When to send Black Friday emails (and texts, and other marketing messages)

Over 15,000 Klaviyo customers had their best sales day ever during BFCM 2024.

One key to their success? Timing.

Winning during Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) hinges on reaching the right people at the right time. Send too early and your message may get missed. Send too late and shoppers may have already purchased from a competitor. In either case, you risk losing buyer attention—and hurting deliverability and revenue.

To convert more customers and drive growth, today’s marketers need to think through both when they start sending Black Friday promotions in the year, and their sending strategy specifically for BFCM weekend. According to Klaviyo’s 2025 BFCM forecast, 40% of consumers shop during BFCM sales, but 24% start earlier.

Here’s how you can use timing to your advantage to generate more revenue during the holiday season and beyond.

Take an omnichannel approach

First things first: email is just one piece of the puzzle. Klaviyo customers that added SMS to their marketing strategy experienced a 20% YoY increase in ecommerce revenue during BFCM last year, according to Klaviyo’s 2024 BFCM data.

With an omnichannel approach to a peak shopping period, you’re more likely to meet customers where they engage, on their preferred channels—whether that means email, text messaging, WhatsApp, mobile app messaging, in-store, social, or something else.

Here are a few ways to make sure your BFCM email marketing plan incorporates other channels:

• Figure out which channels each subscriber prefers. Use AI-powered channel affinity to understand which channels subscribers are most likely to engage on first, then update your BFCM sending strategy accordingly.
• Improve segmentation efficiency. Monitor segment overlap and set parameters for which messages go through which channels during BFCM. We recommend setting up segments based on engagement, browsing, and purchasing behavior.
• Use an omnichannel campaign builder to coordinate efforts across channels and timezones and deliver more cohesive, personalized marketing, before and during BFCM.

Start preparing your email list early

Klaviyo’s 2025 BFCM forecast found that 40% of consumers plan to start shopping for the holidays in July, August, September, or October. Another 40% plan to start shopping for the holidays between January and June.

That means list building should begin far before the November holidays hit. Here are a few BFCM strategies to help you grow your email, text messaging, and WhatsApp lists ahead of the holiday:

• Instead of a generic discount, update your sign-up forms to offer special holiday incentives in exchange for email addresses and phone numbers, like early access to your BFCM sale, free shipping, or first dibs on limited-edition product drops.
• Use AI to optimize sign-up form timing to maximize list growth across channels ahead of the holidays.
• Trade in basic sign-up forms for product quizzes and wishlists that require customers to input their preferences alongside their contact information. That zero-party data will prove invaluable once the holidays roll around.
• Target email-only subscribers and encourage them to sign up for your SMS and WhatsApp lists by offering an exclusive discount.
• Use QR codes to provide special in-store offers in exchange for email sign-ups.
• Promote contests or giveaways on your social channels requiring an email address or phone number to sign up.
• Use a lookalike audience builder to find new customers on social media, based on the highest-value customers already on your email list.

When activewear brand POPFLEX required customers to create a wishlist on their site for a chance to win a shopping spree giveaway in early October, 100,000 customers entered. POPFLEX then used that wishlist data to craft and send targeted BFCM messages.

Patrick Ta Beauty, meanwhile, started investing in email and SMS list growth over a month before BFCM. They used sign-up forms to capture high-intent customers by building anticipation around loyalty perks and early access to their holiday event—and drove a 41% period-over-period increase in email sign-ups the week before BFCM.

Build your pre-Black Friday timing strategy

To cut through the noise and drive more sales leading up to BFCM, start early, and increase your marketing sends as the holiday weekend approaches.

Important caveat before you read on: there’s no perfect schedule that works for every brand. Use the time before Black Friday to test and understand your specific audience to figure out your brand’s ideal messaging frequency, timing, and offers.

July–August: Prep, audit, and start building segments

In addition to optimizing your sign-up forms and growing your lists, now is the time to review BFCM performance from last year. When did you see the most activity across channels? When did you see the most sales? Your audit can help inform goal-setting for this year’s BFCM.

Here are a few timing-related ideas for auditing last year’s BFCM performance:

• Identify your best-performing segments, flows, and campaigns.
• Audit forms and opt-ins across channels.
• Take a look at competitor campaigns from last year.

Summer is also a good time to start cleaning your lists, building out this year’s segments using engagement data, and setting up flows that span multiple channels, like email, text messaging, and mobile push notifications.

Finally, make sure you integrate your CRM and marketing platform with your ad platforms if you haven’t already.

September–October: Test and optimize your offers, copy, and channels

In the months leading up to BFCM, fine-tune your timing, messaging, and channels.

Think of minor holidays and events like back-to-school, Labor Day, Singles Day, and Prime Day as opportunities to try out different messaging ideas, run Smart Send Time tests, and experiment with offers. Then, use that data to make your BFCM campaigns even more impactful.

Review performance data from July–October to see where you can improve, or rethink which channels you’re focusing on and which offers are the highest priority. During this time, finalize your segments, flows, and offers.

Early to mid-November: Send early-access and gift guide campaigns across channels

Klaviyo’s 2025 BFCM forecast found that 32% of consumers make the bulk of their holiday purchases in November.

Here are a few ideas for early BFCM offers and campaigns that might work especially well in the weeks leading up to the big weekend:

• VIP and loyalty-based offers
• Holiday gift guides
• Early-access discounts or limited-time offers
• Holiday wishlists
• BOGO (buy one, get one free)
• Buy one, donate one, or matching charity donations with every purchase
• Personal shopper experiences
• Bundled gift promotions
• Last-chance items
• Guaranteed delivery by Christmas

Just before BFCM, we recommend emailing your most engaged segments and lists on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays, and your VIPs on the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday before Black Friday.

Here’s a suggested email marketing schedule you can use to get started:

Remember, too, that early BFCM offers don’t have to be steep discounts. For every purchase made in the month of November, premium sock brand London Sock Co. paired a 10% discount with a donation of two pairs of socks to charity. And to make the sale even more special, they sent it exclusively to email subscribers at the beginning of November.

“Our products are high quality, so we want to avoid simply discounting them,” says Jack Richards, head of campaigns and partnerships at London Sock Co. “To add value and stand out from the Black Friday noise for customers instead, we give two pairs of socks to homeless charity, Crisis, for every purchase during this period.”

The results speak for themselves: a 180% increase in average order value (AOV) during Black Friday.

Be strategic about campaign timing on Black Friday itself

Klaviyo’s 2025 online shopping report found that throughout the year, consumers are most likely to engage with brands via email, text message, and WhatsApp in the morning.

BFCM-specific numbers back this up, too: Klaviyo’s 2024 BFCM data found that the most active marketing hour for Klaviyo customers was 9–10 a.m ET on Black Friday, when our customers sent over 420 million messages. Then, Klaviyo customers saw peak order volume—1.3 million orders—shortly after, noon–1 p.m. ET that day.

But Black Friday is an all-day event, so it’s important to send communications strategically throughout the day.

When incorporating text messages into your email marketing, for example, “consider staggering your campaigns throughout the day to avoid peak sending hours when customers are inundated with messages,” says Jessica Schanzer, former senior product marketing manager at Klaviyo. “Spread your impact and maximize your reach.”

Ezra Firestone, ecommerce expert and founder of Smart Marketer, recommends sending 3 emails and 2 text messages on peak days, including fall Amazon Prime Day, early BFCM, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Green Monday. Doing so helped his brands nearly double their revenue, he observes.

Here are a few ways to make the most of your Black Friday communications:

• Make messages more timely by sending in the buyer’s local time zone.
• Segment your audience before you send. You might, for example, reserve special offers for shoppers who have engaged with Black Friday promotions in the past.
• Avoid weekends and late nights—those are the least popular times for buyers to engage, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 online shopping survey.

Bamboo clothing brand Little Sleepies wanted to make a splash for BFCM 2022. They planned to offer a bold discount of 30%, but they knew they’d need to start early and be intentional about their email sends to make the campaign successful. To nail Black Friday timing and make the most of their big sale, Little Sleepies:

• Promoted the sale on organic social and an on-site pop-up long before it started
• Encouraged customers to subscribe to emails for an hour of early access to their holiday sale
• Sent two email campaigns on the first and last day of their sale—one to their full list, and another to those who engaged with the first email but didn’t buy
• Sent targeted campaigns to specific segments every day of their 8-day sale

All of the above contributed to 138.2% YoY growth in revenue from email during their 2022 BFCM sale, and 2.5x month-over-month growth in placed order rates on flows in November 2022. “Sending every day was important to us, but we also didn’t want to overwhelm,” says Christine Taylor, retention marketing manager at Little Sleepies.

Coordinate omnichannel flows during BFCM

Consumers are inundated with marketing messages during the holidays, so make sure your flows feel genuinely helpful and relevant, not disruptive.

Any automated messaging should complement BFCM promotions. Importantly, make sure you aren’t accidentally communicating about sales or promotions that contradict what you’re offering for special holiday sales.

Optimize your flows during BFCM by:

• Reducing time delays for abandoned cart and browse abandonment flows to adapt to the fast-paced nature of promotion-based shopping
• Swapping out ongoing promotions for BFCM-specific deals
• Adding countdown timers to your messages to build urgency
• Updating subject lines to highlight BFCM deals
• Integrating additional product recommendations into post-purchase flows

During BFCM, Little Sleepies, for example, sped up their abandoned cart and abandoned browse flows so they sent after 30 minutes of inactivity instead of one hour. They also updated the frequency of abandonment flows so they triggered daily for each customer, rather than once every 14 days.

Use industry-specific timing recommendations

In our recent 2025 omnichannel shopping survey, we uncovered the best times to send marketing messages by industry. These are general preferences for marketing throughout the year, so use these as a jumping-off point, and test out when your audience is most engaged:

Measure and optimize your BFCM strategy

To optimize, iterate, and improve, you need to know what worked well and what didn’t. Gather data during BFCM, then analyze after the holidays to improve future performance.

Monitor the following marketing performance metrics, so you can gather learnings and make adjustments accordingly:

• Click rates by time/day: Use this information to identify which send times perform best during BFCM so you can improve future campaign performance.
• Revenue per recipient (RPR): Compare different BFCM campaigns, flows, segments, and channels to determine which ones are generating the most RPR.
• BFCM Klaviyo-attributed revenue: Understand how marketing campaigns and flows in Klaviyo contributed to overall BFCM revenue, and where you can ramp up efforts in the future.
• Total BFCM revenue (YoY or total): Consider what you did differently this year and how that may have resulted in an increase (or decrease) in total BFCM revenue.

Organize your BFCM email timing with an action plan

Start with this schedule template to capture your shopper’s attention and drive more BFCM sales:

Drive Black Friday success with Klaviyo B2C CRM

Timing can make or break your Black Friday campaigns. To drive more sales during BFCM, you need to combine thoughtful timing with personalized messaging.

Klaviyo B2C CRM unifies marketing, service, and analytics so you can transform your customer relationships and unlock revenue growth during BFCM and beyond.

Want to join the 15,000+ brands that experienced their best sales day ever during BFCM 2024?

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