🦃 Black Friday Game Plan: How we target Annual Subscriptions (Steal this strategy)

Black Friday is right around the corner. Like many of you, we are scrambling to get everything ready.

I wanted to share our internal strategy document for my product, a1d.ai.

Our North Star metric for this Black Friday is simple: Maximize Annual Subscriptions. Cash flow is king, and locking in annual users is our #1 priority.

To achieve this, we are splitting our efforts into two buckets: Public Traffic (Acquisition) and Private Traffic (Conversion/Retention).

Since many of you are running your own micro-SaaS or apps, I’ll start with the Public Traffic strategies because there is something here you can use right now.

Part 1: Acquisition – Creating Gravity 🌍

We don't just want to beg for traffic; we want to create resources that attract it.

1. The "Aggregator" Strategy (SEO Play)
Instead of just a landing page for our deal, we are building a navigation page that collects Black Friday deals from across the market.

Inspiration: Look at how ElevenLabs collected SaaS coupons. It brings value to the user, not just a sales pitch.
The Plan: We are building a dedicated "Black Friday Deals" page. It allows users to claim coupons for various tools.
The Goal: This is a pure SEO play. By being a hub for deals, we capture traffic searching for general software discounts and funnel them to our main site, a1d.ai.

2. The GitHub Repository Strategy (Join us here!)
We created a public GitHub repository allowing users/founders to submit their own deals.

Why? GitHub has massive domain authority. A well-maintained "Awesome Black Friday Deals" repo ranks incredibly high on Google.
Action for you: We’ve already set this up. If you have a Black Friday deal for your product, submit a PR to our repo here:
👉 Awesome Black Friday & Cyber Monday Deals 2025

This serves as excellent backlink construction for us and provides a free promotion channel for you. Win-win.

Part 2: Retention – The Art of Segmentation 📧

Getting traffic is half the battle. Converting it is the other half. We are doing a deep dive into our existing user base to run highly targeted campaigns.

First, we segmented our users into 4 buckets:

Current Monthly Users: The goal is to upgrade them to Annual.
Churned Users: They subscribed once but canceled. We need to win them back.
Free/Registered Users: They signed up but never paid. They need a strong push.
Current Annual Users: (Don't annoy them, or offer an extension deal).

The Tooling: Customer.io
We are using Customer.io for this. I have to be honest—the learning curve isn't exactly flat. However, for the level of granular data and automation we need, it’s been a game-changer.

The Workflow:

Export user DB -> Tag users -> Import to Customer.io segments.
A/B Testing: We are designing different email templates for each segment. We are testing subject lines and CTA placements to see what drives open rates.
Automation: If a user clicks but doesn't buy, they get a specific follow-up sequence.

Part 3: Backlinks & Distribution 📣

Community: We will be engaging on Reddit, IndieHackers, and X (Twitter).
Note: We haven't started this phase yet. I will update this post or write a follow-up on how our "Launch Day" distribution went once we are in the trenches.

Part 4: On-Site Optimization 💻

You can bring the horse to water, but you have to make the water look good.

Homepage: We are adding a countdown timer on a1d.ai. It sounds cheesy, but urgency works.
Pricing Page: We are redesigning the pricing cards to make the math obvious. We want the user to see the specific discount percentage and the exact dollar amount saved immediately. Friction kills conversion.

That’s the plan!

Don't forget to drop your deal in the GitHub Repo so we can all get some cross-promotion going.

I’m curious—how are you handling your existing monthly users this Black Friday? Are you aggressively pushing them to annual, or leaving them alone?

Let’s discuss in the comments! 👇