Our 2025 BFCM analysis shows when email and SMS campaigns saw the highest CTR and CVR—and how to plan your send volume.

Use these send times as a guide, not a rulebook—sending outside them still works. Shoppers are considering a lot of offers, so it’s helpful to introduce your deals early (especially on Black Friday and Cyber Monday) and then follow up with those who weren’t ready to buy right away.

Plus, brands that send at higher volumes during BFCM consistently earn more revenue.

Here’s when to send on each channel, how to determine your Cyber Week campaign volume, and how to build that volume through relevance.

When to send email and SMS campaigns during BFCM

Best times to send SMS campaigns during Cyber Week

These are the highest CTR and CVR send times for SMS campaigns from Thanksgiving through Giving Tuesday 2025:

Phone carrier networks experience huge volume spikes on Black Friday and Cyber Monday that can delay message delivery. Peak congestion hits between 10am and 3pm ET on these days and can slow delivery of campaigns.

To ensure your time-sensitive offers reach subscribers quickly:

• Send before 10am or after 3pm ET for fastest delivery.
• Avoid the top of the hour and half-hour marks (like 11am and 2:30pm) when traffic spikes.
• Reserve MMS for outside peak hours, since it can take longer to deliver than SMS.

Best times to send email campaigns during Cyber Week

Here’s when shoppers clicked and converted on emails the most in 2025:

As you plan your campaign schedule, keep in mind that email can reach subscribers during off-peak evening hours, when SMS may be limited by quiet-hour rules.

Use Send Time AI to fine-tune timing beyond BFCM

Send Time AI, part of Attentive AI™ Pro, delivers messages when each individual subscriber is most likely to engage, improving CTR or CVR in 75%+ of eligible SMS campaigns and lifting email conversion rates by 15% on average.

Use Send Time AI for campaigns that aren’t tied to a specific sale window, launch, or inventory update. Cyber Week’s limited-time deals and fast-moving inventory call for manual timing. Use your performance data and the charts above to set it.

Pick Send Time AI back up for pre-BFCM campaigns and to take advantage of more revenue opportunities after Cyber Week.

How many email and SMS campaigns to send during BFCM

Ten years of BFCM data—including the 5.7 billion messages sent through the Attentive platform during Cyber Week 2025—show the same pattern: higher campaign volume during BFCM consistently drives more revenue.

And there’s good news: Shoppers expect more communication from brands during Cyber Week. 62% say they’re open to receiving more messages than usual on at least one channel during BFCM. That gives you room to send more emails and texts than you normally would.

Plus, Cyber Week is actually a great time for natural list cleansing. 81% of subscribers who opted out during BFCM 2025 had never made a purchase. An additional 15% had only ever made one purchase, likely from their original welcome message.

The strongest approach is to build campaign volume gradually leading up to a big BFCM push. Historically, those that dramatically increased their volume without a gradual build saw 22% lower ROI than all other brands.

Here’s how to determine your Cyber Week send volume and how to build to it effectively on each channel.

SMS send volume during BFCM: Build toward 2–3x your normal weekly volume

In the analysis, revenue increased as brands sent more text messages. 

We found that the strongest-performing brands sent 2–3x their normal weekly SMS campaign volume—using the average from August–October as a baseline. Revenue continues climbing from there, but without a clear read on opt-out impact at higher volumes, staying within this range is the safer bet.

For more concrete benchmarks:

• Minimum baseline: Send at least six BFCM-related SMS campaigns
• Larger brands: Send 11+ campaigns during Cyber Week

This increase in campaign frequency gives shoppers more useful touchpoints during Cyber Week as they navigate deals.

Use MMS for high-impact moments

In crowded inboxes, MMS can give key messages more context and visual weight than text alone. We’ve found that MMS messages achieve a 2.8x higher conversion rate on average than SMS. Top-performing brands use MMS for approximately 25% of their BFCM sends.

Reserve MMS for high-impact moments like your Black Friday sales announcement or a product feature where the visual helps capture attention or provide essential details.

Email send volume during BFCM: Increase 5–10% per day to reach your goal volume

Email frequency during BFCM requires a more nuanced approach. A gradual ramp-up is still the best strategy—but a sudden spike in email volume can trigger spam filters and reduce deliverability.

To build your sending reputation, increase your sends slowly over the course of your Q3 and Q4 campaigns—starting now if you haven’t already.

Start by determining how many emails you want to send during Cyber Week based on last year’s performance and send volume, plus this year’s list growth projections. Then create a plan to slowly increase your email sends to reach that goal by Black Friday.

Cap your daily send increase at 5–10% higher than the previous day’s volume:

• High-volume senders (1M+ emails/day): Increase by 5% daily
• Smaller-volume senders (~100K emails/day): Target up to 10% daily increases

4 strategies to increase campaign frequency ahead of BFCM

Sending more email and SMS campaigns doesn’t mean messaging your whole list more with the same content.

Use segmentation, coordinated message sequences, behavioral flows, and content variety to boost your sends strategically.

1. Use engagement and relationship status to manage frequency effectively

Shoppers want brands to match frequency to their engagement—75% say so outright. Different subscriber segments can handle different message frequencies leading up to BFCM:

• VIPs: Give your highest tier your highest frequency, plus perks like early access and member-only deals to keep them excited to be on your list.
• Engaged subscribers: Shoppers who’ve interacted with your brand recently are paying attention and can handle more sends without a meaningful rise in opt-outs.
• Unengaged subscribers: Shoppers who haven’t interacted recently require more measured frequency. Many wait for big sales like BFCM—so re-introduce your brand in advance of Black Friday, then send your strongest offers when your sale launches.

To focus your campaigns on subscribers likely to act, use Audiences AI to identify high-intent subscribers and exclude those unlikely to convert. It drives up to a 20% increase in revenue.

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Go deeper: Segmentation: The Audiences to Define Before BFCM

2. Coordinate campaigns for unified experiences

Rather than only sending single-message campaigns, you can coordinate multi-message sequences that introduce subscribers to your campaign (whether it’s a sale, new product, etc.) and then follow up with reminders or more details.

For a sale, that might look like:

• Sending announcement campaigns at launch
• Following up with reminder campaigns mid-sale
• Sending final-day reminders

A similar arc works for a product launch: tease the collection, announce with full details, then send reminders for anyone who missed it.

To tell a story across channels, play to the strengths of each channel across your sequences.

Go deeper: Cross-Channel Marketing: How to Make SMS, Email, and Push Work Together for BFCM

3. Activate your behavioral flows

Behavioral flows are an easy way to increase your email and SMS sends while staying relevant to shopper behavior.

If they’re not on already, start with the essentials: welcome series, browse and cart abandonment, inventory alerts, transactional messages, post-purchase, and winback. Each one adds relevant sends without adding another campaign to your calendar.

Update them with BFCM-specific language as Cyber Week draws nearer, and tighten timing to match the faster pace of Q4 shopping.

Use Attentive AI™ Journeys to personalize triggered messages at scale. Attentive AI™ analyzes your brand, product, and customer data to create 1:1 journeys for each subscriber—and brands have driven 200% more revenue with triggered messages from AI Journeys.

Go deeper: 9 Behavioral Flows to Turn On Before BFCM

4. Vary content to justify higher frequency

High-frequency messaging works best when your communications offer unique value. Mix different content types and messaging approaches to prevent frequency fatigue while keeping subscribers engaged.

With BFCM deals and end-of-year gifting on the calendar, there’s no shortage of reasons to show up.

A few effective campaign types to use ahead of BFCM:

• BFCM sale teasers and previews
• Inventory alerts
• Gift guides
• Curated product recommendations for gift-giving
• Holiday-specific product tips and styling guides

Go deeper: 14 Pre-BFCM Campaigns to Reach Early Shoppers

Next read

More sends only pay off when there's something worth sending. Build the campaigns that fill your Cyber Week calendar:

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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.