Black Friday Email Sequence 2026: 9 Sends, Hours, Segments

A Black Friday email sequence is nine sends across 14 days: a save-the-date, an early-access open, a Thanksgiving send, two on Black Friday itself, a Saturday drop, a Cyber Sunday preview and two on Cyber Monday. Each goes to a defined segment at a tested hour, and purchasers are suppressed as they buy. The schedule, the hours and the segments are below.

What a sequence has to do that a calendar does not

A calendar tells you which days you will email. A sequence tells you which people get which message at which hour, and who stops receiving it once they have bought. That second layer is where the money is, because the volume on the big days is now so high that an unsegmented send is a deliverability problem before it is a revenue opportunity. Sinch's email platform delivered 20.4 billion emails in Black Friday week 2025, with volumes on Black Friday itself up 30% year over year (Sinch Mailgun, 8 December 2025). Klaviyo alone delivered 22.7 billion messages over the five days (Klaviyo BFCM 2025 report, 2 December 2025).

The other reason a sequence beats a calendar is that the weekend's shape has changed. Across Ometria's retailers in 2025, Black Friday's average daily spend was 121% higher than the nine-day lead-up, the Saturday after overtook Cyber Monday as the second-largest revenue day, and the Sunday before Black Friday posted the fastest growth of the whole period (Ometria, 12 December 2025). There are now four days worth their own send, not one.

This post is the execution layer. If you want the reasoning behind the calendar shape and the five automated flows that need to become sale-aware before the weekend, our Black Friday email marketing strategy covers that (Black Friday email marketing strategy). If you need the November to December planning view across every holiday, start with our holiday email marketing tips (holiday email marketing tips). This post assumes those decisions are made and gives you the nine sends.

The nine sends at a glance

Dates below are for 2026: Thanksgiving is Thursday 26 November, Black Friday is 27 November, Cyber Monday is 30 November. All hours are US Eastern; shift them for your list's time zone concentration.

Read the table left to right. The hour is the send time for the email; the SMS column gives the paired text and its own hour, always at least 60 minutes from the email. "Engaged 90 days" means opened or clicked in the last 90 days; "engaged 180 days" means the same over six months and is used only for the two launches. The suppression column is cumulative: anyone who buys drops out of every promotional send after the one they bought from, unless the next offer is materially different, in which case they receive a shorter version that says so.

Nine sends to the whole list would be too many. Nine sends where each one goes to a narrower group, with buyers falling out as they convert, means most subscribers receive four to six emails over the two weeks, and your best customers receive the most relevant three. That is the difference between a sequence and a blast schedule.

Sends 1 to 3: the build-up

Send 1, the save-the-date (Tuesday 17 November, 10am). Ten days out, to everyone who has opened or clicked in the last 90 days. No offer detail, no discount percentage. Its job is to set the expectation that the sale exists, tell subscribers that early access is coming for the list, and collect SMS consent with a "text us first" module. The NRF's October 2025 survey found 42% of shoppers planned to start before November and 63% planned to wait for Thanksgiving weekend to do most of their shopping (NRF, 16 October 2025). The save-the-date reaches both groups before they have decided where to spend.

Send 2, early access opens (Wednesday 25 November, 6pm). This is the pre-Black Friday email that matters. VIPs, meaning anyone with two or more orders or in your top spend quintile, plus repeat buyers and engaged 90-day subscribers, get the sale a day and a half before the public. The offer is the Black Friday offer, not a preview of it. Early access does three things: it rewards the list, it pulls a share of demand out of Friday's most crowded inbox hours, and it gives you 36 hours of conversion data to fix anything broken before the launch. Attentive found that half of all Q4 campaign volume in 2025 was sent before Cyber Week even began (Attentive BFCM sending guide, 6 August 2026). Your competitors are already in the inbox on Wednesday.

Send 3, Thanksgiving (Thursday 26 November, 12pm). To non-openers of send 2 and to engaged subscribers who have never bought. A short gratitude note carrying the early-access door, not a second launch. Attentive's Cyber Week 2025 data puts the best Thanksgiving email hour for clicks at 12pm ET and for conversions at 8pm, with SMS clicking best at 3pm. Whether to send at all on Thursday, and what tone to take, is a decision with its own tradeoffs; our Thanksgiving email marketing post walks through it (Thanksgiving email marketing). Anyone who bought on Wednesday is suppressed from this send and every promotional send after it.

Sends 4 and 5: Black Friday itself

Send 4, the launch (Friday 27 November, 8am). To everyone engaged in the last 180 days across all segments, minus buyers since Wednesday. This is the widest send of the sequence and the only one that goes to the 180-day window. Klaviyo's data shows the most active marketing hour on Black Friday was 9am to 10am ET, when its customers sent over 420 million messages, with peak order volume of 1.3 million orders landing between noon and 1pm (Klaviyo, when to send Black Friday emails, 26 June 2026). Sending at 8am puts you in the inbox before that 9am wall of volume, and Attentive's 2025 data has 8am as the best-converting Black Friday email hour. Omnisend's internal data agrees on the window: 6am to 9am and 8pm to 10pm outperform midday (Omnisend, 8 September 2026).

An optional midday resend to non-openers only, around 12:30pm, is worth testing if your list is large enough to read the result. Change the subject line and nothing else. It is not one of the nine because it should not go to anyone who has already opened.

Send 5, the evening (Friday 27 November, 8pm). To engaged 90-day subscribers who have not bought, with a tonight-only or ends-at-midnight angle if that is true, and a "most popular today" angle if it is not. MailerLite's analysis of 1.8 million emails sent over a holiday weekend found the 6pm to midnight window produced the most opens, 549,095 against 327,184 for 6am to noon (MailerLite, 31 October 2025). Attentive's Black Friday email data puts the best click hour at 8pm. The evening send is where the day's second wave of revenue comes from, and it should look different from the morning send: fewer products, one clear reason to act now.

Sends 6 and 7: Saturday and Cyber Sunday

Send 6, the Saturday drop (Saturday 28 November, 12pm). Saturday is the day most sequences skip, and in 2025 it overtook Cyber Monday as the second-largest revenue day across Ometria's retailers, growing 20% year over year. Do not send Friday's email again. Send something with its own shape: a new bundle, a category that was not in the Friday hero, a restock, or a Small Business Saturday angle if that fits your brand. To engaged 90-day subscribers across all segments, with buyers since Wednesday suppressed unless the drop is a new product they have not seen. Attentive's data puts the best Saturday email click hour at 12pm and the best SMS hour at 2pm.

Send 7, the Cyber Sunday preview (Sunday 29 November, 6pm). Cyber Sunday was the fastest-growing day of the 2025 weekend for Klaviyo's brands, up nearly 14% year over year. The Sunday email opens Cyber Monday early for VIPs, repeat buyers and engaged non-buyers, with the Monday offer live from 6pm. This is the second early-access moment of the sequence and it works for the same reasons the Wednesday one does: it rewards the list and it pulls demand out of Monday's crowded hours. Buyers since Wednesday are suppressed unless the Monday offer is different from the Friday one, in which case they get a shorter version that says so plainly. SMS follows at 7pm, which Attentive's data marks as the best Sunday hour for text clicks.

Sends 8 and 9: Cyber Monday

Send 8, the Cyber Monday launch (Monday 30 November, 6am). The earliest send of the sequence, because Attentive's Cyber Week 2025 data puts Cyber Monday's best-converting email hour at 6am ET, and because Monday inboxes fill from 9am. To the engaged 180-day window, minus buyers since Saturday if the Monday offer is a repeat and minus nobody if it is different. Klaviyo's brands saw Cyber Monday grow 11% in 2025, ahead of Black Friday's 10%, and Attentive found it had the highest conversion rate of the week (Attentive Cyber Week 2025 recap, 2 December 2025). Intent is high on Monday. The launch email's job is to make the offer legible in one screen on a phone.

Send 9, the last chance (Monday 30 November, 8pm). To engaged 90-day subscribers who have not bought, and to nobody who has. Adobe measured $16 million a minute in the 8pm to 10pm window on Cyber Monday 2025 (Adobe Analytics, 2 December 2025). This is the one send where SMS should lead and email should support: the text goes at 8pm with the deadline, the email lands a few minutes later with the products. Subject lines, the Monday cohort plan and the Tuesday extension send are covered in our Cyber Monday email marketing post (Cyber Monday email marketing); do not duplicate them here.

Want the nine sends built and scheduled for your list, with the segments and suppressions in place? See our BFCM email program (BFCM email marketing for DTC brands)

The segments, and who drops out after each send

Four segments carry the whole sequence. Build them in October and freeze them two weeks out.

VIPs and repeat buyers. Two or more orders, or the top 20% by lifetime spend, active in the last 12 months. They get the early-access sends (2 and 7) and the launches (4 and 8). They do not need the evening pressure sends, and the deepest discount should not be pointed at them. Ometria found 55% of Black Friday 2025 revenue came from existing customers; the sequence's job with this group is to reward, not to bribe.

Engaged non-buyers. Clicked in the last 90 days, never purchased. They get everything from send 3 onward, because they are the group the sale exists to convert. The sharpest hook belongs here.

Lapsed buyers. Purchased 6 to 18 months ago, engaged in the last 180 days. They get sends 4 and 8 only, the two launches, with a "we saved your spot" tone. If they do not open either, they are out of the sequence and into a January win-back, not a Cyber Monday reminder.

New subscribers. Joined since 1 October. They get sends 1, 4, 5 and 9. They are the most likely to complain if over-mailed, because they have the least relationship with you.

The suppression rule is simpler than the segments: anyone who buys drops out of every promotional send that follows, unless the next offer is materially different, in which case they get a shorter version that says so. Build this as a dynamic exclusion on "placed order since 25 November", not as a manual list edit on Friday afternoon. The engagement window also tightens on the biggest days. Sends 4 and 8 go to 180 days because they are the launches; every other send is capped at 90 days. That single choice is what keeps complaint rates under the thresholds Gmail and Yahoo enforce, which we cover in our post on why Black Friday emails land in spam (why Black Friday emails land in spam).

Where the hours come from

No single source has the answer, and the honest position is that the hours above are a synthesis of four datasets that mostly agree. The table shows each source's finding so you can weigh them for your own list.

Two cautions. Klaviyo's hour data is from 2024 and describes what senders did, not what converted; its value is in telling you when the inbox gets loudest. Attentive's data is the only day-by-day, hour-by-hour set from Cyber Week 2025 and it is drawn from retail brands sending on Attentive, which skews toward SMS-first programs. If your list is concentrated on the West Coast, shift everything three hours later. The pattern that survives every dataset is the same: early morning to open a day, 8pm to close it, and nothing important at 2pm.

One more practical note on reading the table. Click-rate and conversion-rate peaks are different hours in almost every row of Attentive's data, because clicking happens when people are browsing and buying happens when they have decided. The sequence uses the conversion hour for launches and closes, where the offer has already made the decision, and the click hour for the mid-weekend sends, where the job is to get people to the site. If you can only test one thing this year, test the Friday launch against 6am and 8am.

How SMS pairs with each send

SMS is not a copy of the email on a different channel. In the sequence above, text does three jobs: it opens early access to VIPs before the email lands (send 2), it carries the deadline on the two evening closes (sends 5 and 9), and it fills the midday gaps on Saturday and Monday when email click rates sag. Attentive recommends planning for at least six BFCM SMS campaigns, and its recap found that SMS accompanied by email drove 18.4% higher conversion and 14.9% higher revenue per click (Attentive Cyber Week 2025 recap, 2 December 2025). Klaviyo's guidance for peak days is three emails and two texts.

The pairing rule is a one-hour gap. Nobody should receive a text and an email about the same offer within 60 minutes, which is why the table staggers them: 8am email and 10am text on Friday, 8pm text and 8:05pm email on Monday (the exception, because the close is the one moment where the channels should reinforce each other). Suppression carries across channels too: a buyer drops out of both.

Text volume is growing faster than email. Klaviyo's 2025 report shows SMS send volume up 34% year over year with text revenue up 25%. The templates and examples for the messages themselves are in our Black Friday SMS marketing post (Black Friday SMS templates and examples); this post only tells you when each one goes.

What this sequence produced for Spoonful of Comfort

Spoonful of Comfort sells soup and comfort-food gifts, which makes Q4 the year. For BFCM 2025 the program replaced a compressed 48-hour push with an extended window: early access for subscribers before Black Friday, messaging distributed across weeks rather than days, AI-assisted segmentation to decide who saw which offer, smart sending to cap frequency per subscriber, and sale-aware automation so the abandonment and post-purchase flows carried the live offer instead of the default one.

The result was a 196.9% year-over-year increase in email-and-SMS-attributed revenue during BFCM, with owned channels producing 46.1% of total BFCM revenue and 64.91% of Cyber Monday revenue (Spoonful of Comfort BFCM case study). The early-access send and the Cyber Sunday preview did most of the heavy lifting, because both went to people who had already shown intent and both landed before the inbox filled.

The mechanics were not exotic. The sequence was built in October, the segments were frozen two weeks out, and nobody changed anything on the Friday. Klaviyo's benchmark data explains why the automation layer matters as much as the campaigns: across more than 183,000 businesses, flows produced nearly 41% of email revenue from 5.3% of sends (Klaviyo benchmarks, 23 January 2026). The nine sends bring people to the site; the flows convert the ones who hesitate.

The send after the sequence

Tuesday 1 December is not a tenth promotional send. It is two things. For buyers, a thank-you that sets delivery expectations and starts the post-purchase flow that decides whether they come back; Ometria found only 4% of Black Friday 2024 new customers bought again within 12 months, which is the number the post-purchase sequence exists to beat. For non-buyers who clicked, a single narrow extension, covered in our Cyber Monday post, or nothing at all. The December and January work that turns a BFCM cohort into repeat customers is in our post-Black Friday retention post (post-Black Friday retention).

The NRF found that after Cyber Monday 2025, 84% of consumers had started their holiday shopping but still had 53% of it left to do (NRF, 2 December 2025). If you run a Cyber Tuesday extension, keep it to one email, one segment and one offer that did not exist on Monday: a category held for 24 hours, or a single bundle, gives the click-no-buy group a reason to return without telling Monday's buyers they should have waited. The sequence ends on Monday night. The customer does not. The hub for the whole BFCM program, landers included, is here (BFCM marketing for DTC brands).

Frequently asked questions

When should I start sending Black Friday emails? The first send in this sequence goes ten days out, on 17 November 2026. Warm-up sending to re-engage the list should start in early October; a list that has not heard from you since September will not deliver in November.

How many emails should I send during Black Friday weekend? Nine sends in the sequence, but no subscriber receives all nine. Buyers drop out as they convert, and most sends go to a 90-day engaged window, so most people receive four to six emails over two weeks and VIPs receive the three most relevant.

Is it better to send Black Friday emails in the morning or the evening? Both, to different people. Morning (6am to 9am) opens the day and converts best; evening (8pm) closes it and gets the most opens and clicks. Midday is the weakest window in every dataset we found.

Should I send an email on Thanksgiving Day? Yes, one, to non-openers of the early-access email and to engaged non-buyers, at 12pm. Keep it short and carry the early-access door rather than launching a second sale.

Should I segment my Black Friday emails or send the same message to everyone? Segment. VIPs should not receive the deepest discount, lapsed buyers should not receive nine emails, and buyers should not receive any promotional send after they buy. The same message to everyone is the fastest route to the unsubscribe spike Ometria measured at 42% year over year in 2025.

Not sure your segments and suppressions will hold on the day? Request a complimentary BFCM audit and we will check the sequence with you (Get my complimentary BFCM audit)