About the client
Rae Morris is a luxury makeup brand, and as such, online sales are a rarity. This is a conscious decision made in order to uphold the brand’s high end status, as regular product discounting doesn’t align with the Rae Morris image or their customer base.
Sales are instead limited to special occasions — Black Friday being one of them. As the biggest sales event in the eCommerce calendar, Rae Morris’ database looks forward to the annual promotion. To maintain the premium brand image, the discount figure has always been limited to 20% off sitewide.
For Black Friday 2025, we saw the opportunity to grow Rae Morris’ email and SMS database as well as engage existing subscribers with the promise of an exclusive email-only Black Friday promotion that was different from previous years.
Result highlight
About the Rae Morris customer
- Professional makeup artists as well as beauty enthusiasts
- They understand the quality of the product and why the brushes are at a high price point
- Each purchase is considered, so building a brush kit takes time (i.e. multiple purchases)
- Time between purchases is often long, as the quality of the product means there’s no need to repurchase
- They will have money set aside for Rae Morris products and sales
The BFCM concept
For Rae Morris, REP. crafted a ‘Five Days of Black Friday’ campaign series. The series was made up of five separate offers (in addition to a sitewide sale) with messaging that this year’s sale would only last for five days. The main goals for this campaign style was to:
- Grow Rae Morris’ email and SMS database
- Engage existing customers with new offers
- Reduce ‘Black Friday sale fatigue’ by limiting the sale period
- Avoid cutting into the profit margin
- Maintain a ‘luxury’ brand status
“I wanted to come up with a strategy for Black Friday with offers that Rae Morris’ customers hadn’t seen before. The idea for five days of Black Friday was a way to engage subscribers and stand out in their inbox at a time when they’ll no doubt be receiving a high volume of offers from other brands,” Natasha, Head of Content and Marketing, REP.
Part of the strategy was to make it clear to subscribers that each daily offer would be as good as the last. This was to avoid customers holding off on placing an order throughout the sale in hopes of a better offer.
The strategy
The Five Days of Black Friday strategy REP. crafted was broken down into three key phases:
Phase 1: the hype period
In the lead up to Black Friday, REP. worked with Rae Morris’ Meta ads team, Gorilla 360, to ensure consistent campaign messaging. The hype period consisted of:
- 2 x Meta ads
- 1 x popup on the Rae Morris website
- 3 x email campaigns
To create hype surrounding the sale, we did not release the ‘Five Days of Black Friday’ messaging until the week prior. Instead, we leaned on ‘a sale like never before’ type messaging. This was to create intrigue and ensure customers were looking out for the email and SMS campaigns when the sale began.
Phase 2: Five Days of Black Friday
Each day of Black Friday weekend, a new offer was released exclusively to email subscribers. These offers weren’t advertised on the website or social media — they were simply an email-exclusive to show subscribers the value in being part of the database.
The daily offers included:
Each day, an email campaign (as well as an SMS campaign) was sent to subscribers. Those who didn’t engage with the campaign were then sent a reminder email that night.
“We’ve built a great relationship with Rae Morris and worked closely with them to ensure the mechanics of the Five Days of BFCM sale ran smoothly. In particular, on the day of Black Friday, we ran an ‘Hour of Power’ promotion that required Rae Morris to turn on a sitewide 25% off discount for one hour only, then revert the site back to the standard BFCM discount.” – Georgia, Account Director, REP.
Phase 3: Surprise Black Friday sale extension
To ensure we got the most out of the Black Friday sales period for Rae Morris, we surprised the database with a sale extension. For 7 days only, the entire site would be 20% off.
For this portion of the sale, we only sent out two email campaigns, and skipped sending SMS campaigns. This was done with the intention of avoiding overwhelming the database, while protecting Rae Morris’ deliverability score as much as possible after the increased volume of campaigns sent.
Results
Each year, we see brands launch their Black Friday sale earlier and earlier. It’s common for brands to be on sale for the entire month of November, so by advertising only a five-day sale, we ran the risk of being left behind by customers who had already spent their budget elsewhere. However, knowing the Rae Morris brand and audience well, the risk paid off. The smaller, more considered sales period translated into the brand’s biggest Black Friday sale to date.
This Black Friday campaign series resulted in 16X ROI and a 177% increase in Klaviyo attributed revenue compared to BFCM 2024.
Conclusion
If you’d like to work with REP. for your Black Friday 2026 strategy, get in touch by emailing hello@rep-agency.co.
