A 10-step Black Friday email marketing strategy to drive more sales

“Start earlier” may sound like cliche advice for the Black Friday Cyber Monday planner, but it’s useful if you want to decrease your reliance on paid ads and discounts to carry you through the holiday season.

In fact, many brands kicked off BFCM campaigns well before Thanksgiving in 2024 to capture early shoppers​. By the Monday before Thanksgiving, over 40% of email campaigns already contained Black Friday discounts​, helping those companies lock in sales before the holiday weekend rush.

Megan Edwards, email marketing manager at Tecovas, starts her BFCM preparation in July or August. “The sooner we can get things to creative, and the more rounds of edits that they go through—it’s just going to make the campaigns better,” she explains.

In these early stages of planning, Edwards nails down:

• Optimal campaign send times
• Planned campaign cadence
• Segmentation strategy
• Quantity of creative deliverables needed

Email deliverability is always important, but it’s especially important around BFCM, when your bottom line depends on your messages landing in subscribers’ inboxes.

To avoid bounces and spam complaints and generally keep your email deliverability in tip-top shape heading into the holiday sales season, clean your email and SMS lists and let go of inactive or unengaged subscribers. Here’s how:

Your email subscribers aren’t like your children—you’re allowed to have favorites. You’re also expected to treat them differently, so don’t skip out on developing bespoke offers and messages based on the signals people send you.

If you’re able to start planning for Black Friday Cyber Monday in August, you can take steps to segment your overall email list into smaller groups of people most likely to buy during BFCM. Use all the data at your disposal—purchase history, browsing behavior, engagement with past campaigns, location, etc.—to create these groups.

B2C CRMs have built-in data and RFM analysis tools that can identify your high-value customers and predict who’s likely to purchase again, making segmentation much easier. The more precise your segments, the more relevant (and effective) your BFCM messaging can be.

“The one thing I never recommend is blasting folks you haven’t spoken to in years over BFCM,” says Loretta Doria, director of strategy, Ragnarok. “BFCM does present some opportunity to win back more recently churned customers, but I’d still recommend keeping your segments tight so that you don’t end up in a deliverability ditch.”

What does a “tight” segment look like? For Black Friday Cyber Monday, focus on the following 4 segments:

• Engaged segment: If you’re emailing a few times per week, your engaged list is people who have opened or clicked on an email within the last 30–60 days. If you’re only emailing a few times a month, you may want to expand this list to 90–120 days.
• VIP segment: You may define your VIPs based on dollar value, number of purchases, or subscription length, depending on your business model. Every brand defines their VIP list differently, but these are basically your most loyal customers—and note that VIP programs are especially well suited for SMS.
• Previous BFCM purchasers segment: These are people who converted on Black Friday Cyber Monday emails or texts in previous years.

RFM segment: You can use segments that have recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) properties to target customers of certain groups, such as targeting champion customers with requests for product reviews, or targeting at-risk customers with entry-level or lower-cost items.

Once your offers and audience segments are lined up, plan your creative assets and copy well ahead of time. Don’t feel like you have to reinvent the wheel, either.

Ben Zettler says, “You might have a holiday-specific aesthetic, which is fine, but most brands are likely to be sending a higher volume of content than at other times of the year, so you should keep to a simplified structure on each message. Not every email should carry design that in and of itself has been built from the ground up. Decide on one primary aesthetic and iterate off it.”

From email subject lines to CTA language, here are a few tips to keep in mind as you’re lining up your BFCM marketing creative:

• Email subject lines: Inboxes are particularly crowded over Black Friday weekend. Think about ways to make your emails stand out by using words and phrases that inspire urgency, such as “limited time” or “only a few left.” You can even get a helping hand from AI in crafting subject lines that get clicks.
• Countdown timers: Instill a sense of FOMO by including a countdown timer that shows how much time remains until the end of your sale.
• GIFs: Use animated GIFs of relevant deals or products to add movement and visual interest to your emails, while making your BFCM offer stand out.
• CTA design: Place your CTAs above the fold so your subscribers don’t have to scroll to see them. Use bold, contrasting colors and large, easy-to-read fonts to make them stand out and entice readers to click on them.
• CTA copy: Make sure your CTA text accurately reflects your BFCM offer—for example, if your promotion includes a freebie, “Claim my gift.” Or, since BFCM offers are frequently time-bound, your CTA might contain phrases like “This weekend only.”

Personalization: In addition to segmentation, personalize your messages to your audience by using dynamic content blocks or personalized product recommendations.

When it comes to BFCM, timing can make or break your campaign. How often should you email or text your customers? And when, exactly?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer—it depends on your audience’s behavior and tolerance—but you should decide on your cadence and schedule by early fall and build a calendar so you’re organized. In fact, many marketers dedicate the first couple of weeks of September to figuring out BFCM messaging frequency and timing.

Here are a few ideas on where to start:

1. Analyze your audience’s behavior: Look at your target audience data and identify when they’re most active and receptive to your messages. Time zones, typical online activity, and previous engagement patterns should guide your scheduling decisions.
2. Test different SMS and email send times and days: Leverage a tool like Klaviyo’s Smart Send Time, which uses your data to algorithmically determine the optimal send time for engagement. This essentially automates the A/B testing of send times and can identify when each segment of your audience is most likely to open.
3. Send enough messages to stay top of mind: A balanced message frequency can prompt action without overwhelming your subscribers. Sending too many emails can lead to burnout and unsubscribes, while sending too few may result in missed opportunities.

Remember, too: the question of how often you should email your segments about Black Friday Cyber Monday is at least partially answered by segmentation itself. If you want to isolate people who are most interested in VIP access to your BFCM offer, for example, send your opt-in email as early as mid-October.

With that in mind, here’s a sample cadence you might want to adapt for your business:

• October, week 3: email and SMS BFCM VIP early access opt-in
• October, last week: season kick-off email to highlight discounted overstock
• November, week 1: gift guide email
• November, week 2: free shipping weekend email
• November, week 3: VIP early access to bundle promotion or escalating discount
• Black Friday to Cyber Monday: Black Friday Cyber Monday announcements (but note that many brands are sending these prior to Thanksgiving)
• Tuesday: extended final sale
• December, week 2: last chance for guaranteed holiday delivery

A note on timing: For the weeks before Black Friday Cyber Monday, we recommend emailing your most engaged email lists on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Email your VIPs between Tuesday and Thursday before Black Friday. And consider sending emails in the morning: during Black Friday 2024, Klaviyo saw the most active email hour for its customers was between 9 a.m–10 a.m ET, with order volume peaking shortly after.

Communicate every day between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but not necessarily to your entire list. Use engagement-based data (opens and clicks) to determine how often to send to each group. More engaged means more sends; less engaged means less sends. For campaigns that need to be sent to all recipients, make sure to turn off Smart Sending.

While email is a powerhouse for BFCM marketing, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. The most successful Black Friday Cyber Monday strategies in 2024 were omnichannel, reaching customers via email, SMS, websites, social media, and even in-store.

In fact, brands who added SMS messaging to their marketing mix saw a 20% YoY increase in e-commerce revenue during BFCM 2024, accounting for more than $100M in extra gross merchandise value. So be sure to adopt a omnichannel marketing approach that includes:

• Investing in paid advertising well ahead of BFCM. Leads on platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads get more expensive the closer you get to BFCM, so it’s worth spending more on paid ads earlier.
• Growing your lists using social media. If you already have a big following on social, use lookalike audiences to guide those followers to email and SMS—your owned channels, which give you more control.
• Expanding mobile app usage. If your brand has a mobile app, consider making certain products only available in your app and sharing special offers via push notifications.
• Integrating social proof into your marketing. By incorporating social proof, like product reviews and user-generated content, at the start of a relationship with a buyer, you make community a cornerstone element in the buying process. You might, for example, reward frequent reviewers with discounts and incentives that motivate them to buy and review even more items—and do it via SMS to create urgency.
• Determining and honoring channel preferences. “Track which subscribers are converting from certain channels and base your segmentation strategy on those preferences,” recommends Melissa Matusky, manager and implementation consultant at Klaviyo. “You’ll refine your messaging strategy and save money.”

A true omnichannel approach will make it easy for people to be aware of your BFCM offers, whether they’re scrolling TikTok, checking email, or walking into your store.

You might even promote on channels in complementary ways. For example, you could send an email highlighting all your BFCM deals ahead of time and an SMS for more specific, urgent reminders (“only 2 hours left!”). Or you may use social media to drive people to your website to sign up for BFCM emails.

If you do have a physical retail presence, remember that BFCM is omnichannel in that sense, too. Encourage online shoppers to visit stores and vice versa. For example, Tecovas uses email during BFCM to specifically encourage local store visits for boot fittings, knowing that once customers come in, conversion is high.

As Klaviyo’s CMO, Jamie Domenici, put it: “Instead of treating consumers like a monolith, build personalized relationships with them—regardless of where they are in the purchase cycle or how they’re engaging.”

Artificial intelligence isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a practical ally for overwhelmed marketers during BFCM. From generating copy faster to predicting customer behavior, AI tools can help you work smarter and deliver more personalized customer experiences at scale.

According to Klaviyo’s latest ecommerce trends report, more than 80% of marketers say AI improves their productivity and performance at work . BFCM is exactly when you’ll want that efficiency boost and predictive power.

Here are some ways you can use Klaviyo AI in your BFCM strategy:

• Speed up content creation: Staring at a blank page for your 20th email of the week? Let AI give you a first draft. Klaviyo’s AI Assistant can generate email subject lines, email copy, and even SMS text ideas based on your prompts.
• Predict customer behavior: Forecast next order date, customer lifetime value, spending potential, time between orders, churn risk, and more, and use this data to tailor your BFCM marketing tactics to maximize customer retention and revenue. AI can also create product recommendations, showing each shopper the items they’re most likely to purchase based on similar users’ behavior.
• Experiment and optimize: With features like forms display optimization and advanced A/B testing, you can learn what works and what doesn’t—and put adjustments on auto-pilot, so your marketing efforts are constantly improving.
• Automate customer service and responses: Consider the deluge of customer inquiries that can come during BFCM (“Where’s my order?”, “Does this come in size M?”, etc.). AI chatbots or email auto-responders can handle common questions to relieve your support team.
• Guard against fraud and spam traps: Some brands use AI to detect unusual purchasing patterns or bot-like behavior during big sales. For instance, if you have a limited drop, AI could help spot and throttle bots trying to buy out inventory.

Need more ideas? Learn exactly how to use Klaviyo AI this BFCM, with specific use cases and instructions.