Email Deliverability Tips for Black Friday

As the silly season fast approaches, it is very tempting for marketers to respond to commercial pressures with a dramatic increase in email sending volumes, growing message complexity and offer intensity. Many marketers I know work incredibly long hours to achieve just this.

However, if you are not careful, this can adversely impact your sending reputation and send you on into the holiday period with your ability to connect with your customers in a worse state than ever, with your primary contact channel crippled.

Here then are some guidelines, curated from our hardworking Digital Marketing Analysts in our CRM Campaign Delivery Team, who worry about this so our clients don’t have to.

1. Check your Technical Foundation

Work with your IT department to ensure that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are correctly configured and aligned for your current domain setup, it’s amazing the size organisations that can still manage to get a “WARNING: UNVERIFIED SENDER” warning in my Outlook (also known as the “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON”). Properly configured, they prove to the ISPs that your emails are legitimate and builds trust with mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo.

Consider using a separate subdomain for your Black Friday marketing emails to isolate their reputation from your core domain and essential transactional emails (like order confirmations, shipping updates etc).

Review your comms and historic performance to ensure they adhere to major inbox provider requirements, including keeping your spam rate well below 0.1% (one spam click per thousand emails), and check your unsubscribe functionality is easy & one-click (known by techies for some reason as the RFC 8058 protocol).

2. List Management and Volumetrics

Regularly remove inactive subscribers (those who haven’t opened or clicked in several months) and hard bounces from your segmentation. Sending to unengaged or invalid addresses might feel like a pressure release valve for all the products your sales team wants to move, but to the ISPs it signals poor list quality and risks damage to your sending reputation.

Gradually Warm Up Sending Volume from Mid-November onwards, avoiding a sudden, large spikes in email volume. If you plan to send more emails than usual (like blasting your entire base on the morning of the 28th), consider gradually increasing your frequency and volume in the weeks leading up to Black Friday to build trust with ISPs.

Finally on list management, I can’t believe in 2025 I still have to say this, but Never Purchase Email Lists. They are the marketing equivalent of holdalls of cash in luggage lockers. No good ever comes of them. All too often, purchased lists contain expired email addresses repurposed by the ISPs as spam traps and unengaged contacts you know little about, which will immediately harm your sender score and lead to a very quick blacklisting you might find very difficult to explain to your CMO.

3. Consider your Content and Engagement Strategy

Segment Your Audience! Avoid sending generic blasts out, something which can seem tempting on your sixth night in a row working late with your partner wondering where you are. Segment based on engagement level, past purchase history, known interests, and tailor content and offers to be relevant to each of your engaged groups.

Remember the simple golden equation for email marketing :

Increased relevance = increased engagement rates = sender reputation

Continuing on, use dynamic content and personalization fields, starting (but not ending) with the recipient’s name, also or product recommendations based on past behaviour, not what you most want to sell (a concept I call Try the Fish marketing) to make emails as relevant and engaging as they can be.

Make your subject lines compelling & authentic to the brand, designed to convey a mild (especially if you are a Brit) sense of urgency without being misleading or using excessive “spammy” words (e.g., “amazing”, “free”, “act now”) or other clickbait. There’s lots of further reading on great subject lines if you are interested, and even some tools that do the heavy lifting for you. During a warmup period you can A/B test subject lines to see what resonates best with your audience.

Verify your emails are using current mobile & tablet responsive templates, single-column layouts, and large, clear CTA buttons, as over half of Black Friday shopping happens on mobile devices.

Although already mentioned above, let’s have it again : Make the unsubscribe link one-click, visible and easy to use. Suppressed contacts are much better than spam complaints.

4. Monitoring and Testing

Test email rendering across different email clients and devices, check all links and personalization fields work, nobody wants to see “Dear &&FIRSTNAME&&” first thing in the morning, and run spam features in your ESP before campaigns go live. Then test it again! Try sending tests to an older relative, see what they make of your finely crafted marketing masterpiece.

Keep a close eye on your key performance indicators (open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and complaint rates), checking at least every hour while you are sending and into the evening after sends. If you notice a performance decline, be prepared to adjust your strategy quickly and pause some critical sends, letting noncritical sends run the risk of a performance hit. We actually have a service, Application Management that provides this.

That’s it. Now good luck, I’ll see you on the other side, hopefully not with a black eye clutching a 42″ LCD TV in the car park of a supermarket.

For more help, subscribe to our blog, or why not get in touch to see if we can help you through this and other critical periods.