Peak week leaves no time to write campaigns, so the emails and texts that earn your revenue have to be running before it starts. Here are 10 email and SMS automations to set up now, when to switch each one on, and how to measure what they bring in.
Around the Tuesday before Black Friday, your team will be fixing a stock count, answering "where's my order" emails, and arguing about whether the offer should go up. Nobody is going to write a new cart reminder that afternoon.
That's why your Black Friday marketing needs to run on automations before that week arrives, not on one-off blasts. An automation sends the right message at the right time while you're busy. Every week you wait is a week of abandoned carts and new subscribers with no follow-up, so build them now, while there's room to test. This playbook covers 10 email and SMS automations for your holiday marketing: why you need each one, when to switch it on, and how to measure it.
Automations handle the messages shoppers trigger. Your campaigns and offers still need a plan, and our post, The PLOT method, shows you how to build one. Test these before Black Friday week and let them run.
Key takeaways
Count back from Black Friday and start at the row that matches today. Already inside four weeks? Build your welcome, browse, and cart flows first. They depend on traffic that's already arriving, so every day you wait costs you orders.
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| 6 weeks out | Grow the list, set up the welcome flow, check deliverability |
| 4 weeks out | Build segments and automations |
| 2 weeks out | Test every flow, preview SMS on mobile |
| Peak week | Monitor daily, adjust offers |
| After Cyber Monday | Switch to post-purchase and Q5 flows |
Don't skip the two-week row, because one broken trigger on Black Friday costs sales you can't win back. Run a test contact through each flow, check that the right message fires on the right trigger, and open every SMS on a phone, because a link that wraps badly or a message that runs long is easy to miss on a desktop preview.
Don't let the last row slip. Q5 is the stretch from December 26 to mid-January, when many brands pull back on marketing, which gives you room to keep the buyers you just won. The post-purchase flows you built for the sale carry straight into it, and a win-back flow for one-time buyers fits there too.
Here are 10 Black Friday marketing ideas and holiday marketing ideas to build before peak week. Each one brings in revenue or saves your team time. Six start from something a shopper does, and four run on dates you set. The logic works in any platform that supports triggered flows, including the Maropost email and SMS marketing platform (Marketing Cloud), which the last section covers.
Put your best customers first in line. Give them early access to the products they want before the public sale opens, and the stock they'd buy is still there when they arrive.
Send it 12 to 24 hours ahead, with the email first and a text when access opens. Define "best" by purchase history, such as your highest spenders or most frequent buyers over the past 12 months. This one runs on a scheduled send, so it needs a date instead of a trigger.
Tip: Save the VIP segment as a fixed list a week before the sale, for example by exporting it and importing it again. Otherwise a customer who qualifies late gets access you hadn't planned to give.
Turn deal-hunters into repeat buyers. Someone who joined your list for a deal has no reason to stay once the deal is spent, so give them one.
The signup starts a short series, whether it came from a holiday pop-up, a landing page, or a giveaway. The first welcome email confirms the signup and delivers the offer they came for, and two or three more over the following days introduce your best sellers and say when the sale starts. It's an email series, with a text only for subscribers who opted in to SMS.
Tip: End the series when the sale starts. New subscribers should move into your regular promotions instead of getting welcome messages in the middle of Black Friday.
Win back the shoppers who looked and walked away. A reminder showing exactly what they viewed puts the product back in front of them while it's still on their mind.
When someone views a product and doesn't add it to their cart, the flow starts, and the email goes out a few hours later the same day. Test that delay against your own results. It only reaches identified subscribers, such as someone who clicked an email link to your store. Browse intent is lower than cart intent, so keep SMS for the cart flow.
Tip: Take anyone who enters the cart flow out of the browse flow, so a shopper who adds the item doesn't get two reminders for the same product.
Recover the sales you've already earned. A shopper who added products to a cart has told you what they want, so build this flow first. Across online stores in general, Baymard Institute puts the average cart abandonment rate at about 70% across 50 studies.
Start with an abandoned cart email that shows the items, sent within a few hours, then follow up the next day. Add a text for opted-in shoppers if the cart is still open. Check for a completed order before every follow-up, so nobody gets a reminder about something they've already bought.
Tip: Want more on winning these shoppers back? Our post, 70% of carts are abandoned during BFCM, covers it, and Cart abandonment emails has ideas for the messages themselves.
Give shoppers a reason to buy now, not later. A low-stock alert tells people who viewed or carted an item that it's about to sell out, and a back-in-stock alert tells people who asked about it that it's available again, while it lasts.
Email carries the details, and opted-in shoppers get a text the moment the item is back. Send restock alerts right away, since a popular item can sell out again quickly.
Tip: Only use real stock levels, because a fake "only 3 left" teaches shoppers to ignore the next one. If your platform can't start a flow from stock levels, build a list for the item with a text keyword and send to it by hand when stock returns.
Turn "I'll buy later" into "I'll buy now." On the last day of an offer, the shopper who's been meaning to buy needs one more reason to do it today.
A few hours before it ends, send a short text to opted-in subscribers who haven't bought since it began, with a link straight to the offer. Pull buyers off the list right before it goes out, so nobody gets a "last chance" for something they already bought. This one is a scheduled send, and it's SMS only.
Tip: Mind quiet hours and consent. Send within permitted hours for each person's location, because a last-chance text that lands late at night is a quick way to collect opt-outs.
Answer "where's my order?" before your customers ask, so your service team isn't buried in tracking questions during peak week.
Everyone who orders gets these, and each update goes out the moment it happens:
Email carries the order summary, and opted-in customers get the shipping updates by text. Every question you answer ahead of time is one your team doesn't have to handle by hand.
Tip: Put the tracking link and delivery estimate in the first shipping message. And before you add any promotional content to these texts, check our post, Maintaining SMS compliance with transactional SMS.
Sell more with post-purchase recommendations. Once an order arrives, the customer is paying attention and ready to hear about something that goes with it.
A few days later, send a matching product by email, where there's room for an image and a line on how it pairs with what they bought. Set the trigger on the order plus a delay that covers your usual delivery time and a few extra days, so the message lands after the package does.
Tip: Add days to that delay in peak week, when carriers run late. Leave out the items already in the order, so the suggestion is something new.
Give the shoppers who clicked but didn't buy a second chance to say yes. Plenty of people open and click your Black Friday emails and still don't buy.
Build an audience of the subscribers who opened or clicked and haven't purchased, since they've already shown interest. On Cyber Monday morning, send them a second look at the offer by email, then a text to anyone who clicked, and a final reminder that evening.
Tip: Rebuild the segment right before you send, so anyone who bought Sunday night is out. Change the subject line and lead product too, because everyone on this list already saw your Friday email and didn't buy.
A shopper who isn't sure a gift will arrive in time won't order it, so tell them exactly how long they have. A shipping reminder turns Black Friday interest into December orders.
Send it to subscribers who haven't ordered in the past two weeks, and to recent buyers who may want a second gift. Schedule one email a week before the cut-off and a text on the final day, tied to your carriers' last-ship dates for December 25.
Tip: Take the dates from your carriers' published cut-offs and your own shipping methods, not a generic calendar. A missed delivery promise costs more than the order did.
Decide where a message belongs before you write it, because the wrong channel wastes your best offer.
Don't send the same message on both channels at once. Let email carry the detail, then follow up with a short text a few hours later for anyone who hasn't acted.
Phones carry a big share of the buying: Adobe Analytics reported that 57% of US online sales on Cyber Monday 2024 came through a mobile device, so write every email to be scanned and every text to be short.
Text message marketing plays by different rules than email, and they vary by region. Before peak week, check these:
For more on winning attention on phones and what to send by text, see our posts 57% of Cyber Monday spending came from mobile and SMS marketing strategies to boost your eCommerce revenues.
Peak season isn't the time for 15 segments. Holiday marketing works better with a few, each tied to at least one of the automations above. Start with these five:
Personalize by product interest and purchase history. Show the category a shopper browsed, and keep recommendations from repeating something they already bought, because a product block that shows last week's order looks like a mistake. Our post on BFCM email personalization covers how it affects peak-season conversions.
Peak week throws off a lot of numbers, and none of them mean much without a baseline, so pull your October numbers first. Track these for each automation:
Compare each against your own October baseline for the same automation and the same metric. Compare rates, not totals, so a quiet week can sit next to a busy one. Keep the attribution window the same for both periods, since a longer window credits more orders to a send.
Check the numbers daily, and decide beforehand what reading means you pause a flow or change an offer. Don't borrow a benchmark from another business. List size, offers, and audiences differ too much for it to mean much.
Once Cyber Monday ends, hang on to these numbers. They become next year's baseline for your Black Friday marketing, and they show which automations to repeat and which to cut.
Peak season is about turning interest into orders, from Black Friday to the December shipping rush, without piling more work on your team. The Maropost email and SMS marketing platform (Marketing Cloud) keeps one contact record per shopper, so every flow works from the same history. Here's what that means for the automations above:
Want these running before peak week starts? You can book a demo and see how the triggers, segments, and journeys above would work for your store.