How many emails should a store send during Black Friday week?

There is no safe number that fits every store. Send as often as your engaged subscribers keep opening and clicking, and watch complaints and unsubscribes after each send. Many stores send more to recent buyers and active openers, and less to everyone else. If complaints rise after a send, slow down for the rest of the week rather than pushing harder.

Should a store offer an extra discount in abandoned checkout messages during the sale?

Usually not. During a sitewide sale the shopper already sees a discount, and an extra code teaches people to abandon carts on purpose. A reminder of what is in the cart, the sale end date and clear shipping and returns details often does the job. If you do add an incentive, make it expire with the sale and make sure it can't stack by accident.

Is it worth starting SMS marketing two weeks before Black Friday?

Only if you can collect proper consent and test the setup first. A new SMS list will be small by Black Friday, and a mistake with consent or quiet hours carries real legal risk. For most stores starting now, it is better to set up compliant sign-up forms during the sale and run the first SMS campaigns in December or January.

What should go in a Black Friday sale reminder email?

The start and end time with the time zone, what is discounted and by how much, any limits such as stock or shipping cut-offs, and one clear link to the sale. Keep it short and specific. Leave out countdown gimmicks you can't honour, such as a "last chance" email followed by an extension the next day.

How do you measure whether your flows worked after Black Friday?

Compare each flow's orders and revenue with the same weeks last year, and look at revenue per recipient rather than open rates, which are less reliable now that some mail apps open messages automatically. Also check complaint rates, unsubscribes and support tickets about orders. A flow that brought sales but raised complaints sharply needs fixing before the next sale.

Black Friday in Two Weeks: The Email and SMS Flows Worth Fixing Now

Fix abandoned checkout, welcome, browse and post-purchase flows first, clean your lists, and check SMS consent. Skip new builds you can't test in time.

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With two weeks to go before Black Friday, fix the automated flows that already earn money: abandoned checkout, welcome, browse abandonment and post-purchase. Then clean your lists, check that every SMS subscriber gave consent, and test each flow end to end. Leave large new builds until January, when you have time to test them.

Picture a small skincare brand two weeks out. The team has a sale calendar, five campaign emails and a new SMS tool they signed up for in October. Nobody has opened the abandoned checkout flow since spring. It still links to a discount code that expired in July, and the product images point to items that are no longer sold. On Black Friday, every shopper who leaves a full cart gets that email.

Which email and SMS flows should a store fix before Black Friday?

Fix the flows that trigger on buying intent first: abandoned checkout, abandoned cart and browse abandonment. Then the welcome flow, because new subscribers arrive in volume during sale weeks, and the post-purchase flow, because first-time buyers need shipping updates and a reason to come back.

A flow is an automated series of emails or texts sent when a shopper does something, such as signing up or leaving a checkout. A campaign is a one-off send to a list. Campaigns get most of the attention in November, but flows keep working through the whole season without anyone pressing send.

The order to work in

Abandoned checkout. The shopper gave an email or phone number and started paying. This flow is closest to revenue.
Abandoned cart and browse abandonment. Signed-in or known shoppers who added items or viewed products and left.
Welcome. Sign-ups from pop-ups and sale landing pages. Tell them what to expect on Black Friday and when.
Post-purchase and shipping. Order confirmation, shipping updates and a delivery check. Holiday buyers ask "where is my order?" more than at any other time.
Back in stock. Only if you restock during the sale. Otherwise switch it off so it doesn't promise what you can't deliver.

A marble hand pressing clay into a cracked joint of a stone water channel so the leak stops and the water runs on

What should you check in an abandoned checkout flow?

Check that it triggers, that every link and code works, that it stops when the shopper buys, and that the offer in it matches the offer on your site that week. Most broken recovery flows still send; they just send the wrong thing.

What to check

Trigger and timing. Place a real test order, leave at the payment step and confirm the first message arrives when you expect it.
Exit condition. Buy after the first message and confirm the second one never comes. A recovery email after a purchase reads as a bug.
Links and codes. Every link goes to a live product or the restored cart. Any discount code is valid for the sale period and no longer.
Offer consistency. If the whole site is 25% off, a 10% recovery code looks worse than doing nothing. Pause or rewrite the incentive for sale week.
Platform limits. Read your platform's notes. Shopify's help pages, for example, say abandoned checkout recovery works only for the Online Store and Buy Button sales channels, so checkouts started elsewhere won't get it.
Duplicates. If you run more than one email or SMS tool, make sure only one of them sends recovery messages.

How should the welcome and post-purchase flows change for sale week?

Change the content, not the structure. The welcome flow should tell new subscribers exactly when the sale starts and what they will get. The post-purchase flow should set honest delivery dates and answer the questions your support team gets most.

For the welcome flow, add one line about the sale with the start date and time zone, and remove any first-order discount that would stack with the sale price unless you mean it to. If you hold back early access for subscribers, say so in the first message, because that is the reason most of them signed up.

For the post-purchase flow, update the delivery estimates for holiday volume, add the last order date for delivery before the holidays, and link the returns policy. A clear shipping email is cheaper than the support ticket it prevents.

How do you protect deliverability during the Black Friday rush?

Send more only to people who have engaged recently, warm up any new sending domain or IP well before the sale, and keep complaints low with a visible one-click unsubscribe. Mailbox providers judge you on how recipients react, and a spike in volume to old addresses is the fastest way to land in spam.

Deliverability is whether your messages reach the inbox rather than the spam folder. It depends on authentication (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), how many recipients mark you as spam, and how many addresses bounce. Google and Yahoo's bulk sender rules apply to every store that sends at volume; we covered them in our post on email sender requirements.

Before you send more

Confirm authentication passes for the domain you actually send from, including any new subdomain.
Suppress addresses that bounced or haven't opened or clicked in a long time. Decide the cut-off once and apply it to every campaign.
Raise volume in steps over the next two weeks rather than tripling it on Black Friday morning.
Make sure unsubscribing takes one click and works the same day.

If your customer list lives in a CRM as well as your email tool, our guide to cleaning up CRM data covers duplicates and stale records before they reach a send.

What are the SMS consent rules to check before you text customers?

In the United States, automated marketing texts need the customer's prior express written consent, opt-out requests must be honoured, and replies such as "stop" count as an opt-out. Check how every number on your SMS list was collected before Black Friday, not after a complaint.

Not legal advice: SMS rules differ by country and state, so confirm your obligations with a lawyer for the markets you text.

The US rules sit in the Federal Communications Commission's regulations at 47 CFR 64.1200. Three parts matter most for a store:

Consent. Section (a)(2) bars autodialed marketing calls to mobile numbers "other than a call made with the prior express written consent of the called party." In practice, that means a sign-up where the customer clearly agreed to marketing texts, not a number copied from an order form.
Opt-out. Section (a)(10) says customers can revoke consent "by using any reasonable method," and that replying with words such as "stop," "quit," "end," "revoke," "opt out," "cancel" or "unsubscribe" to a text counts. Senders "may not designate an exclusive means" of opting out, and requests must be honoured "within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days."
Quiet hours. Section (c)(1) bars telephone solicitations to residential subscribers "before the hour of 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. (local time at the called party's location)." Schedule sends by the customer's time zone, not yours.

A marble ear turned toward a small bronze bell whose cord is tied with a single yellow thread

What to check on your SMS list

Every subscriber came in through a sign-up that clearly said they would get marketing texts.
Numbers imported from orders, other tools or old spreadsheets without that consent are removed from marketing sends.
STOP and similar replies unsubscribe the number in every tool you use, not just one.
Sends are scheduled by the recipient's local time.

What should you leave until after Black Friday?

Leave new platforms, new segments built on data you haven't checked, and complex multi-branch flows until January. Two weeks is enough time to fix and test what exists, not to build and debug something new during the busiest weeks of the year.

Adobe's 2026 holiday forecast, published on 28 September, expects US online sales of $275.1 billion from 1 November to 31 December, up 6.7% year over year. It forecasts Black Friday at $12.9 billion, up 9.2%, and Cyber Monday at $15.1 billion. Adobe also expects discounts of up to 21% just before Thanksgiving and up to 30% during Cyber Week. That is a lot of traffic arriving at once; a flow that breaks on those days breaks for many shoppers.

Shoppers are also arriving from new places. Adobe expects traffic to US retail sites from AI tools, measured by shoppers clicking a link, to rise 130% over last year. If you are working on how your products show up there, our post on getting your store recommended by AI assistants covers what to fix in your product data.

Write these down for January

Flows you wanted but couldn't build in time.
Segments that would have helped, and the data you would need for them.
Every message that broke, and why.

How we approach it at Vizio AI

We start with an audit of what already sends, not a new strategy. We list every flow and campaign across email and SMS tools, trigger each one with a test shopper, and note what is broken, outdated or duplicated. Fixes are ranked by how close the flow is to a purchase.

We then check the plumbing: domain authentication, list hygiene, consent records for SMS and the hand-off between the store, the email tool and the CRM. After the sale we review what each flow did and plan the January build list from it. This is part of how our Growth Studio connects e-commerce, CRM and lifecycle messaging into one system.