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Boost BFCM sales with 10 expert Black Friday email tips and examples to cut through the noise and drive fourth-quarter revenue.
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Black Friday is one of the biggest sales events of the year. Last year, Shopify merchants drove a record-breaking $11.5 billion in sales during the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend. 
With so many consumers open to shopping during the holiday weekend, leaning on tried and tested marketing channels can open the floodgates to more revenue in the fourth quarter. For many retailers, that’s email marketing. 
Email is the third-most influential channel on holiday purchase decisions, beating influencer endorsements, in-person experiences, and conversations with retail associates in-store. But when so many retailers rely on this direct line of communication to promote holiday sales, it’s difficult to stand out in a subscriber’s crowded inbox. 
This guide shares innovative Black Friday email marketing strategies to try this year, with best practices and examples from leading retailers. 
Customer data is the most valuable asset any ecommerce business has. It allows you to tailor email outreach and deliver on customers’ expectations for a personalized shopping experience. Yet 85% of internet users want to do more to protect their online privacy, meaning this strategy can be difficult to implement. 
Before the holiday season arrives, take stock of the customer data you currently have. If your email list is small or you don’t have supplementary information to personalize campaigns to existing subscribers, deploy lead generation campaigns to gather more holiday season customer data. For example:
Because Shopify offers a customer data platform (CDP) by default, any first-party data you’ve collected on your customers gets combined in a unified customer profile. 
Whenever they share their email address or phone number, this data—such as their order history, loyalty points they’ve earned, previous emails they’ve opened, and/or customer service tickets they’ve raised—all funnel back to one place, giving you one source of truth for every shopper. 
Black Friday might only last one day, but consumers are still open to making holiday purchases in the run up to the big event. Klaviyo found that more than half of consumers think a month earlier than November is the ideal time for brands to initiate their holiday shopping season sales. 
Most retailers start seeding their Black Friday email promotions 21 days before the big event—a strategy dubbed “Black November,” which includes other holiday shopping dates:
The majority of consumers look for discounts and sales during this period—so much so, 7 in 10 consider price the top factor in their holiday purchase decisions, beating quality (61%), variety (34%), and warranties or returns policies (31%).
Take advantage of consumers’ openness to pre-Black Friday promotions by creating a holiday calendar. Perhaps you give your email list early access to your sale, or build hype around a new product drop by teasing it to subscribers, with an automated series like this: 
Not all holiday shoppers are the same. Some might be looking for gifts for a loved one—others might want to take advantage of a hefty discount to buy a product that’s been on their wishlist for months. Segmentation allows you to identify these buyer preferences and deliver personalized Black Friday email marketing campaigns.
Key Black Friday customer segments to email include:
Customers who’ve visited your New Orleans store within the last six months, for instance, could receive an email that invites them to your retail store’s exclusive holiday sale which starts two days before Black Friday.
Yet instead of relying solely on historical data to forecast each segment’s next steps, lean on predictive analytics. These tools digest large datasets using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to accurately predict what a customer will do next. 
💡Tip: Shopify’s segmentation features pull data from unified customer profiles to group customers based on qualities they share. Choose from prebuilt segment templates, or build your own with the ShopifyQL query editor. All segments are dynamic—subscribers will move in and out of segments automatically when data from their unified profile changes. 
Segmentation isn’t the only way to personalize emails around the Black Friday weekend. Dynamic content blocks adjust smaller sections of your email, instead of sending the same email to everyone who fits your segmentation criteria.
Let’s say, for example, that you’ve defined a segment of VIP customers to target during Black Friday. Subscribers have one thing in common—they have a customer lifetime value of over $500—but they don’t all share the same buying behaviors. Some have saved the loyalty rewards they’ve earned—others have made a portion of their purchases in-store. 
Further personalize the Black Friday emails that each subscriber in this segment receives with dynamic content blocks. That could be:
Black Friday sales are effective because they’re exclusive—either in terms of product quantity (for example, a limited amount of inventory) or because the promotion ends at a specific time. 
Lean into this time sensitivity and encourage Black Friday subscribers to take advantage now rather than later. This scarcity can induce the fear of missing out, a psychological phenomenon that influences people to buy even when they didn’t intend on doing so. 
Effective marketing techniques to create urgency in your Black Friday emails include:
reMarkable, for example, has a countdown timer in their email to announce Black Friday is ending. It offers visual representation of when the deal ends, instead of just a generic “Sale ends tonight!” message.
Email inboxes are a crowded place to be at the best of times—never mind on Black Friday, when every retailer wants to capitalize on consumers’ willingness to buy. Email marketing platform Omnisend processed 1.13 billion emails in the week surrounding BFCM. Klaviyo reported similar figures: at its peak, merchants sent 420 million messages in a single hour on Black Friday.
An email subject line is the first thing that subscribers see when your campaign lands in their inbox. A best practice is to split-test strategies such as:
Here are some real examples that incorporate these best practices and stood out to me during the Black Friday weekend last year:
Promotions and flash drops can incentivize holiday shoppers to make impulsive purchases. Remove the biggest barrier to them doing so—finding the money to pay for their order—by offering buy now, pay later (BNPL).
During the BFCM weekend last year, consumers spent over $686.3 million on BNPL purchases, up 8.8% from the year before. Of those who have used this type of service, almost a third say they’d be more likely to spend money on discretionary goods if the retailer offered BNPL as an option.
Shop Pay Installments offers an easy way to add BNPL options at checkout. Customers can choose to divide their purchases into smaller, more manageable installments. Combined with Shop Pay, the best-converting checkout on the internet, it’s no surprise that Shop Pay Installments has been proven to reduce cart abandonment by 28% and increase average order value by as much as 50%. 
Email might be the only direct line of communication you have with Black Friday customers, but it’s not the only way to command their attention. 
SMS marketing is the easiest integration since most email marketing platforms, including Klaviyo, offer SMS integration as standard. For example, you could send an email campaign to a particular segment, then use SMS to follow up with those who haven’t yet redeemed the offer or opened the email.
It’s an approach proven to get results: Klaviyo reports that merchants who integrated SMS into their Black Friday email marketing strategy experienced a 20% YoY increase in ecommerce revenue during BFCM, accounting for more than $100 million in gross merchandise value. 
Email can also complement paid advertising strategies as costs skyrocket throughout Black Friday season. Shopify Audiences builds custom retargeting lists to export to platforms like Meta, Google Ads, and TikTok. It’s helped merchants like Happy Hippo achieve a 4.7x return on ad spend (ROAS) while cutting customer acquisition costs (CAC) by 72%. 
“Shopify Audiences is a huge benefit for Plus merchants,” says CEO and lead product designer Adam Biel. “It has helped lower customer acquisition costs so our investments can stretch much further with Facebook ads.”
Transactional emails tend to be overlooked when marketers attempt to compete with other retailers for attention during Black Friday. Yet they’re an opportunity to strengthen relationships with the customers you’ve already acquired. 
Comb through the automated emails you send as standard when customers complete a certain action. Here are some examples and ideas to optimize them:
Black Friday, Cyber Monday regularly break records, but not all of them are good. Most customers acquired during BFCM have a lower lifetime value. This occurs partly because these customers were being opportunistic and taking advantage of your promotions, but also because your brand loses mindshare throughout the year.
Design an email retention sequence to retain holiday shoppers after Black Friday ends. You could:
💡Tip: Shopify Flow takes the logistical hassle out of these holiday marketing automations. Work from prebuilt templates—such as inviting shoppers to your loyalty program when their unified customer profile meets specific criteria—or custom code your own. 
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of new promotions and segmentation strategies that turn email subscribers into paying customers—so much so, that retailers often forget the fundamentals. 
Here’s a quick reminder of the email optimization best practices to keep in mind while writing Black Friday emails: 
If you’re in the midst of a creative lull and are searching for ideas on how to make your Black Friday emails stand out, draw inspiration from these examples.
Shoppers are especially prone to abandoning online carts in search of better Black Friday deals. This cart recovery email from Pulp & Press reminds each individual customer of the products they abandoned, with a reminder that it’s the biggest sale of the year—and that they should take advantage now, before the deal ends. 
Black Friday might be the biggest online sales event of the year, but it’s not always the most profitable. Discounts tend to lure in low-value customers who might only purchase from you when products are heavily discounted. 
Detox Market’s Black Friday email is a great example of how to combat this with tiered promotions. The more customers spend, the bigger the discount. 
Freaks of Nature leans into scarcity with their “almost gone” Black Friday email. The call to action button tells people to “secure” their shirt—more strategic than just “get yours today.” Plus, it uses price anchoring to showcase the before and after sale price of each bestseller.
There are also direct checkout links for email subscribers to complete their purchases without searching the online store for the perfect item. 
It’s tempting to shout about your bestselling products or hefty discounts with innovative email designs. Home furnishings brand Revival takes a different approach. Instead, the brand shares a letter authored by their founder, which wishes them a wonderful holiday weekend with a gentle nudge to buy the item on their wishlist. 
The email also features a note beneath the sign-off that teases the following day’s email. This tactic can increase open rates during Black Friday—subscribers are already on the lookout for the campaign. 
With so much competition to reach your target market during Black Friday, leaning into your brand values can attract conscious consumers who care more about sticking to their morals than impressive discounts.
Deodorant brand Fussy, for example, is a certified B-Corp that sells deodorants made with natural ingredients and refillable cases designed to reduce plastic waste. Their target audience cares about sustainability, hence why the retailer’s Black Friday email marketing strategy was to rename the event “Green Week.”
Email marketing spans every stage of the customer journey, from aiding initial product discovery to encouraging customer retention. Shopify has everything you need to personalize this end-to-end experience, including unified customer profiles and segmentation to put your data to work. 
Plus, when holiday email campaigns drive record levels of website traffic, you don’t have to worry about outages or downtime. Shopify’s infrastructure handled over 57.3 PB of data, 1.19 trillion edge requests, and 10.5 trillion database queries during the last BFCM. It’s why leading brands like Represent, Knix, and Muscle Nation trust Shopify to capitalize on Black Friday sales.
“Black Friday can be nerve-wracking,” says Stefan Lewis, chief digital officer at Represent. “But Shopify has always helped us in terms of increasing bandwidth and we’ve never run into any issues around site speed.” 
Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) email is a marketing strategy where retailers reach their target customers through targeted emails. These holiday campaigns typically include promotions, sales, discounts, gift suggestions, and product recommendations.
To write an effective Black Friday email, lead with a time-sensitive offer in the subject line and header. Use mobile-first design, highlight bestsellers or exclusives, and include urgency-driven CTAs like “get yours before it’s too late.”
The best time to send Black Friday emails is in the runup to the big event. Most consumers start holiday gift shopping before Black Friday arrives. A pre-launch campaign can ensure your brand is top of mind when they’re ready to buy.
Use targeted emails to announce a Black Friday sale. Divide your audience into segments based on traits they share, and include contextual recommendations—for example, discounts on products similar to those they’ve bought.
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