The end-of-year rush can be quite chaotic, but with the right approach you can simplify things. With 90 days of focused preparation, you can navigate BFCM with confidence and clarity.In this guide: Set yourself up for success by building a solid foundation. Align your email and SMS channels, embrace AI tools now to compound the benefits, and grow your audience with intention. Then optimize everything with clear purpose for meaningful results.
The pressure is real. Consumers spent a record $41.1 billion online during Cyber Week last year—and every brand wants to earn their slice of that pie.
But this year is different, and the stakes feel higher than usual. Economic uncertainty and tariff impacts are making consumers more cautious with their spending leading up to Black Friday/Cyber Monday. In June's Attentive Consumer Pulse, we found that 75% of shoppers anticipate some change to their holiday spend. Shoppers say they'll be buying fewer items, searching for more deals and discounts, or shopping earlier. Instead of purchasing multiple items, shoppers will be looking for the ideal gift—so every product will be subject to greater scrutiny.
On top of shifting consumer behavior, brands have faced inventory challenges and tightened profit margins as a result of tariffs. In response, marketers have had to adapt their strategies to navigate this complex landscape.
But we've navigated challenges like this before—the pandemic, the 2021 shipping crisis—and we know what it takes to weather the storm.
From guiding our customers through nine years of BFCMs, we consistently see that Cyber Week success is found by building a solid strategic foundation early on that lets you engage customers with confidence and clarity during the biggest shopping event of the year.
This is especially true amidst economic challenges. Owned channels allow you to build the familiarity and trust that get shoppers to choose your brand when every retailer is competing for their attention.
In the Attentive Marketer Pulse, brands reported that email and SMS are the top revenue-driving channels in this period of uncertainty. As a result, marketers are increasing their investment in these powerful relationship-building channels.
The brands that win this year will be those that cut through the noise by building connections with shoppers early and providing value to their customers.
You have 90 days of focused preparation ahead of you to build the customer relationships that fuel BFCM success.
And that's where we come in. As your trusted guide through the BFCM storm, we've seen what works and what doesn't. Our recommendations are based on the 3.9 billion email and SMS messages that flowed through the Attentive platform during Cyber Week 2024 and the BFCM data we've been collecting and analyzing for nine years.
This is your path to approaching Q4 with confidence.
Ready to start building your competitive advantage? Take a breath, and let's begin.
When everything feels chaotic, clarity comes from focusing on what drives results.
In this period of uncertainty, email and SMS have emerged as the top channels marketers can rely on to drive business growth. During this period, 78% of marketers say email is a top revenue-driving channel and 72% say the same for SMS. But the brands that see the biggest impact treat SMS and email as complementary forces that work in harmony, rather than separate programs competing for attention.
In fact, 58% of consumers are more likely to purchase when receiving the same promotion across channels. When you align your email and SMS programs on the right platform, you create strategic clarity that cuts through the chaos and delivers stronger performance than either channel could achieve alone.
Coordination doesn't mean duplication. In fact, even though shoppers are more likely to purchase when receiving the same promotion across channels, 72% want brands to use text and email differently. That means complementing each other and continuing the story, not copy-pasting from one channel to the other.
While there’s a lot of overlap between SMS and email subscribers, the reality is most consumers engage on one primary channel. So true strategic harmony is found by understanding how to build engagement across both channels.
Start by capitalizing on the strength of each channel.
Use SMS for time-sensitive communications that drive immediate action, like:
Use email for detailed content that builds relationships, such as:
Create sequential messages that leverage both channels. Let each channel play to its strengths by combining email and SMS into the same campaign.
For example, use SMS to announce a product launch and drive immediate traffic. Then follow up with an email that tells the full story.
Or start a cart abandonment flow with a quick text 15 minutes after abandonment to quickly recapture attention. Follow up with a detailed email an hour later that includes product reviews, addresses common questions, or showcases product benefits.
Managing separate SMS and email platforms creates the exact complexity you're trying to avoid. When your channels operate on different systems, you lose the strategic advantages that make a single integrated messaging program so powerful.
By combining email and SMS into the same platform, you benefit from advanced cross-channel orchestration, complete visibility across both channels, and a single source of customer truth for more accurate personalization.
The platform you choose to consolidate on determines if you’ll see small gains or transformational results.
“Attentive triggered email provides us with enhanced orchestration capability and offers more control over our content, revolutionizing the way we connect with our customers: instantly and effectively.”
With Attentive's unified email and SMS solution you gain:
We're focused on platform infrastructure, performance, and reliability so you can focus on strategy and customer relationships.
We make migrating from your existing ESP easy and can get you up and running in days—not weeks—so you can optimize your program well before BFCM.
Understanding your customers is the foundation of strong relationships. The earlier you start learning about your subscribers’ interests, behaviors, and preferences, the more relevant your campaigns will be year-round—but also for Black Friday.
Our research shows that 81% of consumers ignore messages that aren’t relevant to them. Meanwhile, 96% of shoppers are likely to purchase from at least one type of personalized message.
Personalization isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s table stakes for cutting through the noise.
In the 90 days before Black Friday, build the data foundation that powers personalized experiences.
Create calm confidence by collecting and activating customer data that can improve the shopping experience while driving more campaign revenue.
Prioritize information that will give you insight into a shopper's buying habits, product preferences, and lifestyle.
Behavioral data—such as browse and purchase history, email and SMS engagement, and response to different types of offers—tells the story of how customers interact with your brand.
Use this information to:
The key to effective behavioral data activation is clear customer identification. 61% of consumers take multiple sessions or switch devices during their shopping journey.
If you don't identify shoppers accurately across these separate moments, you miss opportunities to reach high-intent shoppers with the right message.
Attentive Signal matches subscribers across devices and sessions, leading to a 20% increase in conversion rates and 95% higher triggered email revenue.
Zero-party data gives you the "why" behind shoppers' actions that can't be observed with behavioral data alone.
It's also a great way to start personalizing marketing communications as soon as a shopper subscribes to your list when you don't have much behavioral data collected yet.
Our 2025 Consumer Trends Report found that 99% of shoppers are willing to share some form of zero-party data in exchange for an incentive—and product recommendations are the top incentive for getting customers to open up.
Easy ways to collect zero-party data:
To maximize the potential of all the customer data you've gathered, you've got to activate it through personalized campaigns. Segments and behavioral flows are the essential building blocks to personalization. But before AI, marketers were stuck working with manual workflows with a limit to the depth of personalization they could achieve.
Now, AI is the gold standard for personalized email and SMS. It brings clarity to a mountain of customer data and unlocks performance that manual processes simply can't match.
Other providers are building AI tools that only act to lighten workflows or as a side offering to their main product. Attentive has transformed our entire platform to be centered around AI to help marketers go beyond efficiency and earn real performance gains.
"It takes a level of creativity and expertise to figure out how to actually make use of AI. Attentive is leading the charge here, both for SMS and email. By making the most of our data, AI Journeys is changing the game for us."
With Attentive AI™, you can:
The brands that see the biggest impact from AI start early: AI improves with every message sent, learning your audience's preferences and behaviors to deliver increasingly relevant experiences. Starting now gives you compounding advantages by November, when every interaction matters most.
Brands using Attentive AI™ are already seeing dramatic improvements, including:
And last year, brands that used AI Pro and AI Journeys saw 2x+ higher attributed revenue growth during Cyber Week than those that didn’t.
These sustained improvements compound as AI learns more about your customers.
Incorporating AI into your messaging strategy amplifies what you already do well and scales personalization that would be impossible to do manually.
By adding AI to your program now, you'll have proven the value for your brand and feel comfortable and confident by November.
Ready to try Attentive AI™ for yourself? Learn more or reach out to your Attentive CSM to get started.
Consumers are getting hit with irrelevant content left and right. To stand out during BFCM, you need to cultivate personal relationships with subscribers that articulate value and drive loyalty—and that means starting early.
Expanding your subscriber list before BFCM not only gives you more people to market to, it gives you time to create a more engaged audience for your end-of-year promos. Plus, our data shows that subscribers who joined between June and mid-November last year had 14% higher AOVs than all prior subscribers.
There's a plethora of ways to grow your audience online and off. If you haven't evaluated your list growth strategy in a while, consider trying some new tactics to increase your subscriber base.
Online:
Offline—using QR codes or Text-to-Join keywords:
Pro Tip
Use a multi-step opt-in form to grab a shopper’s phone number and email address at the same time. You’re more likely to get both contacts at the same time.
Encourage shoppers to subscribe with incentives
Discounts are the most effective incentive to get shoppers to join a brand's SMS and email list, according to our internal data.
But if discounts don't feel aligned with your brand, other great options include:
When promoting your email and SMS lists, communicate the value shoppers will get from joining beyond the discount. Will they be first to know about new product launches? Get exclusive sneak peeks?
Pro Tip
Consider upping the incentive for SMS or highlighting the additional perks they'll get by signing up for texts. Early access is a common benefit for SMS subscribers because of the timeliness of the channel.
While the tactics above help you cast a wider net, AI Grow takes a precision approach by identifying your highest-value website visitors and converting them with personalized offers at optimal moments.
Instead of showing the same popup to everyone, AI Grow:
This way you're growing your list with subscribers who are genuinely interested in your brand and more likely to convert.
If subscribers don’t get your messages, you can’t engage them, which impacts your ROI and your ability to engage and convert customers.
You'll have set up most of your essential SMS deliverability infrastructure when you launched your program. But here are a couple extra things to think about as you prepare for Black Friday:
Building solid partnerships with carriers helps ensure reliable capacity and priority sending. Our partnership-focused approach has resulted in deliverability satisfaction rates that are 71% higher than what customers experienced with other platforms.
Email deliverability is more challenging. To stay out of the spam folder, you'll want to avoid spam triggers and audit your email program to account for email providers' requirements.
You'll also benefit from ramping up your sending volume slowly. Increasing your email volume overnight can look suspicious and trigger spam filters. By gradually bumping up your sending volume, you can guarantee you reach the inbox when it matters most.
Start by determining your goal volume for BFCM based on:
Then, map out a schedule to slowly increase your email sending volume.
We've found that sending a slightly higher, more consistent volume of emails from Q2 to Q4 (a "tortoise" strategy) before your big BFCM push is more effective than saving up your emails for a big spike during BFCM (a "hare" strategy). Brands that spiked their sends in Q4 last year without that gradual ramp saw 22% lower ROI than all other brands.
If you didn't already start ramping up in Q2, it's not too late to start. We recommend increasing email sends by no more than 5–10% of the previous day's volume. If you're already sending a volume of 1 million emails per day or more, we recommend staying closer to 5% daily increases. If you send smaller volumes (around 100,000 emails per day) you can target a 10% growth rate.
Attentive makes it easy to reach subscribers' email inboxes and stay out of the spam folder. Built-in best practices and proactive deliverability monitoring help Attentive customers maintain high delivery rates of 99.8%+.
If you're planning to add Attentive Email, or switch from another provider, now's a good time to do it so your program is all set for BFCM.
Pro Tip
Step up sending volume gradually to boost deliverability and engagement. Begin more frequent communication now, including occasional campaigns to less active subscribers.
In our 2025 Consumer Trends Report, we found that 71% of shoppers want brands to learn from their shopping habits over time. Behavioral flows deliver exactly this kind of relevance by responding to how customers interact with your brand.
Plus, these triggered messages supply you with automated revenue so you get a great ROI.
Activate these essential journeys now to foster your relationships with customers:
Welcome series nurture your relationships with new subscribers by setting the tone as soon as they join your list.
Browse and cart abandonment reminders bring shoppers back to take another look at something they expressed interest in with these high-performing journeys.
Post-purchase flows won't drive as much revenue, but these journeys help build relationships that support long-term retention and future revenue.
Winback messages work to re-engage subscribers who have purchased in the past but have since gone quiet.
Inventory updates let shoppers know a product is back-in-stock or will be out-of-stock soon are powerful motivators for purchase.
If available on your e-commerce platform, transactional journeys keep customers up-to-date on their order status, which builds trust and enhances loyalty and retention.
Optimizing your email and SMS program supports healthy business growth year-round. But it's all the more important for Q4 when you stand to pull in the most revenue for the year. So use your pre-BFCM prep time to find out what works to engage and convert subscribers.
If you have time, you can optimize every aspect of your strategy—from testing your sign-up unit's CTA button color to testing the impact of emojis in your email subject lines. But we recommend focusing on the changes that will have the biggest impact on your bottom line:
Behavioral flows: Since these messages automatically engage your customers based on their actions, small improvements here compound into significant revenue gains.
Sign-up units: Your sign-up units are working around the clock to grow your audience, so optimizing them pays off.
Campaign effectiveness: Every text message and email you send teaches you what resonates with your subscribers so you can iterate with every campaign.
Segmentation: Take this opportunity to test your segmentation thresholds and refine your targeting.
Pro Tip
Use your late summer and fall sales as testing grounds to understand how customers interact with sign-up units and promotional campaigns before the high-stakes BFCM period.
You stand to pull in more revenue than any other time of year during BFCM. The worst thing that can happen? The platform you use crashes and your text messages and emails don't get sent.
Attentive is built to support brands during this high-stakes event with:
As you grow and optimize your program year-round, you can also benefit from our:
Ready to make your customer messaging more personal and effective? We make it easy to get started with Attentive.
Economic pressures are making consumers more selective, so the brands that succeed this year will be the ones that build genuine relationships before the end-of-year rush.
With 90 days of strategic preparation, you can establish a strong email and SMS strategy that supports your biggest revenue opportunity of the year.
Here are your key moves to make now:
By following this methodical approach, you'll have the strategic clarity that comes from conscious preparation and enter Q4 with unified channels, engaged subscribers, and automated revenue streams already working for you.
Ready to build your competitive advantage? Download the 90-day BFCM checklist to track your progress and establish your foundation one step at a time. Then, stay tuned for part two to find out how to craft a unified messaging strategy—coming in September.
