The Black Friday email and SMS calendar for 2026

Black Friday is on November 27 this year, and Cyber Monday on November 30. Over the same five days last year, Klaviyo credited email and texts with 42% of its brands' revenue, and 43% on the peak days (Klaviyo).

You don't need to message people every few hours to get your share. Your subscribers hear from every other brand that week too, so every extra message has to earn its place. For most brands, three emails and two texts, sent at the right times, are enough.

Here's that plan, with the dates, the prep that gets your emails into the inbox, and the Klaviyo and Omnisend settings that can quietly skip or delay your messages. It goes with our Black Friday checklist for your store and our guide to how much to discount.

Starting late? Do these four things first

If you're reading this after November 4, the plan below still works. Start here:

• Start your text number's verification today. Omnisend says it usually takes about five business days, sometimes two weeks, and can't be sped up (Omnisend). If it won't be done by November 25, run the sale on email and plan texts for next year.
• Email only your engaged subscribers. That means people who opened or clicked in the last 30 to 60 days if you email a few times a week, or in the last 90 to 120 days if you email a few times a month (Klaviyo). If you email everyone you haven't contacted in months, all at once on Black Friday, the whole send can end up in spam.
• Switch your pop-up and first welcome email to the Black Friday offer, so November's visitors join your list for the sale.
• Write the three emails and two texts this week, and schedule them.

The plan at a glance

Dates for Black Friday on November 27, 2026. The sale itself, message by message, is further down.

The dates to put in your calendar:

• Thursday, November 26: Thanksgiving
• Friday, November 27: Black Friday
• Saturday, November 28: Small Business Saturday
• Monday, November 30: Cyber Monday
• Tuesday, December 1: GivingTuesday
• Thursday, December 17: the last day to send by USPS Ground Advantage for delivery by Christmas

October 22 to November 4: get into the inbox first

You'll send more than usual that week, so check your sending reputation while there's time to fix it. Google asks bulk senders to keep spam complaints under 0.1% (Google), and its free Postmaster Tools shows your rate for Gmail.

• Check your sending domain. Send from your own domain, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up. Klaviyo and Omnisend both walk you through it.
• Build engaged segments. Klaviyo suggests counting people who opened or clicked in the last 30–60 days if you email a few times a week, or 90–120 days if you email a few times a month (Klaviyo). Apple Mail opens emails automatically to protect people's privacy, which makes opens look better than they are, so Klaviyo flags those as "Apple Privacy Opens" for you to leave out.
• Retire people who never engage. Run a sunset flow: one last "still want to hear from us?" email, then stop sending to anyone who doesn't respond. But keep last year's Black Friday buyers, who may only shop once a year.
• Get your text number verified now. In the US and Canada, Klaviyo and Omnisend send marketing texts from a verified toll-free number or a short code. Omnisend says verification usually takes about five business days and sometimes two weeks, it can't be sped up, and you can't text while it's pending (Omnisend).

November 5 to 20: grow your list, and keep sending steadily

• Switch your pop-up to Black Friday. Change your sign-up pop-up's message to the sale, something like "Get our Black Friday deal first", so the people visiting in November join your list.
• Put the Black Friday code in the first welcome email. New subscribers get the deal straight away, instead of a different welcome discount that clashes with it.
• Keep your regular emails going. Inbox providers trust senders whose volume is steady. If you normally email 10,000 people and suddenly email 80,000 on Black Friday, a lot of it can end up in spam. If you plan to email people you haven't emailed in a while, build up to them: Klaviyo's rule is to make each campaign about 1.5 times the size of the last (Klaviyo Academy). Attentive found that brands that raised their volume sharply without building up saw 22% lower return than everyone else (Attentive).
• Save your texts for the sale. Two texts during the sale are enough for most brands, so don't use up your subscribers' patience before it starts.

November 21 to 25: get everything ready

• Write and schedule all five messages now: the three emails and two texts in the plan below.
• Add a countdown timer to your emails. A live timer showing the hours and minutes left before the sale ends worked well for our clients last year. Omnisend has had a built-in countdown timer since September 2026. Klaviyo doesn't have one, so you add one from a timer tool such as MailTimers (Klaviyo).
• Pick your send times from your own results. Look at your past campaigns for the hours your subscribers open and click most, and schedule around those. Klaviyo's Smart Send Time can do this for you, but it needs a list of at least 12,000 people, and Klaviyo doesn't recommend it for time-sensitive sends like a sale.
• Get your flows ready. Make sure your abandoned cart emails don't offer a code that clashes with the sale: a 10% code next to a 30% sale looks odd, and it may stack on top. In Klaviyo you can schedule a flow to go live or pause at a set time, so nobody has to be at a desk at midnight.
• Optional: early access for your best customers. If you have a group of loyal customers, your day-before email can give them the sale a few hours early. Klaviyo suggests sending VIP emails in the days just before Black Friday (Klaviyo).

The sale: three emails and two texts

Here's the plan we recommend. Send it to people who've opened or clicked in the last few months. Once someone orders during the sale, take them out of the remaining sale messages.

If your sale runs through Cyber Monday, the last-chance messages go out a few hours before it ends on Monday night. If you run a separate Cyber Monday offer, repeat the same pattern for it.

A few rules make this work:

• Avoid the rush hour. Klaviyo's busiest hour in 2024 was 9–10 a.m. Eastern on Black Friday, when its brands sent more than 420 million messages, and orders peaked from noon to 1 p.m. (Klaviyo). Klaviyo's deliverability team passes on a tip from inbox providers: send big campaigns at 9:15 rather than exactly 9:00 (Klaviyo).
• Send your full list once, gently. If you email beyond your engaged subscribers, do it on Black Friday morning: your engaged audience first, then the rest in batches over about four hours, as Klaviyo's training suggests.
• Text outside the carriers' busiest hours. Phone networks are most congested from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which can delay texts, so Attentive suggests sending before 10 or after 3 (Attentive). Your texts also have to fit quiet hours (see below).
• If your sale runs through Cyber Monday, keep budget and stock for Monday. For smaller brands, Black Friday usually brings more orders, but four in ten see the opposite:

Smaller US ecommerce brands in Omnisend's 2025 data. Across all US online stores, Adobe expects Cyber Monday to be the bigger day this year. Source: Omnisend.

Texts: what changes your schedule

These limits decide which of your texts go out, and when:

• Quiet hours. In the US, the federal rules allow marketing texts only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the recipient's time zone, and Florida narrows it to 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. (Klaviyo). Omnisend holds any text sent between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. by default, in each recipient's time zone (Omnisend). In Klaviyo, check your account's quiet hours in your text message settings. So schedule the last-hours text for the afternoon in your customers' time zones. A text that falls in quiet hours is held until morning or skipped, depending on your settings, and either way it misses the sale.
• Three a day in four states. Florida, Oklahoma, Oregon and Maryland limit promotional texts to three in any 24 hours, and Klaviyo skips any extras automatically (Klaviyo). Omnisend's default limit is three texts a day for everyone. Your two sale texts plus an abandoned cart text on the same day use up the limit.
• Texts need their own consent. Someone on your email list hasn't agreed to texts, and neither has someone who bought from you: Klaviyo only lets you text a Canadian number that opted in to texts (Klaviyo). In the US and Canada, Omnisend asks for a separate checkbox for text sign-ups, because a combined "email and texts" box can get your number rejected (Omnisend).

After Cyber Monday: shipping cutoffs and calm

• If you extend the sale, keep it short: a day or two, with one email and one text that say when it now ends. Then go back to your normal rhythm and let your flows do the work.
• Send "order by" emails before each shipping cutoff. For delivery by December 25:

USPS dates are for the lower 48 states. Canada Post's dates are for the longest, cross-country deliveries; local and regional parcels can go later. FedEx and UPS publish their own dates. Sources: USPS and Canada Post.

• After your last cutoff, switch to gift cards, which arrive instantly.

Turn Black Friday buyers into repeat customers

Repeat customers are worth planning for: over Black Friday–Cyber Monday 2025, revenue from repeat customers grew 13.5% across Klaviyo's brands, compared with the year before (Klaviyo).

So treat the sale as the start of a relationship. Welcome first-time buyers properly, ask for a review once the product has arrived, and give them a reason to come back in January. Our guide to the 5 email flows every Shopify store should have running covers the post-purchase and win-back emails that do this, and the customer lifetime value calculator shows what a repeat customer is worth.

Klaviyo and Omnisend settings to check before November 20

Choose A/B test winners by clicks or orders, not opens, for the same Apple reason as above. Sources: Klaviyo's help center on Smart Sending, Smart Send Time and scheduling flows; Omnisend's help center on Campaign Booster, send times and September 2026's new features.

What we see with our clients

Three things we'd tell every brand:

• Don't over-send. Your subscribers are hearing from every other brand that week too. Three emails and two texts, done well, beat a message every few hours.
• Send when your people are listening. Check your own results for the hours your subscribers open and click most, and schedule your sends around them.
• Use countdown timers. Adding a live timer to our clients' Black Friday emails worked well last year: people could see exactly how many hours and minutes were left.