9 Black Friday Email Marketing Campaigns to Drive More Sales

With one of the most important retail events of the year around the corner, it’s time to plan your Black Friday email campaigns.

During this lucrative period, a strong email marketing strategy is key to ensuring you stand out from the competition and drive sales.

Traffic levels across the year are about to peak, and as an eCommerce retailer, preparation is key to capitalising on this season’s shoppers.

Despite increased financial challenges for consumers in 2024, last year’s Black Friday remained as popular as ever. Online spending during Black Friday 2024 was 10% higher than in 2023, hitting a record $10.8 billion.¹

In this article, we’ll explore why email marketing is essential for a successful Black Friday. We’ll also take a look at the campaigns you can use to recover sales, drive AOV, and build customer loyalty this time of year.

Suggested watching: Discover tips and tricks for your Black Friday strategy in our webinar ‘Mastering Q4: Tactics to Boost Seasonal Sales’.

The current state of Black Friday email marketing

Black Friday is a highly competitive time for eCommerce retailers, with many brands taking a similar approach to promotions and discounting, leaving shoppers with a wide range of options at similar price points.

As a result, you’ll find that on-site browsers will have a high intent to purchase but may be enticed to abandon their carts in search of a better deal. 

Email marketing can help you re-engage these shoppers and drive more of your previous shoppers back to your site.

However, with an influx of emails hitting inboxes around this time, you must craft engaging campaigns that cut through the Black Friday noise.

Pre-planning your email calendar can help you to do this. In the next section, we’ll cover the campaigns you can add to your calendar to build a top-class Black Friday email strategy.

Pro tip: Crafting a Black Friday email strategy can appear time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Harnessing automation like Salesfire’s AI-powered retargeting tools can help you send personalised, targeted emails on a large scale using minimal resources.

Suggested reading: Learn the benefits of email automation in our article ‘What is Email Automation?’.

Black Friday email campaigns to drive sales

Let’s take a look at some of the email campaigns that can play a critical role in your Black Friday success.

1. Sneak peeks

For many brands, an important goal of their Black Friday marketing strategy is to build suspense around their upcoming promotions and discounts. 

This is a great way to ensure your shoppers are prepared for your sales and put your brand at the front of their minds when they’re ready to make a purchase.

To achieve this, consider sending exclusive sneak peeks or previews of limited-time offers to your mailing list.

Building excitement with your email subscribers prior to Black Friday can help to:

• Boost customer loyalty: Giving your email subscribers a heads-up of your deals can make them feel valued and more inclined to choose your brand.
  
• Get shoppers invested in your deals: Shoppers can see which deals catch their eye ahead of time and prepare so they are ready to buy when the time comes.
  
• Inspire gift ideas: Giving a shopper time to review your upcoming deals can help spark gifting ideas for friends and family, driving more sales.

Sneak Peek email campaigns can help your shoppers get ready for Black Friday. It gives them time to consider the products they want to purchase while setting your brand up for success on the day.

Pro tip: Black Friday is when many shoppers will be looking to bag a bargain and tick items off their Christmas gift lists.

Make sure you enhance product discovery for shoppers during this time by showcasing relevant gifts and spotlighting your bestsellers. Try using AI-powered personalised recommendations to help shoppers discover additional products they might like.

2. Countdowns

When sending your Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails, it’s a great idea to leverage campaigns with countdowns.

Countdowns can help to create a sense of urgency and generate FOMO (fear of missing out) for your shoppers.

With 62% of shoppers admitting that FOMO influences their purchases, this feeling can be the difference between your email being clicked or ignored.²

Countdown email campaigns can encourage your shoppers to act fast to avoid missing out on a good deal. This can motivate them to move quickly through the customer journey and checkout.

Timers can be such a simple addition to your email campaigns, but they can significantly boost your sales this Black Friday.

What else you can do: Extend the urgency of your email campaigns across to your site to prevent shoppers from dropping off once they land on it.

You can do this using a solution like Salesfire, which offers a range of On-Site Messaging campaigns to keep shoppers engaged.

These include on-site countdown timers and social proofing campaigns that highlight how many shoppers are viewing or have purchased a product.

3. Exclusive offers for VIPs

Black Friday can be a great time to strengthen relationships with your existing shoppers by offering exclusive VIP-only deals.

The segmentation possibilities of email mean you can send specific campaigns to reward your most engaged subscribers or loyal customers.

Exclusive email campaigns you could send include:

• Early sale access: Provide repeat purchasers with a link to access your Black Friday sale early, so they can bag deals before general access goes live.
  
• Exclusive discount codes: Show your existing subscribers how much you appreciate them by offering an extra discount on top of your standard deals.

Sending campaigns that make your shoppers feel valued can ensure they stay loyal to your brand throughout Q4 and beyond.

4. Browse abandonment

Send targeted emails to shoppers who may have started browsing on your site, but didn’t complete their purchase.

With this type of customer behaviour commonplace during Black Friday, you must have a robust retargeting strategy to recover distracted shoppers.

Automated email solutions can make it easy to send these campaigns to a large number of shoppers without requiring much effort.

For example, Salesfire uses real-time visitor activity to automatically retarget your shoppers with personalised browse abandonment emails.

By reminding shoppers of the products they were interested in, you can entice them back on-site to finalise their purchase.

This type of campaign is great year-round, but especially effective during Black Friday when visitors often jump between sites looking for deals.

Suggested reading: Make your browse abandonment email campaigns more effective by supporting them with SMS too. Discover why SMS marketing should be in your brand’s toolkit.

5. Re-engagement emails

Black Friday provides an opportunity to re-engage and drive revenue from shoppers who haven’t interacted with your brand in a while.

It’s an exciting time for shoppers, and they can be willing to shop with brands they wouldn’t normally choose to secure the best deal.

You can draw these customers back in using re-engagement emails that capture your shoppers’ attention.

To create powerful re-engagement emails, consider including content such as:

• Incentives: Include a discount or free delivery offering that’s too good to pass up to tempt browsers to make a purchase. 
  
• Personalised product recommendations: Entice shoppers back to your site by displaying recommendations of other products they may be interested in.

This type of campaign can help secure more sales this Black Friday by unlocking revenue even from your less-engaged shoppers.

6. Save my basket

During Black Friday, shoppers are bombarded with promotions, so they won’t always commit to a purchase there and then.

They’ll inevitably want to shop around and weigh up deals across brands before making a decision.

To encourage shoppers to return to you to buy, you can run a ‘save my basket’ email campaign.

Allowing shoppers to opt in to save their basket on site means they can easily return to it when they are ready to purchase. 

You also gain the opportunity to send a series of emails that entice them to pick up their on-site journey where they left off.

With this campaign, you can keep your brand top-of-mind for the shopper while making purchasing simple. It can help you unlock a stream of Black Friday sales.

Pro tip: Consider including a limited-time offer within your follow-up emails after a shopper has saved their basket. This can act as an incentive to act fast and choose your brand rather than shop elsewhere.

7. Cart abandonment

One of the most important email sequences for Black Friday is your cart abandonment campaign. 

This campaign is essential throughout the entire Q4, a time when distracted shoppers are frequently abandoning their baskets.

Average cart abandonment rates during Black Friday sit above 70%, so the majority of your shoppers are leaving their baskets behind.³

This highlights the importance of engaging cart abandonment emails to help you recover these potential sales.

You can maximise engagement with your cart abandonment campaign by:

• Offering extra incentives: Deliver personalised discounts to give your shoppers the push to purchase.
  
• Remind shoppers of their basket: By including the specific items they left in their cart, you can more easily capture the attention of shoppers.

Setting up this campaign before Black Friday traffic levels peak will ensure you’re taking action to recover lost revenue. It can help to catapult your conversion rates for the long run.

Pro tip: Ensure you’re constantly testing and optimising the design, copy, and subject lines of your abandoned cart emails to maximise results.

You can do this by reviewing the performance of your emails often, looking at metrics like open rates, click rates and conversion rates.

Suggested reading: Discover the Top Email Marketing Metrics You Should be Tracking.

8. Welcome flow

With the influx of traffic Black Friday brings, many of these shoppers are likely to subscribe to your marketing emails.

You’ll want to make the most of these new subscribers by sending a series of emails that guide them towards their first purchase.

Within your welcome flow emails, you’ll want to:

• Reinforce your brand identity: Remind shoppers of what makes your brand stand out. Mention key USPs such as free delivery or a rewards scheme.
  
• Deliver value: Offer an exclusive welcome discount to motivate your shoppers to return to your site and use it on a purchase.

Pro tip: Maximise the number of shoppers who subscribe to your mailing list by promoting a new subscriber incentive on your site. 

Solutions like Salesfire can promote opt-ins while preventing discount misuse by only displaying sign-up campaigns to shoppers who haven’t subscribed already.

9. Post-purchase flow

Your shopper may have completed a Black Friday purchase, but your email campaigns don’t stop there. 

You now need to think about how you can nurture your shoppers after their purchases to create additional sales opportunities. 

We recommend deploying a post-purchase email flow featuring content relevant to the specific items the shopper purchased.

You can easily do this using tools like Salesfire, which automatically pulls in AI-powered product recommendations to promote cross-sells and upsells. 

This campaign focuses on introducing Black Friday shoppers to products they’ll genuinely love to help drive future sales.

What else you can do: Using hyper-personalisation within your email campaigns is a great way to encourage shoppers to click through and interact with your site.

Consider testing out:

• Personalised subject lines: Capture your shopper’s attention with personalised subject lines to increase the open rate. 
  
• Mobile-friendly emails: Consider the devices your shoppers are using and make sure you optimise your emails for both mobile and desktop users. This ensures your content will be displayed in the best possible way, no matter their device.

Catapult your Q4 success with Black Friday email campaigns

Throughout Black Friday, there is a whole host of valuable sales and revenue opportunities at stake. To thrive in Q4 and beyond, you must utilise campaigns that promote sales and nurture shopper relationships across the customer lifecycle. 

A strong Black Friday email strategy supported by automation will allow you to tap into shopper behaviour to recover lost revenue and drive those all-important sales for your business. 

Supporting your email strategy with automation will allow you to tap into shopper behaviour to recover revenue and drive those all-important seasonal sales.

1 Most Black Friday shoppers bagged their deals online this year, with record spending | NPR

2 BEST FOMO IN MARKETING STATISTICS 2025 | Amra &highest-engaged Elma

3 How to Avoid Cart Abandonment This Black Friday: Ultimate Guide | Easyship