November 3, 2026

Toggle Time: Session 1 - Play Your Cards Right This Black Friday

Play your cards right this Black Friday 🃏

Black Friday is the biggest gifting day of the year on Toggle, and the operators who make the most of it are the ones who build their offer before the rush, not during it.

In the first session of Toggle Time, Amy Mellors and Ashley Kerr shared the Black Friday trends worth knowing and a range of offer ideas to try, then built a Black Friday collection and promotion live in the Toggle dashboard. Grab a cuppa, open your dashboard and build along!

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▶️ Watch the webinar

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Six takeaways to shape your Black Friday offer ✨

🎯 Start with what you want the offer to do

Amy’s first point of call is deciding what you want Black Friday to do for your brand. Bringing in new guests, winning Christmas buyers early and filling your quieter months each call for something different. Getting clear on the goal first makes it easier to choose between a discount, a promotion or a promo code.

💳 Discount or added value?

Amy looks at how operators used each type of promotion last Black Friday, from money off and percentage off to bonus top-ups. One of them overtook another for the first time since Toggle Time began, which surprised even the Toggle team. She also shares how one of Toggle’s top-selling operators kept it simple: added value at checkout, on cards only valid from Boxing Day onwards. The sale landed in November without eating into December’s trade.

⚡ Short and sharp, or long and later?

Amy sets out two ways to shape your offer. Short and sharp runs for 72 hours, from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. Set the redemption date to start once the 72 hours are up, so guests can’t buy a discounted voucher at the dinner table that weekend and use it to pay for the meal. You secure the sale now and an extra visit later. Long and later lets guests buy now and redeem in January or the first quarter, helping to fill the quieter months. Whichever you pick, how you promote it matters just as much, and Amy shares how operators got the word out, from QR codes on tables to emails to their best guests.

🛠️ Build it today, go live on the day

Collections and promotions can both be scheduled ahead, and each collection gets its own link you can drop straight into emails, texts and social posts. With your images ready, each one takes minutes to set up. Ashley walks through both, step by step.

🎁 Name it for the person receiving it

Nobody wants to unwrap a gift card called “Black Friday Mega Sale”. Give the card a name that works as a gift, and save the sale language for your marketing. It’s one of five common set-up slip-ups Amy covers in the session, alongside basket limits and testing your promotion before it goes live.

⏰ Get in early on the day

Amy’s advice for Black Friday itself: send early. Get your emails and promotions out first thing in the morning, so you catch people as they start their day, before they get busy.

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Your next four weeks 📅

Today: decide your offer
Tuesday 10 November: Toggle Time Session 2, a masterclass in filling stockings and tills
Monday 16 November: collection and promotion scheduled and ready
Friday 27 November: Black Friday
Monday 30 November: Cyber Monday
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Helpful resources

Everything Ashley built in the session, step by step, in the Toggle Academy:

Want a hand getting your Black Friday offer set up? Our team are on hand to help, so give us a shout. And if you’re not on Toggle yet, there’s still time to be u and running before Black Friday!

Next stop: Toggle Time Session 2: A masterclass in filling stockings and tills, Tuesday 10 November at 10am. Register here

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