Black Friday officially lands this year on Friday 27th November 2026, with Cyber Monday landing on the 30th three days later.
You already know this is the biggest promotional weekend in any DTC brand’s calendar. What you don’t (yet!) know how to build excitement and maximize sales over the event.
In this guide we reveal our agency’s secrets by outlining the Black Friday email strategies we use to drive sales for real clients. We breakdown which type of content to send and when to send it to secure the best results.
Here is the short version:
- Announce your Black Friday participation by email in October
- Open VIP early access two weeks before the sale begins
- Time part of your sale launch to midday
- Don’t skip sending emails on the Sunday between Black Friday and Cyber Monday
- Contact non-openers with a new subject line
- Don’t rely solely on email for your black friday strategy - use a multichannel strategy
Before diving in, we are Email Kong, a DTC agency that’s generated a combined $58.2M in sales generated from our email frameworks and that includes Black Friday campaigns.
Your Black Friday Email Schedule, Send By Send
Announcing And Teasing Your Black Friday Sale
The very first thing you need to do is make your customers aware that you will be participating in this year’s Black Friday sale. You need to get the word out as early as possible, no later than October.
This is a teaser email, keep it short and on message. Your aim is to get people excited about the cash savings and products which will be available in this year’s sale.
Having said that, one thing we must stress is to not give too much detail away until Black Friday is only a couple days away. You don’t want to kill early-November sales by giving customers a reason to wait until the end of the month to buy.
Another thing we need to be clear about: this guide doesn’t advise on is promotions to run or discount amounts. Without knowing your product catalog or your sales margins we would not be able to give a solid answer.
Run An Early-Access Window Two Weeks Before Black Friday Begins
A successful Black Friday strategy isn’t just measured on sales made over that weekend, it's also judged on expanding your mailing list and improving the Net Promoter Score of your existing customers.
Yes that’s right! You can win over new customers and existing ones by using this next tactic.
Launch a VIP early access sales event for your existing customers, giving them access to your planned Black Friday discounts before the sale begins.
This strategy works because:
- Existing customers feel well looked after by being given access to an exclusive sale where they’re not competing against the general public for the same deals
- It entices new customers to sign up to access the members sale
Usually, we recommend launching VIP access sales two weeks before Black Friday starts. That means this year you should be aiming to send your VIP emails out the week of 16th November.
Samantha Santana, senior strategist of digital marketing at IM Digital, ran the same VIP sale ahead of the last Black Friday email campaign
According to Santana's write-up for Klaviyo, Samplize's 14-day early-access window alone generated over $87,000. She named it the single biggest driver of that brand's year-on-year growth.
Send Your Main Black Friday Email At Midday
On the day itself, you should be sending multiple Black Friday emails about different offers for different products - that’s a non-negotiable.
However, reserve your main offer email for the middle of the day.
Plenty of send schedules target the early-morning inbox check, on the reasoning that people wake up ready to shop.
Across Shopify's merchant base, sales peaked at 12:01pm Eastern on Black Friday, at $5.1 million a minute. A dawn sale launch has been sitting in the inbox for six hours by then, under everything that arrived after it.
Hold the early send if your list responds to it. It just cannot be the only one. We have written before about why send times matter less than most people think, and peak week is the exception that proves it.
Resend To Non-Openers With A Different Subject Line
Write the resend in October, because the resend only lets you change one thing.
Klaviyo's follow-up documentation is explicit about the mechanics. Its feature reuses your original campaign body and asks you to change the subject line.
Two constraints in that documentation are worth knowing before the weekend. Klaviyo makes the resend wait a minimum of 48 hours. It also reaches only profiles that opened or clicked something from you in the last 30 to 90 days, which makes it a second chance for engaged people who missed one email.
Draft both subject lines when you draft the campaign. Improving the second one on the Saturday is how it turns into "Last chance" for the fourth time that week.
Sunday Is The Day Most Send Plans Waste
Make sure you’re sending Black Friday emails on Sunday 29th November, with a new reason for the recipient to open them.
The two named days garner most of the attention, so marketing teams usually repeat Friday’s email on 29th November or send nothing at all.
In Klaviyo's 2025 BFCM report, Cyber Sunday was the biggest year-on-year growth day of the whole window, at 14% revenue growth, with revenue from repeat buyers up 15.5%.
The date most brands skip was the one the market grew fastest on. Don’t fall into the same trap and use this date to keep the momentum going.
Cyber Monday And The Extended Deadline
Close the discount window on Monday 30th November, and decide in advance what an extension would need.
An extended deadline works when it carries a reason. Low stock or a shipping cut-off for Christmas delivery will each turn an extension into a decision your reader can follow.
Making that deadline visible helps as well. A countdown timer is the cheapest way to show it. Tested properly, as the only variable changed between two otherwise identical templates, it tends to win.
Extending with no reason at all teaches your list that your deadlines move. Next year they will wait for the extension.
Black Friday Email Design Examples
Getting the campaign creative right is imperative to make your Black Friday email strategy a success. Below are real layouts and examples of email creative we have used for clients of our agency.
The Single-Product Hero, And When It Wins
A single-product hero works when one item is carrying the sale.
A real promotional email Email Kong built for All Femme.
That layout asks your reader to look at one thing. It is the right request when you are leading with a hero product or a deal of the day. It becomes the wrong request when your offer runs sitewide, because a hero implicitly tells the reader that the single product on screen is the offer.
A sale email we built for a haircare client runs a straight percentage offer against before-and-after imagery, so the reason to buy is visible in the creative before the code is. That is the hero doing its job: one product, one proof, one number.
The Multi-Product Grid For A Sitewide Sale
Grids belong on sitewide and tiered offers, where the reader has a choice to make.
A real cross-sell email Email Kong built for Balloony.
A grid asks your reader to compare and pick, which is exactly the behavior a tiered offer needs from them, and it does something a hero cannot do by showing range.
Somebody who arrived for one category discovers you sell four. That discovery is worth more over a weekend when they are already in a buying frame of mind.
The reader learns what the product does in the same send that tells them it is reduced.
The Lifestyle Layout For A Winback Send
The winback send wants a lifestyle layout instead.
A real winback email Email Kong built for Cleo Harper.
That choice follows from what a lapsed customer already knows. They do not need reminding what the product is, since they owned it. They need reminding what having it was like, and a lifestyle image carries that where a cutout on white never manages.
That is why we build the winback creative separately from the rest of the peak-season set. The Cleo Harper winback email we built offers a fixed sum off the next order with a 24-hour window, so the value is legible without the reader doing arithmetic.
Dark Mode Turns One Template Into Three Emails
Build the email for a phone held in one hand, then look at what happens when that phone switches to dark mode.
A real promotional email Email Kong built for KURI NUKA.
Two things are working against your email before anyone reads a word of it. Sinch Mailgun's BFCM 2025 breakdown records 20.4 billion emails delivered in the week of Black Friday, "with volumes rising 30% YoY during Black Friday alone", while open rates held at 16% once bots are excluded.
Your reader is still opening things. They are simply opening yours alongside thirty others.
Litmus is direct about the second problem. It reports over 40% of subscribers viewing email in dark mode, and email clients handling that differently from one another. Some leave your colors untouched. Others partially invert them, and a third group inverts everything on the screen. One template can therefore reach your list as three different emails, and you only ever designed one of them.
Dark Mode rendering checks are part of the template design work we do on every account, alongside deliverability configuration. It takes minutes, and it catches the logo that disappears into a black background before your customer does. We have covered the Klaviyo template mechanics separately.
Add SMS And WhatsApp To Your Black Friday Schedule
Your Black Friday content calendar should not be limited to just email, it should spread the word about your promotion on any channel your customers hang out. Below we dive into the multichannel sources we also leverage.
Text Volume Is Growing Faster Than Text Revenue
If you have a sales prospect’s phone number, you should be sending them SMS messages as part of any Black Friday flow.
One thing to be aware of is Klaviyo's 2025 BFCM report. It witnessed text revenue rising 25% year over year across its brands, which sounds like a channel to pile into. They also put sending volume across those same brands up 34% over the same period.
Revenue grew while the return on each individual message fell, because more brands were sending more texts to the same phones. A text costs what it always did and earns less than it did.
That is an argument for fewer and better-timed messages. It is not an argument against the channel.
WhatsApp And Direct Mail For Your Best Customers
A lot of our Black Friday strategies are about making your customers feel special and providing them with personalized offers and outreach experiences. WhatsApp and direct mail are two strategies that let you do just that.
For our client KittySpout, we ran the retention program across email, SMS, WhatsApp and direct mail rather than email alone, rebuilding it from order confirmation through to retention as the brand scaled past 500,000 customers. That work produced a 146% increase in returning-customer revenue. Neither channel is for your whole list, though. Both are for the tier of customers who justify the cost.
Peak Traffic Is The Cheapest Time To Capture A Phone Number
Run a text-capture offer through the sale window, and be honest with yourself about when it pays.
Peak brings the largest volume of high-intent traffic your store sees all year, which makes it the cheapest moment in your calendar to collect a phone number. On-site capture forms are the most underused asset of the weekend, and a sale is when a capture form is least likely to feel intrusive.
What that number will not do is help you this weekend. A new subscriber needs consent, a welcome sequence and some sending history behind them before they can carry a promotion. Friday morning to Monday night is too short a run for all three. Taking a list from 5,000 subscribers to the 15,000 you might want for early access is months of work.
Numbers you capture in November pay off in December and at next year's peak. Capture them anyway, and simply leave them out of this year's black friday email marketing strategy.
How To Segment Your List Before The Sale
Every send in the calendar above is addressed to a list, so the last decision in a black friday email marketing strategy is which lists carry them.
Most Campaign Revenue Comes From Recently Engaged Buyers
Build one core engaged list, and send to it consistently.
November is the month brands are most tempted to over-engineer the list, and the temptation costs them.
One practitioner writing in r/Klaviyo has audited around a hundred ecommerce brands. They argue that more volume to engaged people is what produces the revenue.
Between 27 and 30 November you have four days of buying attention and a fixed number of sends to spend against them. Break one engaged list into five and each campaign reaches a fifth of the people it could have, which raises your open and click rates and lowers what the weekend earns. The relevance you buy that way rarely pays for the reach it costs.
That arithmetic matches who does the buying during peak. According to Klaviyo's 2025 BFCM report, revenue from repeat buyers grew 13.5% year over year across the window, outpacing new buyers at 9%. Customers you already had carried the growth.
Clicks Define Engagement More Reliably Than Opens
Define that engaged list on clicks, because opens stopped being a clean signal some time ago. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection preloads tracking pixels through a proxy server, registering an open whether or not anybody read the message. An engaged segment built on opens is therefore built partly from people who have never seen an email from you.
Push several sends a day at that segment during peak and you are mailing hard at an audience that is not there.
Clicking is a deliberate act, which is what makes it worth more. You get a smaller number and a truer one.
Four Targeted Segments Cover A Peak Calendar
Layer a small number of targeted segments over that core list, then stop.
Four is a sensible ceiling on that layer. Recent browsers who did not buy, repeat customers and lapsed buyers worth winning back cover almost everything a peak calendar needs, plus one category-interest segment.
That same r/Klaviyo write-up sets a hard limit on the layer: one targeted send a week on top of your regular campaigns, and maybe two during Black Friday. Targeted sends are additions to your schedule, so each one costs you time on top of what is already booked.
Tiering is how larger programs keep that manageable. Every tier receives the launch and the last-chance send, the top tier receives all the sale campaigns, and the lower tiers get layered in selectively. Adding a segment beyond that costs you time, and your time in November is the scarcest thing you own.
Spending more hours on segment logic than on the emails themselves means the priorities have inverted. Our guidance on how often to send once you count your flows applies with more force during peak.
Have Your Klaviyo Account Audited Before October
Reading a calendar is the easy part. Executing a black friday email marketing strategy takes weeks you may not have spare. Segments have to be built and flows tested against live data. Creative has to be checked across three different clients before your announcement email goes out in October.
That is what our free Klaviyo audit is for. We go through your account the way we would go through a homeware or beauty client's before peak. We look at flow performance and the holes in it. We check campaign attribution, list health and segmentation, then how your templates render on real devices. You get back an ordered list of what to fix and what fixing it is worth.
If your early-access list does not exist yet, that is the first thing the audit will flag. Book it now and you will still have October.
Frequently Asked Questions
A few specifics come up every year, so here they are in one place.
When is Black Friday 2026?
Friday 27 November 2026, with Cyber Monday on Monday 30 November.
How early should a black Friday email marketing strategy start?
October at the latest, for the announcement and the early-access build. Klaviyo's planning guidance puts segmentation and flow configuration at October so the weekend runs on prebuilt logic.
How many emails should I send across the weekend?
The calendar above is six sends across roughly six weeks, three of them inside the sale window itself. Fewer than your competitors will send, and more than one.
Does my list size change the answer?
Yes. Under about 5,000 subscribers you can reasonably send to your full list. Above that, mail your engaged segment and expand outward only while the numbers hold.
Should I extend the sale past Cyber Monday?
Only when you can say why inside the email. An extension carrying a stated reason reads as a decision, and one carrying no reason teaches your list that your deadlines are negotiable.
Where does SMS fit if I have never used it?
Start by capturing numbers during the window rather than by sending to a list you built last week. A number needs consent and a welcome sequence before it can carry a promotion.