Boryana Antonova, Head of Customer Success at Releva AI, shares her insights on building a winning personalization strategy for Black Friday and other major seasonal events — with practical tips for online retailers and beyond.
Black Friday is coming, and your calendar is probably packed with strategy meetings. But before you present that final plan to the executives, let’s talk about what really makes personalization work when the pressure is on.
Last year, U.S. online retailers alone brought in nearly $10 billion during Black Friday. This year, that number will likely climb higher. With stakes like that, getting personalization right isn’t just nice to have—it’s everything.
Boryana Antonova, our Head of Customer Success, has been through several Black Fridays at Releva. She’s seen what works, what doesn’t, and what transforms good campaigns into the kind that customers still talk about months later.
Here’s what she’s learned about making personalization feel genuinely personal when everyone’s shouting for attention.
What key factors should brands focus on this Black Friday?
The shopping window keeps getting wider each year. Some brands start their early access sales weeks before Black Friday. Others drop prices gradually, testing what gets people excited. This isn’t necessarily bad news—it just means your campaigns need to breathe and evolve rather than explode all at once.
Boryana: Think of Black Friday as a season, not an event. Your personalization strategy needs room to grow and adapt as customer behavior shifts throughout this extended period.
How can brands leverage last year’s Black Friday data and insights to strengthen their campaigns this year?
Before you plan what’s next, understand what worked before. Dig into where your traffic actually came from last Black Friday—social media, paid ads, word of mouth, that email campaign everyone said was too risky.
Look for the stories hidden in your data:
- Where did customers linger longest? That tells you what genuinely interested them
- How many pages did they visit? Were they researching or ready to buy?
- What made them spend more? Was it free shipping thresholds, bundles, or something unexpected?
- Did personalized recommendations actually lead to more purchases per customer?
The goal isn’t to repeat last year exactly. It’s to understand what created genuine connection so you can recreate that feeling in new ways.
How do seasonal events like Black Friday affect audience strategy and what should marketers consider?
Here’s something most brands miss: your customers become completely different people during the holidays.
The person who spent months researching that perfect skincare routine for themselves? During Black Friday, they’re frantically trying to figure out what their sister might like. Your personalization engine, which knows everything about their preferences, suddenly knows nothing about what they’re actually shopping for.
This creates both challenges and opportunities. Nearly half of millennials still shop for themselves during Black Friday, and they made up 43% of online shoppers last year. For big-ticket items like appliances, people almost always buy for themselves. So your regular personalization approach still matters—just not for everyone.
The key is recognizing when someone has shifted into gift-buying mode and adapting accordingly.
How should marketers handle these customer behavior changes during Black Friday?
Black Friday brings more visitors to your site than any other time of year — making it the perfect opportunity to collect valuable zero-party data. Many of them are strangers who have never told you what they want. This is your moment to ask. Consider launching an interactive quiz that gathers customer preferences upfront or identifies whether shoppers are buying for themselves or someone else. You can also engage visitors through a conversational AI assistant like Releva AI Agent, which helps capture intent and personalize the experience in real time.
For returning visitors, follow up with an email inviting them to review or update their preferences, including whether they’ll be shopping for others this season. With that data, marketers can fine-tune offers, content, and product recommendations to align with customer intent and optimize for key performance metrics.
If a visitor is shopping for someone else, segment them into a temporary audience that prioritizes short-term site behavior over affinity-based recommendations. Since gift shoppers often have higher bounce rates and lower engagement, you can keep them interested with exit-intent popups featuring reviews or testimonials. These cues build trust, reassure shoppers they’ve found the right gift, and guide them back into the conversion funnel.
What can brands do to reach customers without overwhelming them during the holiday noise?
Your customers’ inboxes are about to become battlegrounds. Everyone’s offering deals, creating urgency, and demanding attention. The last thing anyone needs is another brand shouting into the chaos.
The solution isn’t silence—it’s intentionality. Send fewer messages, but make each one count. Prioritize channels based on where your customers actually want to hear from you. And remember: if someone’s getting overwhelmed, they’ll unsubscribe. Better to send one perfect message than five forgettable ones.
How can brands cut through the noise and make their messages stand out?
During Black Friday, customers can go from curious browser to committed buyer in minutes, not weeks. They don’t have time for your usual nurture sequence. They need what they want, when they want it, or they’ll find it somewhere else.
This means your personalization needs to be instant and obvious:
- Countdown timers that create real urgency around limited-time offers
- Clear badges showing which products are selling fast or getting great reviews
- Price drop alerts that reach people exactly when they’ll care most
- Shipping deadline reminders that help people make decisions instead of just stressing them out
The goal is helping customers move quickly and confidently, not manipulating them into panic purchases.
As the holiday season progresses, one of the most effective tactics for marketers is to create a sense of urgency around shipping. If a customer abandons a cart or has recently browsed a product, brands can send a timely email reminder highlighting that the shipping deadline is approaching — and that waiting too long could mean their items won’t arrive in time. Even after the deadline passes, brands can leverage geolocation data to promote convenient alternatives, such as in-store pickup.
What can other industries learn from Black Friday, even without seasonal pushes?
Black Friday’s intensity teaches lessons that work year-round, even for brands that don’t have seasonal pushes.
Financial services can use this moment to collect data from people applying for credit cards to fund their holiday shopping. Grocery brands can create urgency around holiday meal ingredients. Travel companies can trigger personalized offers around holiday booking behaviors.
The core principle stays the same: understand when your customers’ needs shift, then adapt your personalization to serve those new needs instead of the old ones.
Making It All Work Together
Getting Black Friday personalization right isn’t about having the fanciest technology or the most data. It’s about understanding that your customers become different people during this time—more urgent, more uncertain, often shopping for others instead of themselves.
The brands that succeed recognize these shifts and adapt accordingly. They use data to understand behavior, but they use empathy to understand motivation. They create urgency without creating stress. They personalize not just for who customers are, but for who they become when the stakes get higher.
Black Friday traffic doesn’t have to disappear after the weekend ends. With the right approach to personalization—one that truly understands how people shop when everything feels important—that flood of visitors becomes the foundation for relationships that last all year long.
Your personalization strategy is ready for Black Friday when it’s ready for anything your customers might need, not just what they usually want.
