2025 guide to Black Friday app marketing: 9 actionable tips
Valentina Stepanova
The Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) period is a goldmine for app marketers — but also the most competitive. With inboxes flooded and CPMs spiking, only apps with a smart Black Friday marketing strategy will cut through the noise. In this guide, you’ll find actionable Black Friday app marketing tips to help your mobile app stand out, capture holiday shoppers’ attention, and turn browsers into loyal buyers.
Maximize your Black Friday app search visibility
Before you wow a user with your deals, you must help them find you. App store optimization (ASO) is a critical, yet often overlooked, strategy for capturing seasonal search traffic when shoppers are actively looking for deals. Apps that don’t update their listings for Black Friday risk missing out on thousands of high-intent downloads.
Black Friday ASO checklist
- Add relevant keywords to the app’s metadata
Start by incorporating high-intent seasonal keywords like “Black Friday deals,” “holiday offers,” or “exclusive Black Friday discounts” into your app’s metadata.
Strategically place these keywords in the key areas such as the app title, subtitle, and keyword field. These terms can boost your app’s visibility, but make sure they still align with your app’s products or services.
Ellie Hines
- Update screenshots & the icon
Your app store page is your digital storefront. Generic screenshots and icons won’t capture the urgency and excitement of the season. Give your product page a holiday makeover to signal to users that you have deals worth exploring.
Your app’s icon, screenshots, and promo videos are key conversion elements and ones that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Make sure to update your screenshots to spotlight exclusive Black Friday deals and promotions, using bold text overlays with phrases like “Limited Time Offer” or “Black Friday Exclusive” to create urgency.
Ellie Hines
- Enrich the app’s description with a promo code
Placing Black Friday deals and relevant keywords at the start of your description — especially on Android, where front-loading the long description has extra ranking weight — can significantly improve Black Friday application discoverability and conversion potential.
Making use of action-driven copy (“Unlock Black Friday savings,” “Shop 50% off Black Friday,” etc.) will provide users with the clear value they can gain during the Black Friday period. This creates a strong incentive for them to download your app and take advantage of the offers.
Ellie Hines
Create BFCM-themed creatives that convert
Great creatives win the tap. Treat your visuals like mini-landing pages: they should signal Black Friday–Cyber Monday immediately and state the offer on the image so value is clear at a glance — core to modern Black Friday marketing strategies.
Choose the right style and insert offers directly into the visuals
Lean into recognizable Black Friday cues so your ads stop the scroll: dark backgrounds, bold price tags, large % off numerals, countdowns, and “app-exclusive” stamps.
Invest in variety to prevent fatigue (and to learn fast)
Create multiple versions of each asset (headline × offer × visual). Rotate across placements and kill losers quickly.
Diverse creatives allow you to test different messaging and visuals, helping you identify what resonates most with your audience during high-traffic periods and avoid creative ad fatigue.
Ellie Hines
Separate Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns
Relevance wins. Run a distinct Black Friday app marketing set (colorway, copy, deadlines) and a separate Cyber Monday marketing set (fresh theme, new offer/angle). This prevents banner blindness and gives you a second conversion crescendo with new hooks.
Build & warm your audiences before the rush
One of the biggest mistakes app marketers make is waiting until Black Friday itself to engage users. To cut through the noise, you should start warming up your audience at least 2–3 weeks before BFCM. That way, by the time your main promotions launch, your subscribers are primed and ready to act.
Focus on growing your owned channels
The holiday season is the most expensive time to acquire new users. Run broader user acquisition campaigns across multiple channels — email, push notifications, and SMS — starting early fall.
The goal is to fill your funnel with potential customers who have shown interest in your brand. You can then retarget this warm audience during the BFCM campaign at a much higher conversion rate.
Create a waitlist for early access to discounts
This Black Friday campaign builds anticipation and gives users a compelling reason to opt in. It captures high-intent users and creates a sense of exclusivity, driving higher conversions when promotions go live.
The events app Fever effectively uses this Black Friday strategy by offering a waitlist, promising users first access to exclusive deals.
Drive downloads with Black Friday app-exclusive discounts
Your mobile app is one of your most powerful marketing assets during BFCM. Use it to create a VIP experience that drives sales, boosts app downloads, and fosters long-term loyalty. Offer deals that are better or available earlier in the app to give users a compelling reason to download it.
Use your website, social media, and email newsletters to advertise the exclusive Black Friday deal available only to app users.
Big brands effectively use this strategy, creating website banners and emails that explicitly tell customers to download the mobile app for first access to deals.
Paid advertising is another powerful channel for driving app installs ahead of Black Friday. Run campaigns specifically optimized for app downloads, targeting users who are most likely to be interested in your products and deals.
By testing different creatives, audiences, and bidding approaches across platforms like Meta, Google, Snapchat, and TikTok, brands can identify what performs best and scale their acquisition efforts.
Retargeting campaigns further enhance this by re-engaging potential customers who showed interest but didn’t convert, using personalized offers to drive them back to the app for limited-time Black Friday deals.
Ellie Hines
Generate fuzz around Black Friday
Once you have your audience, it’s time to build anticipation. The best campaigns create a sense of excitement and urgency before the main event — a classic Black Friday marketing strategy in action.
Use urgency-driven tactics like declining discounts
Online beauty retailer Lookfantastic builds momentum by sending emails with discounts that decrease every couple of hours. This use of time-sensitive offers motivates immediate purchases and gets customers excited for the main sale.
Create hype with Black Friday push notifications
Black Friday push notifications let you cut through crowded inboxes and keep your brand top of mind. Plan a sequence to build momentum:
Pre-sale teaser
The sale is live
Urgency reminders
Last chance
Abandoned cart recovery
Segment users & personalize your Black Friday offers
Generic, one-size-fits-all promotions are easily ignored during FFCM campaigns. Attentive’s 2025 study shows 81% of consumers ignore irrelevant messages, while 96% are ready to buy when the content is personalized. To truly connect, you must segment your audience and customize your offers.
Go beyond basic demographics and create powerful segments based on user behavior:
- Build loyalty tiers: Reward your most valuable customers. Create a ‘VIP’ segment for your top spenders and give them exclusive Black Friday early access or a deeper discount.
- Differentiate by user status: Target first-time buyers with a compelling welcome offer, while sending an exclusive deal to active buyers to thank them for their loyalty. For freemium apps, target non-paying users with a special offer to convert them.
Engage users through different channels
A winning Black Friday marketing strategy is omnichannel. Your customers jump between inboxes, lock screens, and checkout screens, so meet them everywhere and keep messages in sync.
Easily coordinate your omnichannel Black Friday messaging in a marketer-friendly tool like Pushwoosh Customer Journey Builder — across push notifications, email, in-app messages, and SMS.
- Push notifications — cut through the noise.
Your secret weapon to bypass cluttered inboxes. Use them for speed and urgency, with deep links guiding customers to the exact app screen. - Email — tell the full story.
Perfect for building anticipation, warm-up interest, telling a richer story about your brand, showcasing a wider range of products, and post-purchase communication.
- In-app messages — convert in the moment.
Engage users with targeted offers and guidance while they are actively shopping in your app. Monitor real-time events like app open, category view, or cart abandonment, and send automated in-app messages. - SMS — time-sensitive messages.
Perfect for critical, real-time updates like shipping notifications and expiring deals. It also serves as a reliable backup when users are unreachable via other channels, ensuring no key message goes unseen.
Keep the conversation going through to Cyber Monday
Don’t let your momentum die down after Black Friday. Cyber Monday is your chance to re-engage your audience with fresh urgency and new offers. To maximize results, plan your Cyber Monday campaign before Black Friday begins, and weave it into your BFCM strategy across the entire weekend.
Use Black Friday behavior to fuel your Cyber Monday strategy — the data you collect on Friday is a goldmine for your further campaigns:
Target cart abandoners
Send a reminder to users who have added items to their cart but haven’t checked out. A simple message can create the urgency needed to convert.
Send personalized offers
Did a user browse a specific category or view a product? Hit them with a targeted Cyber Monday deal.
Position Cyber Monday as the “last chance”
Turn BFCM buyers into loyal customers
Winning a sale on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is just the beginning. To make the most of the surge in new customers, focus on post-purchase communication that builds trust and encourages repeat engagement.
- Send personalized thank-you messages: A simple “thank you” goes a long way. Personalize your push, email, or SMS with the customer’s name and order details to show appreciation.
- Keep them informed about their order: Proactively communicate shipping and delivery updates to build trust and reduce customer support inquiries.
- Cross-sell with relevant recommendations: Recommend products that complement the customer’s purchase.
- Ask for reviews: Once the order has been delivered, invite customers to share feedback. Reviews not only build credibility but also strengthen customer relationships.
Supercharge your Black Friday app strategy with Pushwoosh
Orchestrating personalized, multi-channel BFCM campaigns is complex. You need a platform that can automate communications across Black Friday push notifications, emails, in-app messages, and more.
Pushwoosh provides the tools you need to execute a powerful Black Friday-Cyber Monday campaign that cuts through the noise and drives sales.
