Black Friday: 5 Ways to Get Ahead With Referral and Influencer Data

Read time: 4 minutes

Black Friday is critical in 2025. After tough trading conditions and low consumer confidence, it’s the breakthrough chance you’ve been waiting for. But you need to act now to ensure success.

You wouldn’t wait until September to order Black Friday stock. Or to redesign your checkout. So why put off collecting customer insights that could make or break your biggest sales opportunity of the year? 

Get ahead of the competition by integrating the right data early, allowing you to create irresistible offers, clever cadences, and better segmentation. 

Read on to learn why investing in referral and micro-influencer marketing now is essential for closing 2025 with a bang — and kicking off 2026 on a high note. 

How to get Black Friday-ready with referrals and micro-influencers

Your customers love referring friends on Black Friday—so now’s the time to prepare your referral programme.

Last year, on Friday 29th November, our platform powered 1.6 million orders—3.5x the usual daily average—and generated nearly £1 million in referral revenue for our brands, more than double the typical daily figure.

This surge in referrals can have a lasting impact on your bottom line because referred customers are far more valuable than non-referred shoppers:

On average, referred customers:

• Spend 11x more on their first order (and 8% more on repeat purchases).
• Are 5x more likely to refer others themselves.
• Have up to a 2x higher lifetime value.

To date, our acquisition platform has generated nine million new customers and $3 billion revenue for our brands.

Here are five ways you can use Mention Me to tap into this potential and boost your Black Friday results.

1. Capture offline word-of-mouth with link-free sharing

It’s often inconvenient for customers to share links. Would you want to find and share a link when simply chatting at the gym? Name Share™ removes this hurdle.

Unique to Mention Me, this feature makes it easy for customers to generate referrals without using links — all you need is a name. For Mention Me clients, Name Share® drives 34% more referrals than other methods, which is ideal for quickly building your BF/CM customer base before you start advertising.

Another tip? During the holiday period, try something new and bulk out your referral incentive to really drive engagement during your busiest periods.

For example, offer free delivery or an even larger gift card amount to encourage more engagement and more referrals.

2. Acquire more customers through A/B testing

A/B testing teaches invaluable lessons about your customers. It tells you what made them take the desired action, helping you optimise not only your BF/CM campaigns but also your future projects. This should make it easier to attract even more loyal customers. 

Our unique A/B testing capabilities help drive a 4x boost in customer acquisition in the first six months, leveraging data from over 45,000 experiments and A/B testing.

Testing can take some time. You need to set up, find results, and take action to ensure maximum impact from your BF/CM campaigns. So, the sooner you start testing, the better. 

3. Boost ROAS with AI-powered segmentation

Your brand advocates are your most loyal and valuable customers. The key to a successful BF/CM  is acquiring more of these dedicated fans through effective segmentation, ensuring you spend time and money attracting brand fans on Black Friday, not apathetic customers.

With our AI-powered Audience Builder, you can seamlessly create audience segments and integrate them with Meta or Google, making it easier to target lookalike audiences and boost your return on ad spend (ROAS) by up to 90%, as demonstrated by Moss, a leading clothing retailer in the UK.

Again, to give your brand the best chance this year, it’s important to start segmenting your customers now before the BF/CM rush.

4. Create well-timed offers to boost conversions 

Should you prompt customers to buy another item or refer a friend? It can be difficult to know which lever to pull. Propensity to Refer™ solves this dilemma.

Our AI modelling predicts when it's best to encourage customer advocacy or to offer a purchase incentive. It’s already helped some of our clients increase repeat purchases by 2x, and AOV (average order value) by 14%.

Using this AI, you’ll ensure that your BF/CM offers are well-timed and relevant to your customer's current context, helping to maximise conversion rates during the BF/CM boom in traffic. 

5. Reveal micro-influencers hidden in your customer base

Your authentic revenue-drivers might already be shopping with you. But you just haven’t met them yet.

With Mention Me Influencer, you’ll identify real customers who love your brand and also have meaningful online influence. Whether they’ve posted unprompted on Instagram or regularly recommend you in their circles, we'll help you surface and activate them in time for peak season.

No more sifting through endless profiles or chasing cold DMs. Our platform uses AI-driven matching and first-party data to reveal the best-fit micro-influencers from your own customer base—those already primed to create authentic, high-converting content right when you need it most.

This high-trust content can be repurposed across your paid and organic campaigns, boosting conversions and building credibility at the moment it matters most—Black Friday and beyond.

Why access referral and micro-influencer data now?

Referral and micro-influencer marketing get you high-quality customers. Leveraging the data beyond the sales helps you maximise LTV and encourage repeat purchases.

But why is it so important to access this data now? Here are three reasons:

1. Free yourself from cookie-dependence

In 2024, Google rolled out its Tracking Protection feature, which banned all third party cookies, so if you rely on targeted advertising via cookies, you need to rethink your tactics.

The solution? First-party customer data.

With the acquisition platform built on trust, combining the world’s best referral platform and AI-first micro-influencer solution, you'll gather all the first-party customer data you need to build a profitable BF/CM.

2. Future-proof your 2026

In May 2024, the UK emerged from recession with the fastest growth in two years. As the economy turns a corner, it’s crucial to find new ways to beat the competition and finish the year with a bang.

Referral and micro-influencer data are the tickets, helping you intelligently segment and target customers to ensure personalised and relevant engagement for the year ahead.

Why start behind your rivals when you can burst from the blocks?

3.  Increase CLTV

Referral and micro-influencer marketing can unlock up to X2 customer lifetime value (CLTV), because you acquire customers who spend more, stay longer and bring others with them.

The brands that move fastest with trust-powered acquisition will pull furthest ahead.

The takeaway? Increasing LTV boosts your bottom line. And the sooner you start using referral and influencer data, the sooner you'll see lasting, profitable growth.

Roundup

Tapping into referral and influencer-led acquisition is your shortcut to outperforming your rivals. But timing matters.

Start now, and you won’t just win Black Friday—you’ll carry that momentum through January, February and beyond.

This is your moment to lead from the front. With Mention Me, you’ll transform seasonal shoppers into high-value customers through trust-first strategies that combine data-driven referrals with authentic micro-influencer marketing.

Our complete acquisition platform can help you future-proof your strategy and meet rising consumer expectations—and turn Black Friday into lasting, profitable growth.

Ready to drive predictable growth and scale faster? Speak with our experts today to build your best Black Friday yet.