The Essential 2025 BFCM Checklist: 24 Ways to Optimize Your Subscription Growth and Retention

It seems like every year, BFCM gets bigger and bigger. In 2023, Shopify experienced a record-breaking $9.3 billion in sales – an increase of 24% YoY. And what happened in 2024? That record was broken again: brands on the platform earned $11.5 billion in global sales.

So if the past is any indicator, 2025 is set to be yet another record-breaking year.

For subscription brands, in particular, creating a BFCM checklist so you can prepare in the right way represents a massive opportunity to acquire new customers and show some love to current subscribers so you can boost retention.
For example, during BFCM in 2024, Stay merchants attracted over 27,000 new subscribers in just a single day (that day was Black Friday).

But with huge volume comes huge challenges. While trying to get in front of new customers as early as possible before they spend their budget elsewhere, you’re also dealing with operational tasks, such as reviewing inventory, planning discounts, and mapping out pricing and products. Oh, AND you need to nurture your existing customers at the same time to avoid churn. (Want to find out just how much revenue you can unlock when you lower churn with Stay? Check out our retention ROI calculator.)

The best way to set yourself up for success? Get organized.

Ahead, we’re sharing the official BFCM checklist for Shopify subscription brands. Here’s what to expect:

Black Friday Checklist At a Glance

• 4 – 8 weeks out: Plan BFCM discounts, prep products, partner with creators, and secure inventory
• 1- 4 weeks out: Audit site speed, finalize email campaigns, optimize PDPs, and update customer portals
• BFCM week: Launch promotions, test messaging across channels, highlight gifting, and maximize conversions

Post-BFCM: Retain new subscribers, win back churned customers, and analyze data for future campaigns

4-8 weeks out

The rush of the holidays isn’t upon us…yet. However, you should be preparing for Black Friday so you can launch with a bang when the time comes. Because capturing early shoppers is key this year, our partners at Attentive recently released a survey showing that 59% of customers plan to start BFCM shopping before the actual holiday. Our own data shows that, from the start of November, Stay brands were acquiring subscribers at an impressive pace – around 11,000 each day.

4-8 weeks out is prep mode time – which for subscriptions means a BFCM checklist that looks like:

• Plan the sale: Define the discount structures (e.g., gift with first purchase, one-time subscription discount, subscriber-exclusive offers) you will use, and set clear start/end dates for the promotions. 
• Make any necessary changes to your selling plans or product catalog: You may want to temporarily offer discounted first orders, adjust minimum commitment terms, or add prepaid plan options. Similarly, preparing for Black Friday involves assessing your product catalog to ensure that seasonal, limited-edition, or bundled products are configured correctly in Shopify and can be offered through subscriptions without disrupting your fulfillment workflows.
• Partner with creators to build social proof ahead of launch: Engage micro-influencers or loyal subscribers to sample upcoming seasonal products, record a review, or create unboxing content weeks in advance. This primes UGC and social proof you can leverage during the blitz. 
• Add or remove products in the customer portal: Decide if any products should be hidden or temporarily removed from the subscription customer portal during the sale (e.g., low-inventory SKUs you don’t want subscribers to swap into). At the same time, consider adding exclusive or seasonal products to the portal, allowing subscribers to easily upgrade, swap, or add them to their orders.

For example, Intake Breathing launched a free gift with every first-time order. Customers who purchased a Starter Kit were offered a complimentary refill kit, which automatically transitioned to a subscription after the free trial period (30 days). Clear messaging at checkout, combined with the default to subscription model, helped Intake Breathing skyrocket their subscriber acquisition – and it led to a 4X higher AOV.

• Review your existing discounts and create special offers for BFCM: Here’s the part of your BFCM checklist where you can start thinking about the offers and discounts you’ll be running – and begin setting them up and testing. Something to keep in mind is creating Black Friday and Cyber Monday-exclusive codes, gifts, and other offers alongside any existing ones. This creates more urgency and helps your subscribers feel like they’re getting more value.
• Test new themes and workflows: Test a seasonal or holiday-themed variation (e.g., updated color palette, urgency messaging, gift-oriented imagery) to highlight your BFCM promotions without disrupting navigation or checkout. And beyond design, this period presents an opportunity to experiment with subscription workflows that enhance acquisition and retention, like trial-to-subscription or a one-time promo code for the next order.
• Review sale expectations to determine inventory levels: Consider your forecasted order volume for BFCM, taking into account both new subscriber acquisition and potential spikes in add-ons or swaps from current subscribers. Use last year’s data (if available) and marketing projections to model demand, then cross-check with supplier lead times.
• Map out inventory for any prepaid subscriptions: If you’re offering prepaid subscriptions (3-, 6-, or 12-month plans), get ready for Black Friday by mapping out inventory needs across the entire commitment period. Be sure to secure enough stock to fulfill future shipments at the promised cadence, since failing to deliver could increase churn and create support escalations.

Loverboy, for example, used the Add-On Carousel in their customer portal to showcase one-click upsells and cross-sell products. Their subscribers loved the new flavors they could easily add to their orders, resulting in a 248% increase in add-on revenue. Major growth like this in a short amount of time is what you can expect during BFCM – make sure you’re stocked up by looking at previous campaign performance and using forecasting tools like Stay’s cohort comparisons, forecasting by order report, and LTV forecasts, all powered by our proprietary machine learning models. 

1-4 weeks out

At 1-4 weeks before the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, you’re making final tweaks to your store, promotions, and portal. Here’s what your Black Friday checklist should include at this stage:

• Run a technical site audit: There’s no doubt there will be a spike in your shop’s traffic during BFCM. So test your site speed, landing pages, and subscription flows in advance. This reduces risk during the live sale so you can feel confident that customers will have a smooth experience – even when traffic is at its peak.
• Set up attribution tagging for acquisition channels: Ensure you can isolate which ad channels, campaigns, or referral sources drove subscription sign-ups, in addition to one-time orders, so you can quickly scale winning channels.
• Audit new subscriber flows: Make your first few interactions as frictionless as possible. As you prepare for Black Friday, review your welcome emails, first-order tracking, usage tips, and other relevant content, because the quicker a new subscriber sees value, the lower the likelihood they’ll churn.

OLIPOP sends a follow-up email to new subscribers, letting them know the benefits of their subscription and the perks they get. This not only builds customer excitement but also creates the feeling that they’re a part of an exclusive club, making them more likely to stick around for their next order.

• Lock in your emails: Finalize the emails you’re going to send to subscribers and prospective customers during Black Friday. From cart abandonment flows to upsell emails, your BFCM checklist should include building out and scheduling your campaigns. One of our favorite email tools is Stay’s URL Builder, which you can use to create Quick Actions directly inside of emails. These links enable a specific action with a single click, facilitating easy and quick customer conversions. For example, they can follow a link to add the item to their cart and apply the discount advertised in the email. Alternatively, for subscribers who have churned, you can send them an email with a Quick Action link to reactivate and apply the discount. 
• Optimize your PDP: Implementing simple PDP design changes can significantly impact your subscription take rate. A few of our favorite tweaks to try out as you’re preparing for Black Friday: default to subscription for buy option, highlight your subscriber incentives, and include some social proof.  
• Use a banner! Create a banner ad in the subscription portal so existing subscribers know what to expect for BFCM, and you can start converting early shoppers. The banner can highlight upcoming offers, encourage subscribers to add seasonal products, and offer exclusive or early access to discounts and new products.

Clean Skin Club is an excellent example of how to prepare for Black Friday using your customer portal. They ran a BFCM promo that gave subscribers exclusive early access to their holiday sales. They advertised this as a banner in their portal, and customers could purchase each item from the carousel just above, making it as easy as possible for subscribers to redeem the offer.

BFCM week

The time has come! It’s time to put all those pre-BFCM checklist tasks into action to acquire new, loyal subscribers and prevent churn from your current customers

A few of the top considerations:

• Don’t offer TOO big a discount on subscriptions: If you get subscribers in the door with a huge discount, then return to everyday savings, customers will get sticker shock and churn right after their first order. You need to offer a discount that feels valuable, but isn’t so drastically different from the offer current subscribers are already getting.
• Switch up your messaging (and channels): You can bet shoppers are getting inundated on all sides with brands trying to get their attention. Make sure you’re standing out by testing messaging/creative (e.g., value, scarcity, social proof) that’ll cut through the noise, trying it out at different times of the day, and reaching your customers on different channels (e.g., Instagram, website, SMS).  
• Highlight gifting options: Many people do their holiday shopping during BFCM. For your existing subscribers, this is an excellent opportunity to highlight their options for gifting their next order – and claiming any freebies, discounts, and holiday offers in the process. Tackling this BFCM checklist task is simple in the Stay customer portal: subscribers just need to click a button to gift their order. This makes it super easy for them to retain, while also helping them check off a task on their holiday shopping list.  

• Activate your email segments: For customers who signed up, engaged, or churned during BFCM, launch drip campaigns based on their segments. From product education and cross-sells to winback emails, this is the time to start launching the flows you set up while preparing for Black Friday. 
• Reuse what worked last year: You’ve likely already planned new discounts and promos, but don’t discount what worked last year. Did one discounted SKU surpass all others? Run that discount again! Had a high-converting creative from BFCM 2024? Use it again! In addition to your new promotions, consider re-running last year’s top-performers  – in all likelihood, those strategies (or just a slightly tweaked version of them) will do well again.

Post-BFCM

Take a breath – you earned it! And when you’re ready, it’s time to dive into the data, work on nurturing all of your awesome new subscribers, and continue optimizing your business.

A few to-dos on the Black Friday checklist after the dust has settled:

• Offer a gift or discount on the second order to new subscribers: You’ll have a lot of new customers who subscribe just for that initial BFCM offer. To keep them sticking around, one of our favorite suggestions/tasks is to present them with a free gift or promo code on their second order.
• Review your cancellation surveys: Save customers from churning after BFCM with cancellation surveys that actively address their objections. With RetentionEngine, your cancellation flows are backed by the power of AI, which continuously optimizes results over time and serves personalized treatments based on cancellation reasons.

Clevr, for example, used RetentionEngine analytics to take a deeper dive into subscription cancellations. Based on common churn reasons, their team then implemented new messaging at post-purchase and relied on the RetentionEngine to automate cancellation flows based on the survey results. Even better: they used video messages in their cancellation flows, which can improve retention rates by over 40%! 

• Implement winback strategies: A BFCM checklist doesn’t just include tasks for new and current subs. For subscribers who churned, this is the perfect opportunity to try out some winback strategies. For example, you can leverage loyalty partners like Rivo or Bubblehouse to offer points multipliers or VIP access to customers who have churned, encouraging them to come back. Alternatively, you can offer them a discount code and remind them of all the benefits they receive through their subscription (and how these address the most common reasons for cancellation). One of our favorite features to use here is the WinBackEngine, which times your winback messages perfectly to when churned customers are most likely to return.
• Dive into your dunning metrics: It’s likely that with the higher order volume during BFCM on Shopify, you experienced a higher dunning rate. Dive into the numbers to understand which accounts require further attention and which have already resolved themselves, allowing you to optimize your retry strategies. Or you can use Stay’s Smart Dunning, which eliminates the need to follow up manually. The tool uses machine learning to dynamically retry payment methods based on the customer’s history and the decline reason.
• Extract trends: You’ve got a lot of numbers at your disposal now – take this time to comb through them and extract high-level learning and trends. These will be critical when you create your BFCM checklist for next year, and there are probably some juicy data points you can put into action even now. Let’s say the data shows your seasonal add-ons performed really well and drove a much higher AOV. Right now, you can build promotions that keep the momentum going, and next BFCM on Shopify, you can try launching those products even earlier to drive more revenue.

Make Your List, Check it Twice

‘Tis the season to drive subscription growth – and keep those new customers sticking around. Black Friday is also an opportunity to drive higher AOV from current subscribers and strengthen their brand loyalty. That’s why our 24-step essential BFCM checklist isn’t just a playbook for subscriber acquisition – it’s also a guide to preventing churn and delighting your existing customers. 

So, what are you waiting for? Get ready for BFCM with Stay, and let’s break more records this year, together!