The Green Sheet Online Edition
September 28, 2026 • 26:09:02
Street Smarts
A 2026 BFCM marketing playbook for your ISO or MLS business
Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are no longer just a long weekend on the retail calendar. They are part of an extended holiday selling season that begins weeks, sometimes months, before Thanksgiving.
For ISOs and merchant level salespeople (MLSs), this creates an opportunity beyond processing additional transactions. The holiday season provides a reason to engage your merchant portfolio, introduce additional solutions, strengthen retention, and demonstrate the value your organization brings to the merchant relationship.
There is plenty of business at stake. The 2025 holiday season generated a record $257.8 billion in U.S. online spending from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, according to Adobe Analytics. Cyber Week alone generated $44.2 billion, while smartphones accounted for 56.4 percent of online holiday transactions.
Heading into BFCM 2026, merchants are also serving increasingly value-conscious consumers while managing higher operating costs and rapidly changing technology. Your strategic advantage is helping them navigate that complexity. Here are several ways to turn BFCM into an office-wide merchant growth and retention strategy.
Give merchants 'BFCM-in-a-box'
Your SMB merchants are busy, and many do not have dedicated marketing departments. Make holiday promotion easier by providing a simple, customizable BFCM toolkit. Consider including email and SMS templates, social media captions and graphics, gift card promotions, QR-code signage, and a basic calendar showing when holiday campaigns should launch.
Don't forget mobile. With more than half of online holiday transactions occurring on smartphones last season, merchants should review how promotions, product pages and checkout experiences perform on smaller screens.
The ISO opportunity: Out-of-the-box resources give sales representatives and account managers a reason to proactively contact merchants. Instead of reaching out only when there is a processing problem or contract renewal, you are starting a conversation about generating revenue.
Help merchants sell value, not just discounts
Consumers want deals, but continually cutting prices isn't always the best strategy for an SMB. Encourage merchants to think beyond “20% off everything.” Promotions could include:
- Spend $75 and receive $10 toward a future purchase.
- BOGO discount, like “Buy two products and receive a third at a discount” or “free.”
- Free shipping above a designated threshold.
- Bonus loyalty points during Cyber Week for merchants that have an established program.
- Early BFCM access for existing customers.
- Earn promotional gift card with purchase, above a designated threshold.
These offers can help merchants increase average tickets and encourage repeat visits without competing solely on pricing.
The ISO opportunity: Review whether your merchants' POS, ecommerce and loyalty systems support tiered promotions, bundles and rewards. A BFCM conversation can easily become a valuable technology review.
Make gift cards work for your merchants
Gift cards can generate revenue today while giving customers a reason to return tomorrow. Encourage merchants to promote both physical and digital gift cards. A restaurant, salon or retailer, for example, could offer “Buy a $100 gift card and receive a $15 promotional card.”
Digital gift cards become especially valuable as shipping deadlines pass and consumers search for last-minute gifts. Then think beyond December. Help merchants develop January campaigns encouraging recipients to redeem those cards and potentially spend beyond their stored value.
The ISO opportunity: Gift cards create another value-added service to discuss with merchants while potentially generating additional transactions and future visits.
Turn your payment data into marketing
One of the most underused marketing resources available to an SMB may already be inside its POS, CRM or loyalty platform: customer data. Encourage merchants to segment customers into groups such as new, repeat, high-value and lapsed customers, and determine how to identify the behaviors driving purchase decisions in real time.
Instead of sending everyone the same BFCM offer, a VIP customer could receive first access, while someone who has not purchased in six months could receive a stronger incentive.
The ISO opportunity: Train your team to discuss transaction data as a business intelligence resource—not simply a record of payments. That minor change can help reposition your organization from processor to business partner.
Prepare for AI-assisted shopping
AI is rapidly becoming part of how consumers discover, research and compare products. Deloitte's 2026 retail outlook also points to retailers investing heavily in AI-powered personalization and emerging agentic commerce. For SMBs, this makes accurate digital information and SEO increasingly important.
Encourage ecommerce merchants to review their product descriptions, pricing, inventory availability, images, shipping policies, return information and FAQs. AI-powered discovery can't effectively recommend products when a merchant's digital catalog contains incomplete or inconsistent information.
The ISO opportunity: You don't need to become an AI consultant. Understanding how commerce is evolving, and how your products and services meet their needs, can help open conversations about ecommerce, inventory management, CRM and integrated payments.
Conduct a pre-holiday payments health check
Higher holiday transaction volume also brings increased operational pressure. Before Thanksgiving, help merchants review fraud controls, employee access, chargeback notifications, refund procedures and backup processing plans.
At the same time, don't overlook checkout friction. Mobile wallets, contactless payments, mobile checkout and streamlined online payment flows can make it easier for legitimate customers to complete purchases. Your goal should be simple: less friction for good customers and stronger controls against suspicious transactions.
A payments health check can also identify outdated terminals, gateway issues or integrations that should be addressed before peak volume arrives.
Turn BFCM Into a Retention Campaign
The biggest opportunity for ISOs and MLSs isn't another Black Friday promotion. It is merchant engagement. Consider creating an office-wide outreach schedule:
- September/October: Holiday technology and readiness review
- Early November: Marketing, loyalty and gift-card discussion
- Before Thanksgiving: Processing, fraud and support check
- December: Last-minute digital gift card and ecommerce opportunities
- January: Holiday performance review and 2027 planning
Prioritize high-volume merchants, businesses with growth potential and accounts your organization has not contacted recently. This transforms BFCM from a four-day sales event into a structured portfolio-management strategy.
Be the partner behind the payment
The winning BFCM strategy for ISOs and MLSs in 2026 isn't simply providing another terminal, API, gateway or payment option. It is helping merchants use their technology to run a stronger business.
Connect payments with marketing, loyalty, analytics, ecommerce, fraud prevention and customer experience. Most importantly, communicate those capabilities in a language an SMB owner understands and can successfully implement into their business strategy.
Your merchants are preparing for one of their busiest selling periods of the year. Help them make the most of it. Because when your merchants generate more sales, retain more customers and enter the New Year stronger, your portfolio benefits right along with them. 
Jaki Kackert is a seasoned marketing professional with experience supporting organizations across the payments and financial services industries. Through expertise in content marketing, digital strategy, public relations, and communications, she helps ISOs and Resellers build marketing strategies that attract, retain, and grow merchant portfolios. For more information please visit www.kackertmarketing.com or reach out to Jaki at jbkackert@gmail.com.
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