As Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach for 2025, the pressure on businesses to prepare strategically across channels with a focus on overall efficiency in returns has never been higher.
In this episode of the Roundtable Podcast, Glenn Marvin, Nick Thorpe, and Marty Jenkins-Lyttle explored the evolving strategies that e-commerce leaders should adopt, including Klaviyo and Shopify to Meta, Google, and TikTok, and offered a comprehensive look at what has changed since 2024.
Glenn frames the episode around one core idea: the channels businesses rely on for BFCM, Klaviyo, Shopify, Meta, Google, & TikTok, have all changed since last year, & what worked in 2024 isn’t automatically going to work again in 2025.
Rather than a general strategy session, this episode runs platform by platform, comparing 24 to 25 & flagging the core principles that matter regardless of which channel you’re focused on.
Nick’s read is that the fundamentals haven’t changed, audit your systems, check your connectors, make sure your data’s flowing correctly, but personalisation has moved from basic to hyper-personalised, & AI is doing a lot more of the heavy lifting. Natural language segment building, AI-assisted content, & dynamic product recommendations are now standard rather than nice-to-haves.
Where 2024 had around eight key flows, 2025’s documentation is well over thirteen, with segmentation by behaviour, spend, & lifetime value baked in. The upside, once these flows & automations are set up, they keep running year after year with minimal extra effort.
Marty’s advice starts with deliverability, check your score now, since easy wins like reducing unsubscribes, spam complaints, & bounce rates can shift a business from the 30s into the 60s, 70s, or higher, directly affecting inbox placement during the busiest sending period of the year.
Warming your audience matters just as much. You can’t jump from silence to four emails a week, so talk to your database early, tell them you’re likely going early on your sale, & give people a reason to look forward to it rather than just collecting emails with no context.
Glenn flags a point worth repeating: who you promote to matters as much as who you don’t. Training your highest-value, full-price customers to expect a discount undermines the value of your core offering long after BFCM ends.
The recommendation is to think strategically about exclusions, or at least treat those customers differently, rather than blasting the same discount to your entire list & devaluing the brand for the sake of a short-term spike.
Nick’s focus is mobile, with BFCM mobile traffic often exceeding 80%, businesses need to actually test their site as a first-time mobile user, checking load speed with tools like Google Lighthouse & fixing what’s slowing things down. AI search is also changing SEO, with structured data making it easier for AI systems to read & recommend products, an area where smaller, more flexible sites can actually outperform bigger brands.
A dedicated BFCM landing page is worth building early too, both for SEO benefit & to start capturing interest ahead of launch, even before specific products or offers are locked in.
Popups, surveys, & quizzes tie personalisation efforts back into list building, helping businesses understand customer intent alongside simply collecting an email address. Nick points to Shopify’s built-in ABC analysis report as a simple way to see what’s selling well, what isn’t, & what products naturally sell together.
Marty adds that readiness matters just as much: banners, collections, & homepage built ahead of time, tested through a new customer’s eyes on both desktop & mobile, with bundling & merchandising planned around an actual reason a shopper would add something to their cart, not just because two products happen to pair well.
Nick’s take is that Meta has shifted from manual targeting toward creative strategy & feeding the system good signal. Where 7 to 10 ads in a campaign used to be standard, brands are now building near-full-funnel ad sets with 20 or more creative iterations, letting Meta work out which asset suits which person at which stage.
Marty agrees but flags the trade-off: trusting the platform doesn’t mean removing oversight. Watching who it’s targeting, what it costs to acquire versus reconvert, & staying on top of new features released week to week are still essential, especially heading into the busiest period of the year.
The volume of creative required has grown dramatically, brands that used to test 10 to 20 variations are now producing hundreds or thousands, letting the system, not the marketer, work out what performs best. Budget still has to match that scale though, there’s no point producing huge volumes of creative without enough spend behind it to actually learn from it.
Marty’s addition is about placement & pacing: creative needs to exist for every placement a system might serve it in, & BFCM budget shouldn’t be spent evenly across the month, it should ramp with the phases of the sale itself, warm-up, launch, & wind-down.
Nick highlights the same shift toward automation & AI-driven decisions, alongside a growing focus on GEO, generative engine optimisation, making sure headlines, page copy, & structured data are written in a way AI search tools can pick up & recommend. Shopping feed hygiene remains just as important as ever.
One practical flag: brand search queries very often dominate top-performing keywords in automated campaigns like PMax, so businesses need to actively decide whether they want brand terms included or excluded, rather than letting the system quietly reward itself with cheap brand traffic.
Ad spend is climbing across every platform, & Nick sees TikTok as a genuine cost advantage right now, both for cheap awareness impressions &, increasingly, direct acquisition. The catch is creative: polished, ad-style content falls flat on TikTok, & audiences are savvy enough to reject anything that feels like a repurposed Meta ad.
Partnering with creators solves both the content & audience problem at once, though good creators book up fast, so Marty’s advice is to start that relationship early. Live shopping hasn’t landed in New Zealand yet, but building a TikTok presence now means being ready the moment it does.
Marty’s closing point is simple: fundamentals still decide the outcome of any seasonal campaign, get your sanity checks done, make sure the basics are genuinely in place, & don’t leave it to the last minute. Businesses that come to their partners with everything last-minute at the busiest time of year consistently get subpar results.
Glenn’s final word echoes the same theme across every platform discussed: the earlier you prepare, the more you’ll find worth changing before the date arrives, rather than making last-minute, half-considered calls under pressure.
BFCM 2025 rewards businesses that treat every platform as having moved since last year, not just their own offer. Audit your systems now, feed your platforms better data, plan your creative volume against your budget, & get your fundamentals locked in early, because the businesses still figuring this out in November will be competing against everyone who started in September.
Glenn Marvin, Connect the Dots
Nick Thorp & Marty Jenkins-Lyttle, Connect the Dots
6 minutes
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