Black Friday and Cyber Monday is the biggest revenue week of the year, but also the most chaotic. Affiliates and influencers can be your growth edge, driving conversions while ensuring your budget goes toward proven, performance-driven sales..

But here’s the catch: affiliate and influencer marketing during BFCM only works if you plan it ahead of time. Affiliates and influencers need time to prep content, align with your messaging, and build anticipation with their audiences. If you wait until the week of BFCM, you’re already too late.

This article gives you a step-by-step campaign calendar built for ecommerce brands. It shows you exactly when to brief affiliates, roll out content, increase commissions, and build urgency, helping you stay organized and manage your partners to maximize results.

The importance of timing in your BFCM affiliate campaigns

BFCM is not a 4-day flash sale. It’s a six-week revenue cycle that starts in early November and extends into December. If you only start involving affiliates a week before your sale launches, you’re too late.

Here’s how timing directly impacts results:

• Pre-hype (3–4 weeks out): Affiliates need time to script, film, and schedule their content. Brief them early, and your promos feel natural in their feed instead of last-minute filler.
  
  
• Event period (Black Friday–Cyber Monday): By launch week, your affiliates should have warmed up audiences and built trust. Now, your affiliates can focus on urgency and conversions, moving away from awareness.
  
  
• Post-holiday (1–2 weeks after): Affiliates continue to promote offers, deals, bundles, and gift cards. This phase also delivers cleaner attribution since brand ads aren’t flooding feeds, so you can see exactly which affiliate touchpoints are driving conversions.

Why the timing of your BFCM campaign is important:

• Affiliates who prep early create higher-quality content that drives more volume.
• Coordinating ahead lets you control the message, so your brand positioning doesn’t get diluted.
• Early planning protects attribution and margins since affiliates with single-use coupons and dedicated tracking links bring in direct conversions instead of losing sales to coupon aggregators.

Don’t plan affiliate campaigns just around the four BFCM days. Plan them around the entire buying season. The earlier you align with affiliates, the more revenue you’ll capture and the clearer your data will be on who truly drove sales.

The affiliate & influencer campaign calendar for BFCM

Affiliates and influencers can only drive measurable sales during BFCM if you give them a clear path: enough time to onboard, receive products, and seed content before the holiday rush begins. 

This calendar maps exactly what to do and when, so you’re not scrambling at the last minute.

6–8 weeks before (late September – early October)

This phase is about building capacity by expanding your partner base and getting them production-ready well before shoppers start browsing deals. Here’s what to do during this time:

• Recruit new affiliates and influencers: Prioritize creators who are already posting seasonal content (gift guides, holiday essentials, TikTok Shop unboxings). They’re in front of buyers now and can naturally integrate your product into those narratives. 

Tip: Outreach with clear value (exclusive codes, commissions, and a fast onboarding process) helps you stand out before their inboxes flood with offers.

• Ship product samples with onboarding kits: Don’t just send the product. Include a brief with campaign goals, deadlines, and commission structure. When creators get hands-on early, they can shoot authentic unboxings, tutorials, and gift-guide features that look planned instead of rushed.
• Seed anticipation content: Encourage affiliates to post “coming soon” mentions, tease gift ideas, or include your products in early holiday roundups. These posts aren’t meant to convert immediately. Instead, they’re meant to put your product on mental shopping lists before BFCM discounts go live.

• Automate customer onboarding: Instead of emailing codes manually or tracking spreadsheets, tools like Social Snowball auto-enroll customers as affiliates the moment they buy, generating unique discount links, and nudging them to promote your brand. This way, you get to activate customers as brand ambassadors, critical ahead of your big sale.

By this point, you should have affiliates already mentioning your brand and hyping your products to keep it top of mind. If you wait until November, they’ll be buried under competing brand deals.

4 weeks before (late October)

This is when affiliates shift from prep to execution. By now, they should have products in hand. Your job is to give them the exact framework to start bringing in pre-BFCM traffic while tightening up tracking before the flood of sales.

Some ways to do this are:

• Deliver detailed campaign briefs and assets: Send a campaign pack that includes offer timelines, hero products, value props, example scripts, and pre-cut creative (TikTok hooks, Story stickers, email banners). Affiliates should never have to figure out how you want your brand positioned.

• Test tracking links with soft launches: Ask affiliates to publish light content, like an Instagram Story or TikTok teaser, using their unique tracking links. This lets you confirm that attribution works, fix broken codes, and benchmark baseline CTRs before the real traffic hits.
  
  
• Roll out performance-based commission tiers: Don’t just say “higher commission.” Be specific. For example, “10% base, 12% if you hit $3,000 in sales, 15% at $10,000.” Affiliates need visible targets with clear financial upside. This is what separates casual promotion from incentivized and aggressive selling.

• Motivate customer affiliates with reward updates: Send triggered emails or SMS reminding them what they’ve already earned and what’s at stake for BFCM. For example, “You’ve made $45 in referrals. During Black Friday, you’ll earn double on every sale.” Small nudges like this convert passive sharers into active promoters.
  

• Segment affiliates for tailored pushes: This makes sure that each group gets the right balance of assets, motivation, and complexity. 
  
  • VIP creators: Exclusive bundles or early-access offers.
  • Micro-influencers: Swipeable captions and plug-and-play creative.
  • Customer affiliates: Keep it very simple: “Here’s your link, share it with friends and earn store credit.”

By late October, your top affiliates should already be live with early content. If they’re still waiting on direction, you’ll lose them to brands that locked them in weeks earlier.

2 weeks before (early November)

Two weeks out, your affiliates and influencers should stop prepping and start priming demand. This is the pre-hype phase where you warm audiences so they’re already paying attention by the time discounts drop. 

• Direct affiliates to seed anticipation posts: Provide  clear hooks like “Our Black Friday drops in 10 days” or “Holiday bundles are almost here.” These posts train audiences to watch out for your offer instead of getting distracted by competitors.

• Push influencers into product-led teasers: Get TikTok unboxings, Instagram Reels showing your product in use, or “holiday-ready” shots live now. Early content builds social proof and ensures that algorithms are already ranking their posts before peak BFCM.
• Finalize and communicate performance bonuses: Don’t keep payouts vague. Share the exact incentive ladder. For example: “10% base, 12% at $5K, 15% at $15K.” This transparency motivates high performers to compete.
  
  
• Pre-set automated payouts: Configure payouts now so affiliates don’t wait weeks to see earnings. With Social Snowball, you can queue automatic payments through Tremendous or Trolley in cash, gift cards, or donations. Fast payouts keep affiliates focused on driving sales for you, not chasing admin.

If your affiliates aren’t posting teasers by early November, you’re losing share of voice. The brands that show up early are the ones customers remember when the sale officially begins.

BFCM week (Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday)

This is the week affiliates and influencers have been building toward! The goal is simple: maximize visibility, drive urgency, and protect margins. Every move you make should support those outcomes.

Some tips to guarantee the success of the BFCM week are:

• Run a coordinated content campaign: Affiliates shouldn’t post once and go silent. Ask them to publish across multiple touchpoints, like TikTok videos, Instagram Stories with countdown stickers, YouTube Shorts, and email blasts. Repetition keeps your offer top of mind when shoppers are overwhelmed by hundreds of competing deals.
  
  
• Deploy time-boxed discount codes: Assign each affiliate a unique code that expires in 24–48 hours. This creates urgency (“buy now before this code disappears”) and gives you real-time visibility into which partners drive sales in. Rotate codes mid-week to keep campaigns fresh and prevent fatigue.

• Protect your margins with single-use coupons: BFCM is peak season for coupon leakage. Safelinks by Social Snowball automatically generates single-use codes every time a shopper clicks an affiliate link. Even if it gets copied to a deal site, it only works once—so you don’t bleed margin or pay out fake commissions.

The brands that win during BFCM actively manage affiliates hour by hour. Real-time tracking, tiered nudges, and fraud prevention separate a profitable campaign from one that drains revenue.

Post-BFCM (Early December)

Cyber Monday doesn’t end your affiliate strategy. Early December is your chance to retain momentum, deepen relationships, and extend wins into the rest of the holiday season.

Here’s how to make the most of this phase:

• Pay top affiliates fast: Issue bonus payouts and tier rewards within the first week. Don’t wait until January. Quick payments keep affiliates motivated to keep promoting your brand during Christmas and New Year pushes.

• Turn campaign results into a content library: Use affiliate program management tools like Social Snowball to collect TikToks, Reels, and Stories that drove the highest conversions and tag them by affiliate, format, and product. Pair each content with metrics like CTR, revenue, and AOV. You’ll have a ready-made database of proven content for December promos and future campaigns.

• Convert BFCM buyers into affiliates instantly: Every new customer you acquire is a potential word-of-mouth channel. With Social Snowball, you can auto-enroll them at checkout, generate a unique discount link, and track them in your dashboard. That means December buyers can start driving referrals the same week they purchase.

• Keep affiliates active with new briefs: Plan campaigns for “last-minute gift ideas,” “stocking stuffer bundles,” or “New Year reset products.” Give specific deadlines to affiliates so they don’t go dormant after Cyber Monday.

Most brands go quiet after BFCM and leave revenue on the table. If you pay affiliates quickly, recycle proven content, and recruit new affiliates into your program, you’ll extend your sales surge into December instead of watching momentum fade.

Tips for maximizing the impact of your affiliate efforts during BFCM

Affiliates perform best when they know exactly what to do, what they’ll earn, and how fast they’ll get paid. Here are four ways to maximize their output during the busiest sales season of the year:

1. Segment affiliates by performance

Not all affiliates bring equal results. Group them into tiers—top performers, mid-level, and new recruits. 

Offer higher commissions, early product drops, or exclusive bundles to your top tier so they feel prioritized. This keeps them invested and competing for bigger rewards.

2. Give them content that’s ready to post

Affiliates lose time creating assets during BFCM. Provide a swipe file of pre-approved captions, product shots, TikTok hooks, and email templates they can use instantly. This keeps messaging consistent and speeds up time-to-publish.

3. Build urgency into your commissions

Layer in time-sensitive incentives. For example, a 5% bonus for sales made within the first 48 hours, or a tiered bump if they cross $10K in attributed revenue. 

Affiliates respond fast when they know payouts are tied to limited windows.

4. Go multi-channel, not single-channel

Don’t limit affiliates to discount links on one platform. Encourage them to push your offer across TikTok Shop, Instagram Stories, YouTube Shorts, and even their email lists. 

Multi-touchpoint exposure dramatically improves conversion, especially when shoppers are bombarded with deals.

Ready to maximize acquisitions during BFCM?

When you give affiliates enough time to prep, the right assets, and incentives to push harder, they become one of the most reliable revenue streams for your ecommerce brand during the busiest shopping season.

That’s where Social Snowball comes in. From auto-activating affiliates at checkout to tracking TikTok Shop content and paying commissions in one click, it removes all the manual work so you can scale your affiliate channel without slowing down.