Black Friday emails arrive in one of the busiest weeks of the year for inboxes. Klaviyo alone delivered more than 22.7 billion messages over the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday 2025, 25% more than the year before.
In an inbox that full, one more percentage off with a countdown timer is easy to scroll past. The Black Friday emails that stood out gave subscribers a different reason to open.
They let loyal customers in first, added a gift instead of cutting the price further, explained why the brand wasn't having a sale or welcomed first-time buyers with an offer for after the sale.
Below are Black Friday and Cyber Monday email examples from real brands, grouped by approach. After them come subject line patterns, an example sequence, and what the data says about when to send and how often.
What makes a good Black Friday email?
A good Black Friday email makes clear what the offer is, who it's for and when it ends before the reader has to scroll. Beyond that, the best ones protect margin and set up a second order after the sale.
A simple offer makes all of that easier to say. Ben Zettler, founder of Zettler Digital and a Klaviyo Elite Partner, explained on our podcast how to simplify Black Friday offers.
Klaviyo's BFCM 2025 results suggest that restraint paid off:
-10%
Change in discounts across ecommerce over BFCM 2025, while consumer spending rose 11%
+14%
Growth for the brands offering the smallest discounts, the fastest of any group over BFCM 2025
+13.5%
Growth in revenue from repeat customers over BFCM 2025, outpacing revenue from new buyers
Klaviyo's figures come from a stable cohort of 10,000 brands on its platform, and it credits early access, exclusive drops, VIP perks and personalized offers for much of the repeat-customer growth. Those approaches and a few others run through the examples below, and each suits a different kind of store:
| Approach | Best suited to | What it costs you | Examples below |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early access for loyalty members and subscribers | Brands with a large base of past buyers | Little: the same offer, shown to your best customers first | The White Company |
| Gifts and product drops instead of deeper discounts | Beauty, food and other categories with low-cost extras | The gift or the new product, not a cut on every order | Patrick Ta Beauty, Jones Road Beauty |
| No sale at all | Brands that hold their prices all year | Some deal-driven orders | ME+EM |
| Different messages for different customers | Lists that mix loyal, lapsed and new buyers | Time to build and test segments | Beekman 1802, Shinola, Accessorize, Happy Way |
| Gifting emails | Jewelry, gifts and anything bought for someone else | Gift wrap, engraving or a gift finder | Missoma, Notonthehighstreet, Astrid & Miyu |
| Welcome emails for new Black Friday customers | Any brand that wins first-time buyers over the weekend | One more offer, timed after the sale | ALLSAINTS |
Our Black Friday strategy guide covers how to set an offer your margins can carry. The examples below show how brands presented theirs.
12 Black Friday email examples
These Black Friday email examples are grouped by what each brand did differently, starting with the customers who hear about the sale first.
Early access for loyalty members and subscribers
Early access emails let a brand's best customers shop the sale before everyone else. Brands use them as a reward for existing customers, as a reason to subscribe or both, and the sign-ups that unlock them grow the email list in the weeks before Black Friday.
1. The White Company
For Black Friday 2025, The White Company renamed its promotion "White Week" and gave members of its loyalty program, The Club, a full week of access before the public. The calm, minimal email design suited a brand known for luxury rather than doorbusters.
Gifts and product drops instead of deeper discounts
A gift with purchase can do a discount's job at lower cost, because the brand pays for one gift instead of cutting the price of everything in the order. A limited product skips the discount altogether: shoppers buy now because it won't be around for long.
Both protect your margin, which is the point Andrew Maff, founder of BlueTuskr, made on our podcast: steep BFCM discounts often backfire for brands that care about profit and long-term brand health.
2. Patrick Ta Beauty
Patrick Ta Beauty replaced its 2023 offer, a $25 credit toward the next purchase for spending over $100, with a gift worth $96 on orders of $150 or more for eight days of BFCM 2024. The gift was an eyeshadow palette, a lip crème and a mini tote.
In the month before, its emails and sign-up forms promoted loyalty perks, including early access to the event. Klaviyo reports that the brand's BFCM ecommerce revenue rose 175% year over year.
3. Jones Road Beauty
Jones Road Beauty doesn't run sales, even over BFCM. "We feel like we don't need to discount," CMO Cody Plofker told Klaviyo. For 2023 it dropped a limited-edition Mini Miracle Balm instead, and starting the Monday before Black Friday it pointed every drop announcement ad and post to a sign-up form, which 59.2% of viewers completed.
Shoppers who had taken its shade-finder quiz but never bought heard about trying several shades, while VIP repeat buyers heard about giving their favorite as a gift.
No sale at all
Some brands take part in Black Friday without discounting at all. It works when your prices hold all year and your customers buy for reasons other than a deal, and the email gives shoppers a different reason to buy that weekend, such as a new product or a donation for every order.
Jones Road Beauty, above, does it with a limited-edition product drop. ME+EM did it with a donation, and used the same email to explain why it doesn't discount.
4. ME+EM
For Black Friday 2025, ME+EM, the British fashion brand, sent an email with the subject line "Why We Don't Do Black Friday" and donated £10 for every order to a charity supporting women and girls affected by war and conflict. Its Black Friday page explains the stance and names the charity, Women for Women International.
Different messages for different customers
Segmented Black Friday emails split the list by how often and how recently customers buy, so loyal buyers hear about the brand, lapsed buyers hear about the deal and new subscribers hear why the product works. Segments also let a brand send more emails without sending all of them to everyone.
5. Beekman 1802
Beekman 1802 split its BFCM 2023 emails by purchase frequency. New subscribers got messages about how well the products work, lapsed one-time buyers got the discount and its most frequent shoppers got a plain-text email from the founders about the brand and its heritage.
6. Shinola
Shinola ran a holiday event of almost three weeks in 2024, with daily emails on specific products and limited-edition drops, then switched to a spend-more, save-more sitewide offer for BFCM itself.
It aimed promotional emails at its most engaged customers, sent outlet offers to subscribers who usually shopped sales and sent its texts mainly to people who had recently engaged.
7. Accessorize
Accessorize used Black Friday 2025 to win back lapsed shoppers, with the subject line "If not now, then when?", its seasonal bestsellers and a prompt to start a wishlist before the sale opened.
8. Happy Way
For BFCM 2023, Happy Way, an Australian protein and supplements brand, gave its most engaged customers early-bird access, sent its CEO's sale announcement as a long plain-text email and showed vegan products only to vegan customers.
After BFCM, purchase-based flows reminded customers to reorder 60 or 90 days after their last order.
Gifting emails
Gifting emails help people who are shopping for someone else decide what to buy. They're a strong fit for jewelry and other categories where so much of the season's buying is for gifts, and there they can do more than another discount.
9. Missoma
Missoma kept its Black Friday 2025 discount of 40% off but built the email around gifting, with gift wrapping at the top, a free engraving banner and birthstones to help buyers choose.
10. Notonthehighstreet
For Black Friday 2025, Notonthehighstreet promoted "The Curator," an AI gift finder in its app, by email: shoppers describe the person they're buying for and get gift suggestions from the marketplace. The email also encouraged app downloads, which opened up push notifications as another channel.
11. Astrid & Miyu
Astrid & Miyu asked shoppers to build wishlists before Black Friday 2025, with one entrant winning everything on theirs, and framed the campaign as a festive thank-you across email, push and SMS.
Welcome emails for new Black Friday customers
A welcome email for people who bought from you for the first time over Black Friday gives them an offer they can use once the sale prices are gone. Our post-Black Friday email strategy covers the messages from the order confirmation to the second order.
12. ALLSAINTS
ALLSAINTS sent a welcome campaign to customers whose first purchase came during Black Friday 2025, with 10% off their next order that was valid only from December 2, after the sale ended. The email also told them what to expect next: a birthday discount, access to future promotions and updates on new collections.
What does a good Cyber Monday email look like?
A good Cyber Monday email gives subscribers a new reason to buy after a weekend of sale emails, rather than the same offer with a bigger number. In a Cyber Monday guide he wrote for Klaviyo in June 2026, Ben Zettler advises offering "a uniquely different incentive for Cyber Monday instead of a bigger discount."
One option he suggests is a bonus of $10 off orders of $100 or more for shoppers who added items to their cart from a Black Friday email and still haven't bought. Compared with a deeper sitewide cut, the bonus goes only to people who have already shown they want to buy.
Cyber Monday deserves that effort because for many brands it's the bigger day. Omnisend's analysis of more than 5,000 US SMB ecommerce brands found that 58% had more orders on Black Friday 2025, 37% more on average, but the other 42% did better on Cyber Monday, with 33% more orders on average.
Check which day led for your store last year and give it your strongest email, without dropping the other.
What subject lines work for Black Friday emails?
The Black Friday subject lines that work say something specific, such as who the email is for, what's free, what's ending or where the brand stands, instead of another "Black Friday sale" with a bigger number.
The examples above fall into a handful of patterns. Each row shows the example a pattern comes from and a subject line to adapt:
| Pattern | Where it comes from | Subject line to adapt |
|---|---|---|
| Ask a question | Accessorize's subject line, "If not now, then when?" | "Still on your wishlist?" |
| Take a stance | ME+EM's subject line, "Why We Don't Do Black Friday" | "Why we're not having a sale this year" |
| Say who it's for | The White Company's week of early access for members of The Club | "Members, you're in early" |
| Rename the event | The White Company's "White Week" | "[Brand] Week starts today for members" |
| Lead with the gift | Patrick Ta Beauty's gift worth $96 on orders of $150 or more | "Your free gift is waiting, this week only" |
| Tease a drop | Jones Road Beauty's limited-edition Mini Miracle Balm | "Something new drops Friday" |
| Welcome a new customer | ALLSAINTS's welcome for first-time Black Friday buyers | "Welcome in: here's 10% off for December" |
A few habits make any of these patterns work harder:
- Put the offer or the audience in the first few words, because phones cut long subject lines short.
- Use the preview text to finish the thought, with the question in the subject line and the offer in the preview.
- Keep deadlines true. A last chance that's extended the next day teaches subscribers to ignore the next one.
- Write for the segment. The same sale reads differently to a VIP and to someone who hasn't bought in a year, as Beekman 1802's segments show.
When should you send Black Friday emails?
Plan to start Black Friday emails about two weeks before the day, which for 2026 means around November 13, and open early access sign-ups before that.
Brands in the Americas began mentioning Black Friday in their subject lines 16 days ahead on average in 2025, according to Dotdigital's analysis of billions of email sends, against a global average of 12:
How early brands started mentioning Black Friday in subject lines, 2025
Average number of days before Black Friday, by region
Cyber Monday has a shorter run-up: brands in the Americas started mentioning it seven days ahead, against a global average of three.
Promotions start earlier than the subject lines suggest, though. Klaviyo saw brands launch BFCM promotions as early as November 7 in 2024, and more than 40% of email campaigns contained discounts by the Monday before Thanksgiving.
Shoppers are ready earlier still. Sinch recorded a 32% year-over-year rise in email volume on its platforms in November 2025, with the biggest growth in the week before Cyber Week, and in its survey of 3,180 consumers, 45.9% wanted promotions at least a month before Black Friday.
That's why early access sign-ups need more lead time than the sale emails. Patrick Ta Beauty started growing its email and SMS lists more than a month before BFCM 2024 and saw a 41% increase in email sign-ups the week before the event.
Osmology, a home fragrance brand, had its Black Friday 2026 page counting down in October to early access on November 11, with a form asking visitors to sign up by email for first access to the offers.
All of that means planning well before the first send. Ben Zettler explained on our podcast why brands whose Black Friday planning starts in November are already behind.
What time of day should you send Black Friday emails?
Most brands send their Black Friday emails in the morning. Klaviyo's busiest hour on Black Friday 2024 was 9 to 10 a.m. ET, when its customers sent more than 420 million messages, and orders peaked between noon and 1 p.m. ET.
On Listrak's platform, 7 a.m. was the most common email send time on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025. Treat these as a starting point and test them against your own past results. Patrick Ta Beauty based its BFCM 2024 send times on what its earlier A/B tests had shown.
How many Black Friday emails should you send?
There's no standard number of Black Friday emails, but the brands that sent more did it by narrowing who got each one. Patrick Ta Beauty went from two emails and one text over five days of BFCM 2023 to nearly six times the email volume in 2024, and its unsubscribe rate fell 37%.
It suppressed anyone who had bought in the past seven days from every email and SMS send, and sent email and SMS at different times of day so dual subscribers never got both at once. Shinola sent daily emails for almost three weeks, but focused them on its most engaged customers.
Klaviyo's BFCM guidance defines an engaged segment as people who opened or clicked within the last 30 to 60 days if you email a few times a week, or 90 to 120 days if you email a few times a month. Send the most to that group and less to everyone else.
A sequence for Black Friday 2026 might look like this:
Our guide to how email, SMS and push notifications work together covers how to cap the total each customer receives across channels.
Final thoughts
The Black Friday emails worth copying rarely lead with the biggest discount. They tell loyal customers first, give a gift or a new product instead of a deeper cut, take a clear stance or send each segment the message it will actually respond to.
Whatever the offer, the email that matters most may be the one after the sale. Give first-time Black Friday buyers a useful welcome and an offer for December, rather than leaving them until next November's sale.
Frequently asked questions
What should a Black Friday email include?
A Black Friday email should include the offer, who it's for, its start and end dates and one clear link to shop. Put the terms that cause confusion, such as exclusions, minimum spends and whether codes combine, in the email rather than leaving shoppers to find them at checkout.
If you're running early access, say when it opens to everyone else.
When are Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2026?
Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving, and Cyber Monday follows on Monday, November 30. Brands that offer early access open it sooner: Osmology's 2026 early access starts on November 11, more than two weeks ahead.
Is email or SMS better for Black Friday offers?
Neither email nor SMS is clearly better for Black Friday offers, so it makes sense to use both for different jobs. On Listrak's platform, email converted at 6.93% and SMS at 6.95% over BFCM 2025, and in Sinch's survey of 3,180 consumers, 56.5% preferred email for Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions.
Email is best suited to the full offer and the products, while texts suit early-access alerts and final-hour reminders to people who opted in.
Should you resend Black Friday emails to people who didn't open them?
You can resend a key Black Friday email to subscribers who didn't open it, as long as the resend goes only to non-openers and uses a new subject line. Shinola retargeted non-openers of key campaigns with repeat sends in 2024, as part of a more targeted email strategy.
Save resends for the emails that matter most, such as the sale opening and the last day, so the extra volume doesn't push up spam complaints.
How do you keep Black Friday emails out of the spam folder?
To keep Black Friday emails out of spam, meet the mailbox providers' sender rules and send most of your volume to people who engage. Hold back subscribers who haven't opened in months rather than adding them to the peak-week sends.
Google requires anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail to authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, support one-click unsubscribe and keep the reported spam rate below 0.30%, and it advises staying below 0.10%.
