How to Keep Your Black Friday Campaigns Performing After Cyber Monday

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

Most retailers already know Cyber Monday is not the finish line. Analysis of the 2024 season by Ecommpay and IMRG, published via the British Retail Consortium, found that 63% of retailers extended their promotions beyond the traditional Black Friday weekend. The question is not whether to keep campaigns running. It is what actually works once the Black Friday noise dies down.

Demand does not stop at Cyber Monday

UK retail transactions rose 9.5% year on year on Black Friday 2024, according to Barclaycard, with Black Friday itself the single busiest trading day of the year. But the Ecommpay and IMRG data shows Cyber Monday, not Black Friday, delivered the best overall performance of the season: a 5.3% conversion rate against 4.6% for Black Friday week, and an average order value of £131.95, the highest seen in four years, despite the lowest on-site engagement time of the period.

Read together, that points to a shift in behaviour rather than a drop-off. Shoppers on Cyber Monday were not browsing longer and deciding less, they were arriving primed and checking out with minimal friction. That is a signal worth planning around: the days immediately after Black Friday are not a quieter afterthought, they are where some of the most decisive buying of the season happens.

Do not just pour more into paid social

The most striking finding in the Ecommpay and IMRG report is about channel mix, not timing. Direct mail was the single most effective revenue driver for Black Friday 2024, accounting for 26.3% of revenue, up from 15.8% the year before. Paid social and email, by contrast, both saw declines in traffic generation over the same period.

That is a genuinely counterintuitive result for a shopping period most businesses treat as a purely digital, paid-social fight. It is also a direct illustration of the risk we set out in Why “Digital Only” Is the Riskiest Strategy for a Small Business, Not the Safest: the channel everyone assumes is working hardest is not automatically the channel actually driving the most revenue. If your Black Friday and post-Cyber Monday plan is entirely paid social retargeting, this is the moment to question that assumption rather than simply spending more of the same budget into it.

Fix the leaks before you spend more

Before adding budget to chase more December sales, it is worth checking what is already being lost at the point of purchase. Basket abandonment across the industry fell to 58.9% in 2024, down from 61.6% the year before, and checkout abandonment eased to 46.8%. Both numbers moved in the right direction, which means the businesses improving were converting more of the traffic they already had.

A faster checkout, clearer returns policy, and more flexible payment options cost nothing to advertise but directly affect how much of your existing December traffic actually converts. That is almost always a better first move than increasing spend into a channel that may already be underperforming.

Your post-Cyber Monday checklist

• Promotions extended deliberately beyond the Black Friday weekend, not switched off once Cyber Monday ends
• A channel mix reviewed against this season’s actual results, not last season’s assumptions about what works
• Direct mail and other non-digital channels genuinely considered, not defaulted out of the plan
• Checkout and basket abandonment checked and addressed before adding any further ad spend
• A plan for the weeks immediately after Cyber Monday, not just the weekend itself

Want help making the weeks after Cyber Monday work as hard as the weekend itself?

We help smaller businesses plan a genuine channel mix for the whole peak season, not just the headline weekend. Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we will talk it through with you.