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# Should you bother with Black Friday as a service provider?
- URL: https://www.revenuerulebreaker.com/should-you-bother-with-black-friday-as-a-service-provider/
- Published: 2026-09-13T10:30:14.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-13T12:51:56.000Z
- Description: Holiday sales seem like a fun way to make cash, but they only work if you design them for your audience. Here's how to be strategic with your holiday promotions.
- Author: Lex Roman
- Tags: Thanks, I Hate It, #top-story

Black Friday's a popular time to run your biggest sale of the year, but should you even be doing a sale? It's an obvious yes for retailers, but if you're a service provider, your holiday sales strategy isn't so straight forward.

It never occurred to me that I could leverage Black Friday back when I was a tech consultant. You're not gonna offer the team at Dropbox or Stitch Fix 20% off your services just because the mall's having a party. None of my peers ever bothered with seasonal promotions. Few of us marketed publicly at all, outside of having a website and a LinkedIn profile because most of our bookings came through relationships.

When I rejoined Instagram in 2021 to get in front of small businesses, I learned about that holiday sales weren't just for e-commerce brands, they could also be used in the service realm. I saw other web designers, copywriters, and marketers running flash sales, promoting bundles and packaging special offers. Not only that, I learned that they were making good money doing it.

Since then, I've been sucked into the holiday promotion machine more than once. I relish an excuse to promote. I love the pageantry of creating a campaign, making graphics, writing social posts, drafting emails and landing pages—but I rarely stop to think, does this even make sense for me? Or for my audience?

Marketers call this "not being strategic" and I've been ignoring their pleas to DO STRATEGY FIRST for decades. The longer I'm in business, the more I realize they're right. If you don't operate from a place of logic, data and intent—even for a small sale—you grind your own energy down and you get next-to-nothing in return. This year, I'm determined to do holiday promotions right. I thought you might appreciate a reset too so I spoke to a few marketing experts about how we can better conceptualize our approach for this season.

## The holidays can be a good excuse to drive urgency...if the timing works for your audience

"The number one clothing sales time of year is not Black Friday or Cyber Monday. It’s Back-to-School," Lysandra Weber told me. [Lysandra](https://www.lysandraweber.com/?ref=revenuerulebreaker.com) founded and ran her own clothing brand for over a decade but now she's a Marketing Consultant for creative businesses. She said a lot of stores hit the wrong sale period, focusing on the winter holidays when everyone else is running sales and missing out on when their customers were actually shopping for new clothes.

Too many entrepreneurs hop on the bandwagon of what everyone else is doing (guilty as charged) and not enough think about the seasons through the eyes of their audience. Now that Lysandra's consulting clients, she won't be running her own promotion during the Black Friday weekend because her clients are in their busy season. Instead, she'll be amplifying them and supporting their needs. Post-holiday, when it's time to start thinking about new year's budgets and plans, she'll market packages that help her clients prep for next year.

Black Friday and all related holidays (Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, December holidays) can be a good excuse to force urgency to buy, according to Tina Bar-On, if your audience is shopping for what you do. [Tina](https://www.tinabar.com/?ref=revenuerulebreaker.com)'s a Fractional CMO with expertise in e-commerce growth. She reframed holiday promotions as "Q4"—meaning that if your client pipeline isn't full enough, you can use holidays as a way to hit your goals anytime during the quarter.

How might you do that? Tina says name your goal first. Decide how many client leads or signed contracts you need to fill your pipeline and use the holidays as a reason to reach out to lost leads, past clients or potential clients. One technique Tina said doesn't get used enough is letting clients know you'll be raising your rates in the new year and offering a lock-in of this year's rate if they sign by a certain time. 

Bigger corporate clients are pretty checked out starting on Thanksgiving so if that's your base, you want to open conversations about what next year looks like now. You also want to be aware of their budget cycles and whether or not their budget resets in January because that determines when they're booking services and how much they're spending. Some organizations need to commit budget before the end of the year and they welcome your thoughtful proposals. Others are in their peak season and they aren't in the headspace to engage with you so a holiday promotion might be wasted on them. Using a holiday as a deadline can work, but only if your clientele is already in buy mode for your services.

## Targeting your sales pitch can save you time and make you money

It's so tempting to take a digital product you have and throw it on sale, but all the marketing experts I spoke to said you need to be more strategic than that. You might have more than one audience and more than one offer. You need to choose what to promote based on your sales goals and based on what actually helps your audience in this season. The more targeted you get, the better your results.

Data-Backed Marketing Strategist [Ally Anderson](https://akaridigital.ca/?ref=revenuerulebreaker.com) recommended using the holiday season to reach people who have been considering working with you and just need that right offer. "Think about the people who have been on your list for a long time, but haven’t bought. Do you have a really quick and easy offer that will get them off the fence and in the door?" Ally said. That should be a starter offer—like a power hour or a paid workshop—they can easily say yes to, giving you room to sell them on your services at their regular price later.

Clarify who those people might be by segmenting your email list with open, click and tag data. If you're promoting a lot this season, segments can help you sell the right thing to the right people. You can let people opt-in to a waiting list or opt-out of a promotion to keep your list high quality. That might involve building a separate landing page for your holiday promotion or creating an automation. 

You can also get intel from your audience before you set a direction. Copywriter Blythe Alpern said it can be good to put feelers out early, maybe even run a poll or a survey to see what your potential clients are most interested in right now. [Blythe's](https://www.wordwomancreative.com/?ref=revenuerulebreaker.com) background is in advertising. She's worked with major brands like McDonald's and Ford and now, she primarily focuses on beauty and lifestyle brands. No matter how big or small your target client, Blythe says you need a concept for your campaign. 

"Bring people into your world. Even if you're a small business owner, you're still a brand who offers an experience. Take them on a journey and provide an incentive for them to sign up," Blythe said. One of Blythe's ideas you could try was dropping hints on your different channels about what your holiday package might be and turning it into a scavenger hunt leading up to your promotion. She also said the offer itself could be what's interesting. The example she gave was [Dear FoundHer](https://www.dearfoundher.com/?ref=revenuerulebreaker.com) bundling their membership and their Substack subscription together for the first time.

I love the public scavenger hunt idea because even if you end up targeting your campaign pretty narrowly, it allows people who might not even be on your email list or who've never made themselves known as a potential client to come forward as interested.

Both Blythe and Tina suggested having a waitlist people opt-into for your holiday promotion, if you're marketing something widely. Otherwise, Tina said you can just send one on one emails to potential or past clients with a personalized message, a problem you believe they have and a time-bound holiday offer. "Hey, I know you love to go to Disneyland. What if you could go to Disney and I took care of this big problem that is weighing on your mind?" Tina said, sharing what these kinds of emails might look like.

If you're selling your holiday package in this targeted way, you can skip all the landing pages, social media and email marketing. Just include a link to book a call or a clear prompt for a reply and run your normal sales process.

## Products are an obvious discount but services and memberships are more about packaging 

If you decide to promote a digital or physical product, you do probably need to run a sale, most of the experts I talked to agreed. That's what's expected at this time of year and that's what everyone's trained to look for. It's easy enough with a product because, once you've covered your costs, the rest is all profit. That's not the case with services where you're on the hook to deliver something new.

"There's not a margin on my expertise," Lysandra told me. "I am not a big fan of offering sales on service-based businesses because theoretically, one should be priced appropriately already." 

Lysandra's thinking more about how to leverage her services to hit her goals this season, both in serving clients better and in reaching more clients. She wants to grow her email list so she's considering doing a giveaway of her 75 minute marketing deep dive to motivate the right people to join her newsletter. She also has a membership for artists and makers which is [offered at a sliding scale](https://app.acuityscheduling.com/catalog/c9693670/?categories=Marketing%20for%20Makers%20-%20One%20Community%2C%20Sliding%20Scale%20Payment%20Options&ref=revenuerulebreaker.com) from $10 to $75 USD a month so a discount doesn't make sense. Instead, she might offer those members a percentage off one of her entry level services as a one time promotion.

If your membership has a fixed price, it could make sense to run a sale though. I've had good luck running introductory promotions on my paid subscription this year and that's exactly what I'm thinking about doing for Black Friday too. Tina said if you do run a sale on your membership or digital product, you might want to frame the discount as cash off rather than as a percentage. $50 off your first month might sound more appealing than 20% off. I've been testing "Get 2 months free" which has been working well as a starting offer for the Legends subscription.

Beyond having clients lock-in a rate, you can also create special holiday packages for the problems you know they have at the end or beginning of the year. That doesn't mean you have to redo your whole service menu. It's all in the positioning, according to Tina. Avoid generic messaging about your services and instead, tailor your outreach to problems you know your clients have *right now*. "The [Airtable news](https://www.revenuerulebreaker.com/airtable-was-just-acquired-by-bending-spoons-goodbye-to-airtable/) is a perfect example. They might not even know it's a problem, but they're going to find out in January when all their stuff breaks. Build awareness of the problem and say, by the way, I have a holiday package where I'll get this done for you by the end of the year," Tina said.

## Start teasing your promotion a month or two ahead whether you go big or small

I wanted to know how far ahead we need to get ready as solopreneurs because I'm always seeing warnings that *if you started planning Black Friday in July, you're too late*. That seemed wrong to me for how nimble us tiny businesses are so I asked Blythe and Tina what the right timing is if you don't have physical goods to manufacture or storefronts to adorn. Both of them said a month or two should be enough time to start running your holiday campaign. Even less if you opt for the targeted one on one approach.

Blythe suggested warming your audience up in October for a November promotion. Plug blurbs about what's coming in your email newsletters and on your social channels every week or two leading up to the actual sale. You want to "build some buzz," she said. But Blythe also warned us not to run heavy marketing for two months and then ghost our list after that. If you're planning to make a big push in November, you need to schedule some communications for December and January too. One or two emails a month that lets your audience know you care about showing up for them year round.

You can use this buzz to build your email list too, Tina says, using the waitlist to gauge interest in your promotion. You also need a consistent visual people can recognize whenever you talk about your holiday offer. 

Once you get closer to the promotion period, you can increase your frequency of promotion, sending more emails and doing more social posts. I call this "putting people in consideration mode" because they're seeing your convincing messaging everywhere you show up and start to really think about buying. Blythe said don't go overboard by sending multiple emails a day and, if possible, let people opt out of the segment if the offer's not right for them. 

## Shape your campaign with the data you already have

You're not starting from scratch, even if you've never run a Black Friday campaign before. You've got piles of emails, social posts, landing pages and other assets you can learn from and reuse for your holiday promo.

One mistake entrepreneurs make with Black Friday and other holidays is running an unproven offer—something that doesn't get purchased consistently. You want to make sure whatever you're selling is optimized for people to buy it and there's no bugs or confusion that would get in the way of purchase. Ally said you can gather three metrics to help you troubleshoot:

1. Number of unique visits on your landing page
2. How many of those showed "purchase intent" by adding something to a cart or filling out an inquiry form
3. How many sales you had

"When you track those three numbers you'll be able to identify your bottleneck: 1) If you're doing a good enough job making people aware that you are running a sale \[unique visits\], 2) if your offers (or their sales pages) are resonating, \[purchase intent\] or 3) if there's friction on your site impacting conversions \[sales\]," Ally wrote in an email to me. Then, you can address the problem before running your Black Friday campaign.

You can do this for your last holiday promotion, for your last promotion in general or just take a sample time period. Find this data in your website analytics and in your checkout system or payment processor.

Hopefully, some of that messaging is already working for you and you can reuse it. Blythe suggested checking email analytics and social media engagement for posts that worked during any promotional period. She wrote more about this process in a guest post for [Entreprenista](https://www.entreprenista.com/articles/the-3-part-framework-for-building-a-successful-holiday-campaign?ref=revenuerulebreaker.com) and she told me you should repurpose that material, updating anything out of date and adding your new promotion in. If your messaging feels stale, a great hack she offered us is to grab your recent client testimonials and share their success stories. You can plug those into existing email templates to update them or you can send a whole new series of client wins ahead of your promotion.

## Team up with other business owners but rethink the charity tie-in

One thing I heard a ton while asking other entrepreneurs what they do for Black Friday is promoting affiliate deals from other businesses. That can be a way to make spare cash whether or not you participate with your own sale. Tina agreed this is a great strategy to employ, but she said the max is three offers. Don't overwhelm your people with a giant list to consider. Just curate three or less that really align with what they need.

Another idea I'm seeing this year is raising money for charity alongside a sale, but Lysandra recommended a better way to approach this. "Don't have it be based on how much people are buying from you. It feels disingenuous because you're literally using the nonprofit to make more money for yourself," Lysandra said. She's been working with nonprofits for years and she's the board chair of a land conservancy nonprofit. "What we have seen to be effective for Giving Tuesday \[from the nonprofit side\] is donor matches." 

Contact the nonprofit with a matching donation offer—a donation amount you commit that they use to raise an equal amount from their base—then send your audience over to their website to participate in that campaign. Lysandra said it's important the nonprofits own their messaging and their donation pipelines. She added that if your matching donation is significant to the nonprofit you choose, they'll promote you on their channels so your business will still benefit. Of course, you can always just give them a cut of your profits separately too.

---

I've honestly never planned a Black Friday or Cyber Monday promotion more than one week ahead of time and the most money I've ever made during that period was maybe $2-3k. Talking with these marketing experts finally got it through my skull that I need to start planning now if I want my Black Friday offer to pay off. As someone with a fixed membership price and a crystal clear end of year goal that I'm extremely motivated to hit, I can see how a well-organized holiday campaign could help me make it happen. And now, I know exactly what I need to do. Choose the right offer for my audience. Start teasing the promotion. Make it enticing to join now.

The conclusion I came to for service providers was that targeted asks to sell your services might make more sense than a blanket sale. We can write all the email newsletters, landing pages and social posts in the world, but it won't replace the relationship we create when a client feels seen and heard. A few personalized notes can go a long way to close your quarter strong and to pre-book projects for next year. 

Seasonal sales strategies can work for you, but you need to develop them around what your audience is thinking rather than what every other business is doing. Your promotion might not be a sale but a solution to a problem they have at this time of year. If you can match that timing to your audience's mindset, you'll see success during any season.

***What season matters most for your clients or customers? Share your thoughts in the comments.***