Shopping changes during BFCM, so your behavioral flows should, too. Update them to reflect how customers browse, compare, and buy during Cyber Week.

Your behavioral flows are already earning revenue around the clock. During BFCM, small adjustments to those triggered messages can have a greater impact—because every trigger fires more often with the increase in traffic.

41% of marketers who reported improved BFCM performance last year are adjusting flow timing or content specifically for BFCM 2026—versus 31% of everyone else.

Use these steps to audit your flows so they match how shoppers browse, compare, and buy during Cyber Week.

1. Shorten your trigger timing

Cyber Week shoppers decide in hours, not days. A cart abandonment message that waits until tomorrow morning arrives after the shopper has bought from someone else—or after your deal has changed.

Walk through each flow's timing with the shorter buying window in mind:

• Shorten the first-touch delay: Move browse and cart abandonment triggers up so the message lands while the shopper is still in deal-hunting mode.
• Tighten the spacing between messages: If your abandonment flow spreads three touches across several days, part of that sequence may fire after Cyber Monday. Compress it so the full flow plays out while your sale is live.

2. Adjust the copy around your BFCM offer

A common flow issue during BFCM: A message that doesn't know the sale is happening.

As one marketer shared what they’d do differently for Cyber Week: "Make sure every single flow was updated as some didn't speak to the offer."

Read every message in every live flow the way a Cyber Week shopper will, and check it against your offer:

• Remove conflicting discounts: If you’ve got an offer in your welcome flow or abandonment flows that can’t be layered on top of your BFCM sale, shoppers get an offer they can’t use. Swap in BFCM versions that acknowledge the sale instead.
• Highlight the BFCM deadline: Reminding shoppers when your sale ends adds tangible urgency to acting on abandonment flows.

Build a variant of each flow for each stage of your sale if it changes across Cyber Week.

“BFCM-acquired subscribers are ready to buy. So for your welcome series, lead with the offer and hold off on the brand story until after the sale ends so it doesn’t get buried.

Post-BFCM, split the follow-up brand content by purchase behavior. Buyers get brand/onboarding content and non-buyers can be eligible to receive one more offer to encourage conversion.”

– Kaleena Zagrzebski, Senior Retention Strategist at Maze

3. Add extra touchpoints to high-revenue flows

During Cyber Week, purchase intent is higher than usual. Your deal gives every extra message a purpose, and two flows in particular benefit from the added touch:

• Welcome flow: Subscribers who join during BFCM joined because of the sale, and historically they’ve generated more welcome-flow revenue than usual.
• Cart abandonment: Subscribers who joined before BFCM respond especially well to cart abandonment during the sale—they already know your brand, and the deal gives them a reason to complete their purchase.

Consider adding 1–2 messages to each for the BFCM window.

Because customers can only enter a cart or browse abandonment flow once within a 24-hour period, we've developed an additional layer of behavioral targeting. Customers who enter an abandonment flow but do not purchase are automatically added to a follow-up audience segment, which then triggers an additional nurture sequence with one to two more touchpoints.

These messages typically focus on reinforcing urgency, highlighting social proof, showcasing best sellers, addressing common purchase objections, and reminding customers of limited-time promotional offers. During BFCM specifically, we align this messaging with the current promotional calendar to ensure customers receive consistent offer messaging while maximizing opportunities to recover lost revenue.”

– Ian Archbold, Director of Retention and Lifecycle Marketing at Flight Performance

4. Coordinate flows and campaigns

During Cyber Week, you’re sending more campaigns than usual—top-performing brands sent 2–3x their normal SMS volume last BFCM—while the spike in traffic triggers more flows, too.

But without coordination, the same subscriber could get your Black Friday campaign, a cart reminder, and a price drop alert in the same hour.

So set guardrails before the sale:

• Set send caps and suppression rules: Keep messages from stacking up.
• Coordinate across channels, not just within them: Treat email, SMS, and push as one system—if a shopper already purchased from your abandonment email, they don’t need the text reminder.

This coordination is associated with stronger performance: Marketers who use suppression rules to keep competing messages from stacking were 23% more likely to report improved BFCM performance.

5. Adjust post-purchase for repeat buyers

One purchase may not be the shopper’s last during BFCM—it's often the middle. 68% of shoppers remember making multiple separate purchases from at least one brand during BFCM last year.

But most post-purchase flows are built for a normal week: a confirmation, care tips, maybe a review request weeks later. During Cyber Week, that leaves proven buyers—people who just bought from you—with no encouragement to buy again while your deal is still live.

Adjust the flow for the window:

• Give buyers a reason to come back before the sale ends: Follow the confirmation with a message recommending what pairs with their purchase—still at the BFCM price.
• Leave helpful content for after BFCM: Long-tail post-purchase content (review requests, replenishment reminders) can wait until after Cyber Monday.

6. Schedule the switch back

Schedule the swap-back to your regular flows so you don’t keep promoting a sale that’s no longer live.

In Attentive, you can schedule changes to your journeys ahead of time—BFCM variants can go live when the sale starts and revert when it ends.

Next read

Marketers who came out of BFCM 2025 wishing they'd done more with their flows put it plainly: "[We’d] spend more time analyzing our journeys as they saw the biggest lift."

Tuning improves the flows you already have. Another gap for some brands is the flows they don't have active.

Check for missing flows:

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More from The Edit

• Segmentation: The Audiences to Define Before BFCM
• 12 Post-BFCM Strategies to Keep the Momentum Going

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Disclosure: Where this material includes Attentive proprietary internal product, platform, or performance data, certain benchmarks, summaries, statistics, or insights may have been compiled or analyzed with AI-assisted tools using Attentive proprietary internal data believed to be reliable. AI-assisted analysis was subject to internal review, but may contain errors, omissions, or limitations, and the data reflects the applicable dataset, methodology, assumptions, and time period used for the analysis. Unless otherwise stated, the data has not been independently audited or verified by a third party and may not be representative of all customers, industries, campaigns, use cases, or time periods. This material is provided for general marketing and informational purposes only and does not constitute a guarantee, warranty, or prediction of future performance, savings, revenue, conversion rates, deliverability, engagement, or other business outcomes. Individual results may vary.