A 10-step Black Friday email marketing strategy to drive more sales
A set your email strategy is the key to a successful Black Friday Cyber Monday.
Summary
Why building an email strategy for BFCM matters
Emails during BFCM are one of the most important revenue drivers for businesses. When done right, they reach the right customers at the right time, with just the right message, getting clicks and driving conversions.
This guide will show you how to set up a successful email strategy for Black Friday Cyber Monday 2025.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) aren’t just for door-busting in-store deals anymore. These days, the most exciting shopping weekend of the year is largely digital.
According to Adobe Analytics, US shoppers spent a record $10.8 billion online on Black Friday 2024 (up 10.2% from 2023) and $13.3 billion on Cyber Monday 2024 (up 7.3% from 2023).
In other words, BFCM keeps growing and is a huge opportunity for retailers to drive online sales. But with that opportunity comes intense competition: consumers’ inboxes and phones will be bombarded with promotions, and many shoppers now opt to buy from brands they trust over those offering the biggest bargain.
The takeaway? To stand out during BFCM, you need a well-planned, data-driven omnichannel marketing strategy that builds customer loyalty and cuts through the noise.
Here are 10 key steps to building out your Black Friday Cyber Monday marketing and CRM strategy this year.
1. Plan your BFCM early
“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
2. Analyze past BFCM data
Don’t start from scratch. Look at the data from your previous year’s SMS campaigns and email campaigns to see which products, promotions, and channels drove the most sales and engagement, and iterate on the strategy.
Don’t have past BFCM data because you’re a new brand? Go off any sales-related information you have, or as Ben Zettler, founder of Zettler Digital says, “Pick up the telephone! You likely know a friend, colleague or partners that do have BFCM history and it’s worthwhile to have a conversation about what has and hasn’t worked in the past. People are willing to share.”
Since BFCM goals typically center on sales and revenue more than engagement or brand awareness, you’ll want to focus on marketing metrics like:
- Revenue per recipient
- Conversion rate
- Placed order rate
- Return on investment (ROI)
Not sure where to start putting your past BFCM data to good use? Take a look at how these successful brands learned from their data and drove serious Black Friday season revenue as a result.
Patrick Ta Beauty reimagines their BFCM strategy with a gift-with-purchase
After a modest BFCM showing in 2023, luxury cosmetics brand Patrick Ta Beauty reimagined its 2024 strategy with a data-driven approach. They introduced a high-value gift-with-purchase incentive, offering a $96 product bundle for orders over $150, aiming to boost average order value and encourage product exploration.
They also expanded their email and SMS outreach, increasing email sends nearly sixfold without elevating unsubscribe rates. By segmenting audiences, optimizing send times, and staggering messages across channels, they achieved an 8x year-over-year growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue during BFCM, with email alone accounting for 30% of ecommerce revenue—tripling its contribution from the previous year.
Shinola embraces strategic segmentation for BFCM
In 2024, the luxury brand Shinola embraced a data-driven approach for its first full-scale BFCM campaign. Shinola implemented strategic segmentation, optimized email and SMS flows, and targeted messaging to their most engaged customers.
This strategy led to a 27% year-over-year increase in Klaviyo-attributed revenue, with a remarkable 48% rise in revenue per email recipient and a 40% boost in revenue from automated flows.
Beekman 1802 uses historical data to meet BFCM revenue targets
Early in November 2023, Beekman 1802 was behind in their revenue goals, and competitor sales were launching left and right. Using historical data from the prior 3 BFCMs, the artisanal beauty brand identified which products and messaging consistently performed best around the holidays and personalized marketing for various segments—driving 49% YoY growth in total BFCM ecomm revenue in 2023.
Craving even more ideas? Learn 11 ways to optimize your email campaigns through testing and experimentation, or read tips and tricks from Klaviyo Community Champions on how to audit your Klaviyo account.
3. Test BFCM offers early
BFCM is known for steep discounts, but that doesn’t mean blanket 50% off deals are your only option. In fact, bigger isn’t always better when it comes to promotions—higher discounts do not necessarily equate to higher conversions .
In fact, during BFCM 2024, the discounts that drove the best conversion rates were in the 10–15% or 20–25% off range .
To select the right offer, look at your target audience and profitability potential and identify the deals that would appeal to your customers the most without hurting your bottom line. Here are a few BFCM offers to consider:
- Free gift: Move some stock by giving it away for free, either as a free gift with purchase or a BOGO deal. People love a freebie, sometimes even more than a discount.
- Contest: Run some numbers—if you can’t afford a discount, maybe you can afford less than that in the form of a prize value.
- Holiday product launch: If you can’t launch a whole new product, consider releasing a new color or size for an existing product to keep things fresh.
- Dollar-amount discounts: Instead of offering a steep percentage off, offer a specific dollar-amount discount, such as $10, $20, or $50, for items priced $100 or more.
- Free shipping: Offer free shipping for orders over a certain dollar threshold to increase average order value and boost sales.
- Bundle deals: Use these deals for cross-selling or upselling. Offer discounts when customers buy complementary items together, such as shampoo and conditioner.
- Early-bird deals: Give VIP customers early access to BFCM deals to increase loyalty and reward your best customers.
- Partnership offer: This option requires some planning, but if you can team up with a brand that has a similar audience, you may open yourself up to a new pool of customers for Q4.
- Donation incentive: If it makes sense for your brand, offer a slightly smaller discount but match it with a charity donation. Communicate the impact your customers have had after BFCM is over.
To determine which approach makes the most sense for your brand, start planning your BFCM deals, promotions, and discounts well in advance—ideally the first week of August. Starting this early before the holiday weekend will give you more time to carefully curate your offer and develop your Black Friday marketing strategy.
We recommend choosing a few BFCM promo strategies that might work for your business, and then A/B testing them over Labor Day weekend to see which drive the most engagement and sales.
4. Clean your subscriber lists
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:
Type of list |
What to do |
---|---|
To clean your email list |
To clean your email list, first suppress invalid and outdated email addresses. Then, identify unengaged profiles and either suppress them from your list, or send a re-engagement campaign before BFCM season arrives. |
To clean your SMS list |
To clean your SMS list, create a segment of SMS subscribers whom you want to win back, and create a re-engagement flow for that segment. Then, create a sunset flow for anyone who goes through the entire re-engagement flow and continues to not engage. Finally, bulk unsubscribe your sunset segment. |
In both cases, make sure not to rule out people who bought during last year’s BFCM, as they might be seasonal shoppers.
5. Establish good segmentation practices
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.
6. Plan creative in advance
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.
7. Determine BFCM message schedule
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
8. Adopt an omnichannel approach
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.”
9. Personalize experiences with AI
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.
10. Prepare for post-BFCM sales
Your BFCM marketing strategy doesn’t end on Cyber Monday. Plan for post-BFCM sales and customer retention strategies to keep the momentum going by:
- Offering post-BFCM deals and promotions to entice customers who missed out on BFCM deals to purchase.
- Launching a loyalty program to encourage repeat purchases and turn BFCM shoppers into loyal customers.
- Sending personalized thank-you messages and offering exclusive discounts or freebies as a token of gratitude to enhance the customer experience and encourage customers to come back.
- Requesting reviews or user-generated content, or sending surveys to ask for customer feedback—and using the insights to improve your products and services moving forward.
- Setting up virtual contact cards in your SMS welcome flow so your customers can save your contact on their phone.
- Analyzing and regrouping based on what worked and what didn’t. Document your insights while they’re fresh. BFCM is exhausting, but the data you glean and the customers you win can fuel your marketing well into the new year.
Create a successful Black Friday Cyber Monday strategy with Klaviyo
Pulling off a top-performing BFCM campaign is much easier with the right platform by your side. Klaviyo is more than an email service provider—it’s an all-in-one B2C CRM platform built to help brands create personalized, omnichannel customer experiences and build lasting loyalty. With a powerful toolkit spanning email, SMS, automation, and analytics, Klaviyo enables you to roll out high-converting BFCM campaigns and track their success with ease.
Klaviyo’s B2C CRM helps you drive success with:
- Unified customer data and powerful segmentation: Klaviyo has a built-in customer data platform that brings all your data into one place. This means you can create ultra-precise segments using any data—purchase history, website events, prediction scores, survey responses, and more. Target customers with pinpoint accuracy based on their behavior and demographics, so the right people get the right BFCM offer every time.
- AI-powered insights and optimization: Klaviyo comes with predictive analytics and AI features baked in. It can forecast things like a customer’s next order date or lifetime value, helping you identify who to re-engage or who might become a VIP. Features like Smart Send Time use your data to suggest optimal send times, so you reach customers when they’re most likely to engage . And automated A/B testing and funnel analysis take the guesswork out of optimizing campaigns.
- Omnichannel automation from one platform: With Klaviyo, email, SMS, mobile push notifications, and more all live under one roof. You can easily create cross-channel flows and campaigns that ensure customers get a cohesive experience whether they’re on email or text.
- Customizable templates: Klaviyo’s drag-and-drop email builder allows you to create stunning, on-brand BFCM promotion emails. Choose from a rich library of pre-built templates or design your own from scratch using your brand images, colors, and logo.
- In-depth reporting: Access up-to-the-minute data on your BFCM campaign click rates, ROI, average order value, and revenue generated. Monitor and compare data across campaigns to identify areas for improvement and use the data to optimize your future campaigns.
350+ integrations: Connect Klaviyo with your ecommerce platform, CRM, social media channels, and other marketing tools to streamline your workflow, track customer data, and send targeted BFCM messages across all customer touchpoints.
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