s a thought you’re not saying out loud, which is: I don’t know if this is going to work, and I’ve already spent the money.

If that’s you right now, I want you to know two things. The first is that you’re not doing it wrong. The second is that there’s another way to build a trading year, and I don’t think enough people are shown it.

Black Friday is on the twenty-seventh this year. So like I said at the beginning, this episode lands about eleven weeks out, which is either perfect timing or the worst possible timing depending on how far into the build you already are. Either way, I’d rather you heard it now than in December.

Here’s what I want to do today. I want to lay out the common peak-sale-event model properly, because it’s a real model that works for the businesses it’s designed for. Then I want to walk through what it asks of you – not to talk you out of it necessarily, but because I think most founders sign up for it without ever seeing the full invoice. And then I want to spend real time on the alternative, because I don’t think “don’t do Black Friday” is advice. It’s just a sentence, one that I don’t fully believe, and the useful part is what you might build instead anyway.

Let’s start with the model.

The logic is sound, and I want to give it its due. Your customers are already primed to buy in late November. The entire retail market has spent twenty years training them for it. So you meet them where they already are. You accept a much thinner margin per unit, and you make it up on volume, because the volume available in that window genuinely is unlike any other week of the year.

And the programs that teach this teach it rigorously. They will have you reverse-engineer the whole thing. How much revenue and net profit do you want out of the event? Right, so at your discounted average order value, that’s this many orders. At your site conversion rate, that’s this many sessions. If email is going to deliver a third of it, here’s the list size you need, so here’s your list growth target for the next four months. Here’s your engaged social audience target. Here’s your inventory buy. Here’s your ad budget, front-loaded from early November so your audiences are warm before the auction gets expensive.

That’s a serious plan. Those programs have visibility across enormous numbers of brands, they know their numbers, and they know how to structure an event so it delivers. For a high-volume brand with the working capital, the operational infrastructure and the team to execute it, this model works. I’m not here to tell you otherwise.

And I want to be honest with you – I used to build these plans myself. I’ve sat there with the spreadsheet, working backwards from a revenue target to a list size to an ad budget, reverse-engineering a November down to the last email. I know how to do it and I was good at it.

But somewhere in the last few years I looked at what I and my clients had spent – the months, the cash, the energy, all of it – and then I looked at what was actually left at the end. And it was roughly what we would have made trading steadily all year, without any of that big song and dance.

And I want to be clear about what I mean by that, because it isn’t about wanting an easier run. I’ll work hard. What I’m not willing to do any more is work that hard for no additional result. I have a billion other things I enjoy doing with my time to warrant that kind of return-on-effort.

So I stopped. Not because I couldn’t do it – because I’d finally worked out I didn’t need to.

What I want to do now is show you the whole invoice. Because I think a lot of founders sign up for the first line item without seeing the rest of them.

So let’s do the arithmetic, and I’m going to use round figures so you can follow along without a calculator.

Say you sell a product at a hundred dollars. Say your gross margin is fifty per cent, so it costs you fifty dollars to put that product in a box and get it to someone. In a normal month you sell five hundred of them. That’s fifty thousand dollars in revenue and twenty-five thousand dollars in gross profit.

Now run Black Friday at forty per cent off.

Your product now sells for sixty dollars. Your cost of goods hasn’t changed. It’s still fifty dollars. So your gross profit per order has gone from fifty dollars to ten dollars.

Sit with that, because it’s the centre of the whole episode. Forty per cent off the price took eighty per cent of the profit.

Which means, to make the same twenty-five thousand dollars in gross profit you made in a normal October, you now need to sell two and a half thousand units.

Five times the volume. Not five times the volume for a record-breaking month. Five times the volume to stand exactly where you were standing before you started.

And that’s what the whole apparatus is for. That’s why it takes months. That’s why you need the list of that size and the inventory position and the ad budget front-loaded and the extra hands in the warehouse. All of that infrastructure exists to close a five-times gap that the discount opened.

Now, the good operators do make this work. Their cost per acquisition in that window is managed, their creative is ready, their audiences are warm by the time the auction gets expensive, and they land the event in profit. That’s real, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But look at what the profit is standing on.

Your gross profit on each of those orders is ten dollars instead of fifty. There’s very little wiggle room in ten dollars. Every dollar of ad cost, every extra fulfilment hour, every return, every customer service ticket comes out of a much smaller pot. The event can absolutely work – it just has to work almost perfectly, at five times your normal volume, in the most expensive advertising fortnight of the year. The margin for error has been compressed to almost nothing at exactly the moment the operational load is at its highest.

And the whole thing – the months of planning, the capital, the stress – is justified by one assumption. That the customer you just acquired at forty per cent off comes back and buys from you at full price.

Because if she does, this is a brilliant trade. You bought a long-term customer during the one week of the year when she was most willing to be bought. If she doesn’t, you didn’t buy a customer. You bought an order. And you’ll need to run the whole thing again next year to replace her.

So does she come back?

Here’s what the data says, and then there’s an honest caveat, because I’d rather give you both.

Optimove – a retention platform, so no dog in this particular fight – looked at how likely a new customer was to buy again based on the size of the discount they claimed on their first order. They found the sweet spot for producing an actual repeat customer sits between five and twenty per cent. And separately they noted that on a day like Black Friday, brands see a spike in one-time purchases, and those customers are harder to retain and worth less over time.

Five to twenty per cent. Black Friday isn’t generally a five to twenty per cent off sale event. Usually it’s thirty, forty, fifty.

Now, the caveat. That’s a correlation. It tells you customers acquired on deep discount are worth less. It doesn’t tell you why. And there are two explanations, and which one is true changes what you should do about it.

The first is that the discount does something to the customer. He or she buys your two-hundred-dollar jacket for a hundred dollars, and their brain quietly files it as a hundred-dollar jacket. When you ask for two hundred in March, it doesn’t feel like the normal price. It feels like a mark-up. So they wait. And they wait well, because by then they’ve learned your promotional calendar and they know another sale event is coming.

The second explanation is that the discount doesn’t change anyone at all. It just selects for a particular type of person. There’s an enormous number of people for whom the discount is the product – the saving is the thing they’re buying. They were never going to be your full-price customer, and when you ran that sale, your ad account went looking for the people most likely to convert on it and found them, because that’s precisely what it’s built to do.

After twenty-five years of doing this, my view is that both are happening, and the second is probably the bigger of the two – particularly because of the way that ad platforms and algorithms optimise based on conversion data.

Which matters enormously, because it means you can’t fix it by simply switching the discounts off. If you do that tomorrow, you don’t wake up with a base of loyal full-price buyers. You wake up with fewer orders. 

Those people don’t convert, they leave, and they go and find someone else who’s having a sale, because someone always is.

That’s the part I want to be straight with you about. Moving away from discount-led growth isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a rebuild. You have to construct a different way for people to find you and want you, one that doesn’t depend on a number with a percentage sign after it.

And then there’s what happens in December after the big sale event ends.

I can’t give you a clean statistic for this and I’m not going to invent one. What I can tell you is that I’ve watched it happen over and over again, not just after Black Friday but after any major sale event, for twenty-five years, across my own brands and across a lot of clients’ – and if you’ve ever run a big promo like this, I suspect you already know exactly what I’m about to describe.

You come out of the sale and the numbers look wonderful. Best week of your year. You post about it, you pop the cork on the champagne to celebrate, and everyone’s thrilled for you.

And then December is quiet. And January is very quiet. It isn’t just the usual seasonal dip – it’s deeper than that and it lasts longer than you expected, and you find yourself refreshing the dashboard thinking, where has everybody gone.

Here’s what happened. You didn’t create demand. You moved it. Everyone who was going to buy from you in December bought from you in November instead, at forty per cent off. Your email list, which you flogged with eleven sends in a fortnight, is tired and a bit annoyed with you. And the people who bought have learned something about your brand that they will not unlearn: that if they wait, you’ll go on sale.

So what do you do? There’s a hole in your revenue and a list that’s been trained to wait. So you run something. A January clearance, maybe. Or a Valentine’s thing. Or a birthday sale. And it works, a bit. And the cycle starts again.

That’s the treadmill, and the brands I’ve watched get onto it didn’t get there through laziness or bad judgement. They got there because the first one worked, and by the time they understood the shape of what they’d built, they were structurally dependent on it. The event has to happen next year, at the same size or bigger, because the business is now sized for it.

And now I want to talk about the cost that never makes it into the campaign planning spreadsheet.

It requires a founder who can absorb six-to-eight weeks of high-stakes stress every single year, on top of running the business, usually while also being a person with a family and a body and a life.

I think about this a lot, because the founders who come to work with us almost never say “I want a bigger November.” What they say is that they want it to feel steadier all year round. 

They want to be able to plan. They want to know roughly what next month looks like. They want to take two weeks off in January without watching the revenue fall off a cliff while they’re gone.

What they’re describing is a business that isn’t manic. And a peak-event-dependent business is manic almost by design. 

You spend three months building toward a weekend, you spend that weekend in a state of high alert refreshing dashboards at two in the morning, you get an enormous spike, and then it drops out from under you and you’re staring down a quiet December wondering whether it was worth it. Then you recover, and then you start climbing toward the next one.

Living inside that – the extreme highs, the flat troughs, the constant sense that you’re either sprinting or waiting – is exhausting in a way that’s very hard to explain to people who don’t run a business. It isn’t just the workload. It’s that you never get to feel settled. Even the good weeks are tense, because you know what’s coming after them.

And the thing that never gets said out loud is that steady is not a lesser outcome. Steady is not what you settle for because you couldn’t manage the big event. 

Steady compounds. A brand doing consistent numbers forty weeks of the year, at full margin, with a founder who can think past the next fortnight, is a fundamentally better business than one doing the same annual revenue in four enormous spikes – better margins, better cash flow, better inventory decisions, better hiring decisions, and a founder who is still standing in three years’ time.

Your personal capacity is a business asset. It’s the only one you can’t buy more of. And founders discount their own exhaustion automatically, at a rate they’d never accept from anyone else. (If you’ve ever felt like you’re the worst boss you’ve ever had, this is probably why – you’re utterly exhausted.)

So let’s talk about what you build instead, because this is the actual work.

The reframe is this: revenue and profit are not the same thing, and a spiky year and a growing year are not the same thing. What you want isn’t four weekends that carry the year. It’s fifty trading weeks that work consistently.

And a promotional calendar built that way isn’t an empty calendar. It’s a fuller one. It’s just that the reasons to buy aren’t a discounted price. I’ve got seven of them for you, and I want to go through them properly – because this is the part people skip when they tell you to stop discounting.

Launches. The most obvious and the most underused. A genuine new product, planned with a proper runway – teased, waitlisted, launched to your best customers first. A launch generates urgency without teaching anyone to wait, because the thing didn’t exist before and there’s no cheaper version coming. If you can put two or three real launches in a year, you’ve replaced a great deal of what a sale was doing for you.

Restocks. Wildly underrated. If something sold out, its return is an event – to the people who missed it, it’s the only thing happening. A proper waitlist and a proper restock announcement will outperform a lot of discounts, and it costs you nothing but organisation.

Collaborations. Someone else’s audience meeting yours. A collaboration gives you a reason to talk to new people who arrive already warm because they trust the person who introduced you. It’s one of the very few genuinely new-audience mechanics that doesn’t require paying for reach.

Early access. The reward for being on your list is being first, not paying less. This costs your margin nothing and it does something a discount can never do – it tells your best customers that their loyalty bought them status rather than a coupon. Done well, this is the single highest-leverage swap on this list.

Editorial moments. A story, a founder piece, a behind-the-scenes on how the thing is actually made, a piece on where the ingredients come from. In any category where provenance or craft matters, this sells – not with a hard call to action, but by making people want the thing more than they did last week. This is also the content that gets found in search and cited by AI, which means it keeps working long after you publish it.

Seasonal relevance. Not a seasonal sale. Being genuinely useful at the moment your product matters most – Mother’s Day if you’re a gifting brand, the first cold snap if you’re skincare, back-to-school if you’re kids’ products. Same calendar moment, completely different mechanic.

Community and VIP moments. Recognition instead of money off. Naming your best customers, giving them something first, asking their opinion, letting them into something. This deserves an episode of its own and it’s coming, because the difference between rewarding the transaction and rewarding the person is one of the most under-appreciated levers in this entire industry.

Now look at what happens when you put six or eight of those across a year. You’ve got something happening most months. Your email list has a reason to hear from you that isn’t a countdown timer. Your ad spend is working at full margin instead of ten-dollar margin. Your inventory decisions are based on a demand curve you can actually see, instead of one enormous bet placed in August. 

And when November rolls around, it’s a good month in a good year rather than the month the whole thing rests on.

That’s the business those founders were describing. Not smaller. Steadier – which over three or four years is usually bigger, because none of the growth has to be spent recovering from the last spike.

I’ll tell you the shape of it from my own side, because I’ve run this experiment on myself. You might have heard me talk about this before. Back in episode 318 on this show, I shared some results that were really eye-opening. 

In one 30-day period – mid-November to mid-December 2024 it was – my skincare brand Indagare brought in five hundred and ninety-seven new customers. Best acquisition month we’d ever had. And as it turned out, it was also one of the worst months the business had. Because the customers acquired during that big sale event did not come back to re-purchase later at anywhere near the expected volume based on the brand’s average.

Just briefly – it’d be good to go listen to that episode if you haven’t already – we moved directly to the alternative promotional strategies I’m describing here straight after that big sale event, so we had a really clear cohort of customers acquired from both styles of marketing and we were able to track their purchase behaviour in the subsequent twelve months.

What made it useful is that it was about as close to a controlled experiment as you get in a real business. Same brand, same products, same year, run two completely different ways. 

And when we changed the posture – not the price list, the posture – average order value went up by about half, and the proportion of customers who came back and bought again in that first month more than doubled.

Fewer customers. A much better business. That’s my own data, on my own brand, and it’s why I talk about this the way I do.

Now, I’m not telling you to skip Black Friday. Your customers are shopping that weekend whether you show up or not, and there’s no prize for being the brand that stood on principle and made no sales. 

But maybe consider participating differently. I’ve shared several ideas across various episodes on this show about how premium brands can run promotions and use incentives in a way that benefits rather than costs you long-term. 

Go to your existing customers first and early, so the people who’ve already paid you full price feel looked after rather than mugged. Consider a value-add rather than a sitewide percentage – a gift, a bundle, a sample, an upgrade – something that increases what they get rather than decreasing what you keep. 

If you do use a discount, keep it closer to that five to twenty band than the thirty to fifty everyone else is playing in. And have a plan for the fortnight afterwards that isn’t silence, because the trough isn’t weather. It’s a consequence, and consequences can be planned for.

If you’re sitting there tonight with the forty-row spreadsheet, eleven weeks out, and you can’t unwind any of it now – you don’t have to. Run this year’s event and run it well.

But afterwards, when you’ve slept, come back and look at what it actually cost. Not the revenue. The gross profit, the acquisition cost, the December that followed, and what it took out of you.

And then let’s build you a year where the good months don’t have to be survived.

If you are a premium brand and would like a set of expert eyes on your marketing, helping you plan out this kind of promotional calendar for steady, profitable growth, let’s have a chat. You can book a brand growth strategy session with me by heading to Productpreneurmarketing.com