Email Marketing for Black Friday: The Ultimate Guide [2026]

Black Friday is one of the biggest sales opportunities of the year for businesses of all sizes. Over the years, it has become one of the most profitable shopping events for many companies. For online retailers, it is also a key date in the marketing calendar.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote Black Friday offers. It allows businesses to reach customers directly and share discounts at the right time. However, high competition and crowded inboxes make it essential to plan each campaign carefully.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to prepare your email marketing strategy, stand out from competitors, and make the most of Black Friday.

What is Black Friday?

A bit of history…

There are several theories about the origin of the term. One suggests that retailers moved from being in the red to making profits, also known as being in the black, as the Christmas shopping season began.

Another theory traces the term back to Philadelphia police officers, who used it to describe the heavy traffic on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Finally, the term became more widely known in 1975, when The New York Times used it to describe traffic problems caused by post-Thanksgiving shopping

Cyber Monday and Black Week

In addition to Black Friday, there is another marked date during these days, known as Cyber Monday, which is the Monday immediately following Black Friday. This term first appeared in a press release from shop.org in 2005 and was conceived as a Black Friday but focused solely on online shopping, probably due to the delay involved at that time in updating online sales platforms.

As Black Friday has become a global success for sellers, they have decided to extend the shopping days a bit more and create what is called Black Week, which runs from the Monday before Black Friday to Cyber Monday.

In summary, if you are in the business of selling online, mark the week from November 23 to 30 in red, as it will be intense.

Black Friday in 2025

Over the years, Black Friday has gained increasing popularity worldwide, and the latest editions have surpassed the previous ones. According to Salesforce, in 2023, $70.9 billion was spent globally, and in 2024 a record of $74.4 billion was reached, a 5% increase. In 2025, the figure reached $79 billion, a 6% increase over the previous year.

Another trend that is consolidating is the use of the mobile phone as the main device for making online purchases on Black Friday: in 2025, it generated 52.2% of online commerce revenue in the United States between November 1 and 28, and Adobe predicts it will reach 56.1% by the end of the season.

When it comes to the most in-demand products, electronics, fashion, and home goods are the categories that weigh the most: according to Adobe’s forecasts, they would account for more than half (53.7%) of the online sales of the 2026 season.

Does Black Friday have a big impact in Spain?

68% of Spaniards planned to make a purchase during Black Friday 2025, according to the Cetelem Observatory.

The following graph shows how the relevance of the Black Friday search has grown year by year in our country, until it slightly decreased in 2020 and stabilized in recent years:

As can be deduced from the capture, it went from being something practically irrelevant in 2012 to reaching maximum popularity in 2018. The vast majority of stores run promotions on this date, and 75% of Spaniards say they will take advantage of it to get a head start on their Christmas shopping, so it is advisable that, as companies, we prepare correctly to capture as much attention as possible.

Which businesses can benefit from Black Friday?

f you run a B2C business — one that sells directly to consumers — you should be prepared for Black Friday. If you plan to offer discounts, you’ll need to organize your campaigns in advance and make sure your technical and logistical infrastructure can handle the extra demand. On the other hand, if you don’t plan to offer discounts, explain your reasons clearly. You could also consider an alternative way to take part.

Some companies worry that offering discounts could damage their brand image. However, they still want to reach the millions of consumers ready to shop during Black Friday.

Bellroy, a wallet brand, found a different way to do this with its campaign, “Don’t save money, save lives.” Instead of lowering prices, the company donated enough money to buy ten mosquito nets in Africa for every wallet sold. These nets help protect people from malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

This approach helped Bellroy gain visibility without linking its products to price cuts. It also supported a charitable cause. During the Black Friday weekend, Bellroy sold 2,632 wallets:

By contrast, Black Friday may make less sense for B2B businesses. In the end, purchases are much less impulsive, and decision-making processes are longer. But not everything is a disadvantage: since there are primarily B2C offers, your competition may not run campaigns, so you can differentiate yourself.

As a result, you can increase the speed of customer conversion: if you prepare an irresistible offer for Black Friday 2026, people may move more quickly through your conversion funnel.

Also, keep in mind that if you provide services to e-commerce companies, their activity will grow exponentially during these days, so you will need to be prepared to offer your service accordingly.

Black Friday in Spain in numbers

E-commerce in Spain billed over €114.8 billion in 2025, a 20.6% increase over the previous year. In the fourth quarter alone, which includes Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Christmas campaign, it reached €31.418 billion (+22%), according to the CNMC.

According to different studies, Spaniards planned to spend between €204 and €278 on average during Black Friday 2025: €204 according to the Spanish Consumers Association, €219 according to the OCU (compared to €201 the previous year), and €278 according to the Cetelem Observatory (1% less than in 2024).

As for what they buy, fashion (65%) and footwear (58%) lead the purchase intention, followed by health and beauty (41%) and mobile devices (40%), according to Cetelem.

The channel is also changing: 49% of consumers will combine physical and online stores, nine points more than in 2024, while 40% will shop online only, eleven points less.

Additionally, promotions are starting earlier each year. PcComponentes, for example, began its Black Friday offers on November 3, 2025, and extended them throughout the month, with discounts of up to 60%.

Volume of emails sent

At Acumbamail, we analyzed the volume of emails sent during the Black Friday campaign and compared it to a typical period to observe how activity changes during these dates.

In a typical October period, the estimated volume would be as follows:

Date	Emails
21	13,443,000
24	11,950,279
25	12,275,247
26	13,959,958
27	12,080,051
28	11,053,154
Total	74,761,689

During Black Week and the days leading up to it, the estimate would be as follows:

Date	Emails
21	17,979,374
22	16,090,170
23	15,198,837
24	16,599,712
25	18,149,148
28	18,067,433
Total	102,084,673

In the six days analyzed, the volume of sends is 36.5% higher than in a typical period.

The trend is clear: promotions start earlier each year. For example, many brands now launch their campaigns in early November instead of waiting for Black Week. In addition, they spread their email sends throughout the week rather than relying on a single date.

Among the days analyzed, Tuesday, November 25, recorded more sends than Black Friday itself, November 28. Therefore, concentrating all communication on a single day is not always the best strategy.

Create your email strategy for Black Friday

Prepare your email list

As we always say at Acumbamail, the key to a successful email marketing campaign lies in the subscriber list. You should always obtain the list naturally, with subscribers who have voluntarily signed up to receive your sends or with people to whom you have previously sold something. These have always been the legal assumptions in Spain and continue to be so.

Additionally, there are strategies that allow you to improve the quality of the list and, although it may seem counterintuitive, they are more oriented towards removing subscribers than adding them. Having fewer but more active subscribers has multiple advantages:

• You reduce the cost of your campaigns (even if it’s like shooting yourself in the foot).
• Sending emails to non-existent mailboxes is often a symptom that what is being sent is spam, as in many cases, spammers use dictionaries to generate the lists to which they send their emails.
• Many spam filters analyze the engagement of the campaigns, that is, the number of subscribers who open and click on the sent emails. If a significant percentage of your subscribers ignore you, your reputation with ISPs will be worse.
• Your list may contain spam traps. Spam traps are addresses managed by blacklist owners that never subscribe to anything but are left online for spammers to automatically collect, and if you send an email to one of them, you end up on one of those blacklists.

To optimize your email list, at Acumbamail we have several tools that allow you to reduce non-existent subscribers, remove spam traps from your lists, and reduce the list only to people who have been active for a period of time.

CPCs increase, the price of your email marketing tool does not

In the weeks leading up to Black Friday, CPCs (cost per click) for traffic acquisition campaigns increase considerably. As a result, higher acquisition costs and product discounts can reduce purchase margins, sometimes even leading to losses.

The best way to combat this is to focus acquisition campaigns in the months leading up to Black Friday, so that when the big players increase CPCs and you can’t keep up because you have less margin, you already have a consolidated audience that allows you to achieve sales. Additionally, the price of the email marketing tool you have contracted will remain fixed, so your costs won’t increase and your margin will be greater.

To do this, focus on acquiring subscribers in the months leading up to Black Friday, incentivizing them with discounts or exclusive content and keeping them interested with successive email campaigns, so they are ready for the purchase. The less you have to compete in variable cost marketing during these weeks, the less your annual budget will suffer.

The preliminaries, almost as important as the campaign

Although many purchases happen on Black Friday itself, buying intent often builds throughout Black Week. That’s why it’s worth preparing your audience in advance.

Start communicating a couple of weeks before the event. For example, you can announce that an offer is coming without revealing every detail straight away. This approach helps build anticipation while leaving room to surprise your subscribers.

However, make sure your final offer lives up to those expectations. If the promotion disappoints customers, you risk losing their trust and sending them to a competitor.

It’s also easier to stand out in the weeks leading up to Black Friday. On the day itself, inboxes are crowded and customers have countless offers to compare. Therefore, an early communication plan gives your campaigns more opportunities to get noticed.

The big day

We arrive at the big day: November 27, 2026, Black Friday is here. Once we have ensured that all systems are functioning and will withstand the flow of visits, you must launch your email campaigns.

Avoid sending your email at the same time as everyone else

For example, one of the most frequently asked questions by our clients is what the best time to send a mailing is. The answer is always the same: it depends.

In many cases, you might think that the best option is for the campaign to arrive as soon as possible, to prevent your customers from buying other offers that have reached them first. It’s a good stance, but also keep in mind that if you are the first to send, your competition may be able to improve your offer.

Being such a recurring question, we have discovered that it is a relevant concern for our clients, so we try to offer them an automatic solution that allows them to stop worrying. In this case, we have developed a solution that allows sending an email at the time when a user is most active. It is included in the PRO version of Acumbamail and, taking into account a user’s history, decides what times they open emails most frequently. It is also a very good option for Black Friday.

Our recommendation here would be to try to use our tool to send at the best time or, if it is not available on your platform, avoid sending at the first hour; it will be the time when everyone sends.

It’s not all about email: UX and support

Check that the user experience is correct when making purchases. For example, it’s much easier for them to buy if the prices are already discounted than if they have to enter a discount code, adding a single step to the sales funnel causes you to lose customers. It’s important that everything is correct and works well in your store and that everyone knows there are discounts, there will be people who come directly to the store and won’t go through any campaign, so make sure to show it with well-defined call-to-actions.

Black Friday will be a very intense day. Make sure your chat and support lines are active and your team is prepared to answer questions. In many cases, competitors will struggle to respond quickly. Therefore, this is a great opportunity to stand out and provide excellent service.

Extend the momentum during Cyber Monday

Remember that besides Black Friday, Monday brings Cyber Monday, so, although urgency sometimes helps with purchases, there will be people who cannot make their purchases on Friday itself and use the weekend and even Monday to do so.

Keep the offers and, if you don’t already, keep your support channels running throughout the weekend, as many customers may be making their first purchase in your system and need immediate help.

Also, we recommend sending reinforcement campaigns on Saturday and Sunday. In many places, they do not recommend sending email campaigns over the weekends, but for some businesses, it is the best option. If you have a product that sells directly to individuals (B2C), they will probably have more time to pay attention to your emails on weekends, and their inboxes will be emptier, so it will be much easier for them to open your emails.

Interpret your statistics considering the Black Friday effect

During Black Friday, email volumes can rise significantly compared with a typical period. In fact, this is one of the busiest times of the year for email marketing, alongside other major shopping events.

As a result, your open rate may fall even when your campaign performs well. On an ordinary day, your email competes with fewer promotions. During Black Friday, however, subscribers receive offers from many more retailers.

For this reason, don’t rely on open rates alone to evaluate your results. Apple Mail Privacy Protection has also made this metric less reliable since iOS 15. Therefore, pay close attention to clicks and conversions.

If your click rate drops below its usual level, review your offer, messaging, and audience targeting. You can then use the remaining days of the campaign, including Cyber Monday, to make adjustments.

Email marketing calendar for Black Friday

Here is an example of the calendar with the key dates to keep in mind during the two weeks of activity related to Black Friday (before and after):

Tips and advice

The subject line: the only thing most of your subscribers will read

Keep in mind that the open rate of a successful email marketing campaign can be between 20% and 30%. It needs to be studied for each specific case, but whatever the data, it is very difficult for more than 50% of subscribers to open your campaign.

Excluding the very small (if you use a reliable platform) percentage that is blocked by a spam filter, you have a large number of subscribers who will see your email in their email client and, seeing the subject line, will decide whether to open it or not. That’s why it’s crucial that you put a lot of effort into the only text that most of your subscribers will read.

Tips for writing effective subject lines

There are several ways to make a subject line stand out, such as using Unicode symbols in your email subject line. Although this technique is widely used, a little color can still help your message catch the reader’s eye.

However, it’s important to avoid clickbait. Misleading subject lines can frustrate readers and damage their trust in your brand. For example, tactics such as “If you open this email, you won’t believe what happens next” are unlikely to build lasting relationships with your audience.

Responsive by default

Last year, more than half of all Black Friday purchases were made from mobile devices. Most personal email openings are done from mobile devices. There is no longer an excuse for needing a magnifying glass to view your campaign correctly on mobile.

The development of responsive email templates is a complex topic, as different email providers display the email code differently. Additionally, the HTML that works in email templates is very different from what is currently used on the web, so it is quite complicated for a regular web developer to create email templates that work properly.

That said, our recommendation is to always use an editor provided by your email marketing platform. In the case of Acumbamail, we have one of the best editors on the market for responsive email design and generate templates that work properly on any device.

Personalization: now and always

All the data you have about your subscribers is useful when creating a campaign. Personalization goes far beyond the famous “Hello, |*NAME*|” that we all know.

If you want to stand out on a day when everyone is going to send so many emails, try to do it with more targeted campaigns. Segment with the data you have. If you are going to send a campaign with products for men, don’t send it to the women on your subscription list. Try to make the content you send relevant to the person who will receive it.

A good idea is to segment by the level of receptivity of each segment with your sends. Send first to the most active on your list: not only will you get more benefit, but you also prevent deliverability issues if you haven’t sent anything in a while.

At Acumbamail, you can easily do this by creating segments by subscriber quality: each subscriber has a score from 0 to 100 associated with whether they usually open your emails or interact with them. Just set the percentage (we recommend starting at 70) and you’re done.

It may be more convenient to send a single campaign to all your subscribers, but if you try to be relevant to them, even if you have to create a campaign for each segment, you will get much better results and more on a day as significant as Black Friday.

Share your campaigns on social media

Although all channels will be full of information on this day, the inbox will be one of the most saturated, as it has one of the highest returns on investment available.

Since you have invested a lot of time in preparing your campaign and the purchase process it entails, use it not only to send it by email, take the address of your campaign and share it on social media, you may gain new subscribers or some buyers you hadn’t counted on.

The most important thing: meet expectations

Black Friday is an important sales day, perhaps in many businesses it is the day with the most sales of the year, but it is not worth losing your customers’ trust to increase sales a little on this day. There are some things you can do to avoid disappointing your customers:

• Never buy email lists: it is a common practice and, although it is prohibited by law, many companies still do it. Sending a cold email to try to sell something is very difficult and even if you get a couple of sales, you will have annoyed thousands of people who did not want to receive it. Always avoid it.
• Avoid clickbait: it is disappointing and is a technique that many will use, differentiate yourself by avoiding it. Also, you may get an opening out of the reader’s curiosity, but in many cases, the expectation upon opening will be higher than the reality and you will cause disappointment to your subscribers.
• Think carefully about the offers: you can’t spend the whole week creating expectations about the price drop you are going to include and then have it be something irrelevant or a disguised increase. If you are going to offer a good deal, run a Black Friday campaign, otherwise save yourself the time and money.

Campaigns to inspire you

There are many types of campaigns you can send to improve your sales on Black Friday, below we tell you what they are and give you some examples of each:

Expectation campaign

Don’t limit yourself to sending campaigns only on Black Friday itself, take advantage of the days leading up to it to generate expectation among your subscribers and generate prior engagement.

Countdown campaign

Generating urgency works to increase the immediacy of sales, and few things generate more urgency than a countdown timer. Including one in your email can be a good idea to get your subscribers to buy more, or at least, faster.

Free gift campaign

Offering a freebie or free gift associated with a promotion can be a great differentiating idea on days when you will have to compete with all other companies lowering prices and trying to fight for every potential customer. Some examples? Complementary products with the shipment, free shipping costs, or premium features for software, as in these examples:

Fixed discount campaign

The classic discount is as old as it is effective. Keep in mind the margins and benefits you will obtain. The downside of this option is that everyone will be doing it, and you may need to think of other complementary offers to differentiate yourself.

Scarcity campaign

Like a countdown, indicating the scarcity of products can urge the customer to make a purchase that, under other circumstances, they would think about for much longer.

Last-minute campaign

Again, urgency. When there is little time left for the end of the offers, send a campaign indicating that they may be missing out on a great opportunity if they don’t hurry.

In the examples below, we not only see good examples of this practice but also a trend that is gaining momentum in email marketing: the gamification of email campaigns.

9 different templates for Black Friday in Acumbamail

Our design team has prepared special email templates for this occasion, which all Acumbamail users can use, edit, and customize. You can see them below and access them in our editor by clicking on each of the images:

Finally, we summarize everything in an infographic:

As you have read in detail, if you are in the business of selling, Black Friday is an annual opportunity you cannot miss. Email marketing can be a great ally to make the most of it. If you want, at Acumbamail we can help you get the most out of your email campaigns on this important date.

You can also watch this webinar where we explain some of these tips and tricks to improve your strategy on this date: