Get all-year insight from Black Friday

With Black Friday sales becoming increasingly popular in the UK, we look at what the year-round benefits could be for your business.

It’s predicted that during the Black Friday period of 2025, the UK public will spend a whopping £3.9 billion. The US shopping phenomenon, adopted in the UK since 2010, takes place the last Friday of November (the day after the US Thanksgiving holiday) and often extends into the week around it.

Retailers often mark the period with tempting offers and heavy discounts, hoping to lure in the shoppers already turning their eyes to Christmas. Over 30 million British shoppers are predicted to hunt for a bargain take part in 2025’s event.

Black Friday can be great for business, bringing increased sales and hordes of new customers, but is it just a flash in the pan, or can one Black Friday give a 365-day benefit?

Get inside your customers’ heads

Having a successful Black Friday sale – like the January sales of the pre-internet age – clearly can help your profits for the year. But that increase in spending and attention from new customers can deliver something even more valuable – customer understanding.

By examining your sales data before, during and after your Black Friday activity, you can build a picture of what’s working for your brand and what isn’t. For example, if slashing prices is bringing people through your doors (literal or virtual), what does that say about your pricing during the rest of the year? Would a general reduction lure more people in more often?

If a Black Friday buy-one-get-one-free deal is bringing a whole new group of customers to your door, only for them to vanish again, could you tempt them back with an all-year loyalty scheme? Have a look at Tyl’s portal and pick apart the data it can display for you.

There’s no hard outcomes from understanding the data, but looking at the trends that your Black Friday activity kicks off can help you see which way to jump. You can couple this with talking to your customers. Sure, you’ll (hopefully) be really busy, but a chat over the counter or a follow-up survey in their inbox could tell you exactly what you’re doing right with Black Friday. And that could help you with a strategy to make everyday a loads-of-customers day.

Stress test your business and payments

Another good thing to come out of the chaos of a busy Black Friday is understanding your weaknesses. If you can see where the cracks are in your business, you can take steps to repair or rethink those areas, so your are rock solid for the rest of the year and beyond. Customers like solid businesses they can rely on.

For example, if you’re selling online, is your website coping okay with the increased traffic? Are your payment pages delivering effortless sales for your customers time after time? Are your packages leaving you on time? Are they getting to their destinations in one piece?

If you’re doing business face-to-face, how are your staff coping? Do you need more training? More staff? More card machines? How are your premises coping? Need more space? A bigger door? Better lighting? Better queuing system? All these things come into sharp focus when you have an unusually busy period like Black Friday.

From a payments perspective, how are we doing across Black Friday? Are the card machines working well, or do you need to think about an upgrade? Are your payment links helping your staff send invoices quicker? Are they helping customers pay quicker? If things are working well, that’s brilliant, but if they’re not we want to know about it. Remember, Tyl by NatWest does well when you do well, so we’ll do all we can to supercharge your payments.

A word about fraud

Attracting more customers and having more sales is brilliant for a business. But as with most things in life, the more you do something, the greater the chance you have of something going wrong.

So, when your business activity ramps up during Black Friday, that’s when you need to be even more on guard for fraud. Thankfully Tyl by NatWest has got your back, with a whole host of security checks in place to monitor card payments and look out for anything out of the ordinary.

But the best medicine is prevention (as they say), so to give you the power to head off fraud before it even happens, we’ve prepared this detailed guide to protect you from scams.

Black Friday = Purple Fab-year

Arm yourself with the knowledge that Black Friday data and experience can give you. Couple that with the top tips to keep you safe from card fraud, and you can see how one busy November sale can translate into business brilliance all year round.