Orient your BFCM email marketing strategy around deliverability and compelling messages.

Marketers are gearing up to send a flurry of emails, hoping to capture the attention of consumers and drive significant revenue this BFCM. However, in this competitive environment, simply hitting the send button isn't enough. Email deliverability—the ability to ensure your emails reach the inbox and not the spam folder—becomes a critical factor in the success of your BFCM campaigns.

If your emails don’t make it to the inbox, your carefully crafted messages and enticing offers will never be seen, let alone acted upon. Understanding email deliverability can significantly improve your chances of reaching your audience and driving clicks and conversions.

Deliverability gets you to the inbox, but your subject lines and content gets your subscribers to your website. In this article, we’ll explore what you need to do right now to boost your email deliverability and how to craft emails that stand out in a busy inbox.

Have peace of mind when you send emails this BFCM by putting deliverability at the center of your email marketing strategy. 

Email deliverability refers to the ability of your emails to reach the recipient's inbox without being flagged as spam or blocked by email providers. When your emails don’t make it to the inbox, it’s not just a matter of wasted email spend—it can lead to lost revenue. 

Did you know? 74% of email-driven revenue comes from subscribers who’ve opened an email in the past seven days.

Factors that impact deliverability: 

• Sender reputation: A trustworthiness score or rating that ESPs assign based on various factors, including the frequency of spam complaints, the number of emails that bounce, the engagement level of your recipients (such as opens and clicks), and the overall quality of your email content.
• Authentication requirements: Such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. They verify your identity and help email providers trust your messages. 
• Spam filters: Creating content that avoids trigger words and phrases that can cause your emails to be automatically filtered out. This includes things like excessive capitalization or punctuation, using words like “free” or “act now,” and using hyperlinks sparingly. 

By focusing on these elements, you can significantly improve your chances of reaching your audience and making the most of your Cyber Week campaigns. 

Success story: Supergoop! was thrilled with the results from their SMS sends and wanted to see what Attentive could do for their email program. After migrating over, they saw improved inbox placement and a stronger email sender reputation. And they saw an increase of 52% in open rates and a 67% increase in revenue per send from top-performing journeys.

Once you have your authentication in place and are sending quality emails, you can monitor your email program and deliverability by tracking these metrics:

• Open rates
• Click-through rates (CTR)
• Conversion rates
• Bounce rates
• Unsubscribe rates
• Spam complaint rate

Pro Tip

To improve the email experience for everyone, Google and Yahoo have set guidelines that spam rates should be below 0.10% and never exceed 0.30%.

We often get questions about machine opens inflating open rates, and while they can represent 70-97% of total opens, you can actually consider this as a positive sign. Here's why: for a machine open to occur, your email must first successfully reach the inbox. What this means is that machine opens indicate healthy deliverability, which is what matters most for your email program.

As you’ve got an eye on your numbers, keep in mind that inbox providers, like Gmail, are watching the numbers, too—the number of emails you’re sending. 

If there’s a sudden spike in your send volume, it’ll get attention but not the good kind. To prepare for BFCM, try gradually increasing your sends over the summer or plan to start ‌ramping up no later than Halloween. Aim for an increase of no more than 5–10% of your send volume per day. We recommend that high-volume senders (1M+ emails/day) stick to around 5%. Smaller volume senders (~100K emails/day) can increase sends by up to 10% per day.  

Did you know? Subscribers who joined marketing lists over the summer accounted for 31% of brands’ Cyber Week revenue.

Lastly, on the subject of numbers, now it a good time to trim inactive subscribers. One disengaged subscriber can impact deliverability for your entire list. And with data showing that 97% of email revenue comes from recipients who have engaged in the last 90 days, you want to make sure you’re reaching the subscribers who are driving revenue. 

To find where to trim, create engagement tiers based on recency and interaction. If it’s been more than 180 days, enroll them in a sunsetting or winback campaign. If there’s still no engagement, it’s time to remove them from your list.

Just like having the perfect email means nothing if it never reaches the inbox, the most well-crafted message will have no impact if it's sent to the wrong audience.Audience can be one of the most important elements of a successful email campaign. 

Segmentation and engagement go hand-in-hand in email marketing. If you’re ready to take your segmentation to the next level, you may want to power your email sends with AI Pro for Email. One feature that’s a fan-favorite is Audiences AI. This tool automatically optimizes your segments by adding subscribers who are likely to open your emails and convert, and suppressing those who aren't. 

Stonewall Kitchen chose Attentive’s AI solutions when they wanted to expand their customer base and create more engaging emails and SMS campaigns. Within just six months of using AI Pro, they could identify 11% more subscribers visiting their website, driving $128k+ of incremental revenue. Send Time AI improved their open rates by 35% and CVR by 11%, and Audiences AI drove an additional 17% lift in incremental revenue. 

"AI Pro came at the perfect time for us. It aligned fully with our shift in segmentation strategy and made our lives so much easier as well. I feel confident that the more we use it as a tool, the more our performance will improve."‍

Monica Gorycki, E-Commerce Platform Manager at Stonewall Kitchen

If AI isn’t in the cards this year, plan to refresh your journeys ahead of BFCM as they automatically deliver personalized experiences based on real-time behavior. Journeys also help your deliverability rate by sending messages subscribers expect and want—because what shopper isn’t looking for their discount offer when they abandon their cart?

We’ve found that brands who have three or more journeys live see a 47% increase in ROI compared to campaign sends alone. An always-on cart abandonment or browse abandonment journey is especially effective over BFCM, when shoppers’ attention is being pulled in many different directions. And when you send your emails and SMS from one UI, customers see an 18%-35% increase in revenue from additional touchpoints in their journeys.

Pro Tip

Update your journeys with BFCM-specific copy and offers to create additional incentives to bring shoppers back to your site.

You’ve grounded your BFCM email marketing strategy in deliverability, and you know who you want to target with your sends. Now, it’s time to focus on your content and subject lines to get your audience to open and engage with your emails. 

We’re breaking down our recommendations by the types of emails you’ll send over BFCM. We’ve found some best practices work well for campaigns but don’t perform as well for triggered journeys—and an optimized BFCM email marketing strategy will include both types of sends.

Tips for crafting compelling BFCM email subject lines

• Create a sense of urgency and excitement: BFCM is the best time to use scarcity in your marketing messages. Shoppers know these deals are time-sensitive or quantities are limited, so lean into that strategy to encourage opens and clicks. Another take on building excitement: Create a curiosity gap by asking a question or teasing something new without naming it to pique subscribers’ interest. 
• Be direct about your offer: Make your Cyber Week emails stand out with clear, benefit-focused subject lines. Tell subscribers exactly what they'll get—whether it's a discount, gift, or expedited shipping—so they know why your email is worth opening among the dozens in their inbox. Clickbait-style titles won’t earn you real clicks as subscribers are trying to find the best deals and get their holiday shopping done. This also helps your emails perform better on mobile as it’ll keep your subject lines short (under 55 characters). 
• Get emotional: The holidays are sentimental, and your marketing messages should also have some emotional weight. Whether you’re generating a sense of anticipation, joy, or surprise, don’t shy away from infusing some emotion into your messages. We’ve talked about creating a sense of FOMO in your emails, but test other emotions or humorous messages that might resonate with your subscribers. 
• Include calls to action: Using words like “shop,” “save,” or “get” can grab subscribers’ attention and direct them to what they’ll do once they open the email. Keep in mind that many shoppers are looking for gifts and shopping for others rather than themselves this time. You can be more direct with your CTA and worry less about personalization since their previous shopping habits may not apply during BFCM. 
• Use all caps sparingly: All caps can get attention, but it can also be marked as spam. Most marketers default to title case or partial caps to emphasize a key word or two in the subject line. Word to the wise: ‌Spam filters are also looking for excessive punctuation or symbols. 
• Use emojis to accentuate your message, not replace words: Emojis in subject lines can make your emails stand out in the inbox. However, they shouldn’t replace words since that can hurt your email’s accessibility. They should match your brand. Also, start watching your own inbox to see what emojis others are using so you can use something different to make your emojis pop. We expect to see a lot of gift boxes (​​🎁 ), police lights (​​🚨), and alarm clocks (⏰) again this year.   
• Include social proof: Cyber week can already be chaotic with lightning-fast deals, and shoppers don’t have time to comb through reviews and do research. Do it for them by including social proof in your emails. Test star-ratings or testimonials in your subject lines, like “Save 30% on {PRODUCT} Rated 5 ⭐ by 3,500 Customers.” 

Pro Tip

Get your brand set up with BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) to have your logo appear in the preview pane, helping subscribers immediately identify your brand and increasing open rates. BIMI requires the highest security authentication in place, which also ties into your deliverability. Attentive helps brands set up and take advantage of both BIMI and Apple's Branded Mail to clearly stand out in the inbox with your logo and business details.

A/B testing to improve deliverability

As you edit your email content, you’re probably going to run some A/B tests to confirm your changes are driving better results. As you think through them, keep in mind that some A/B tests not only help you improve your content for your subscribers, but also improve your deliverability as you improve engagement. 

A/B tests that can improve your deliverability: 

• Sign-up source and incentive: Look at how your email subscribers entered a marketing list and if that impacts LTV. These sources include mobile or desktop sign-up units, manual uploads, Shopify sign-ups, etc. You can also look at the source and see if there was an offer or discount attached, as this could impact what types of emails they act on or choose to ignore. Do some A/B testing with your segmentation strategy by sign-up source or incentive to see how that impacts conversions and ROI.
• Subject type grouping: Look at your subject lines in groups rather than by single subject to quickly understand what’s resonating with your audience. Groupings can include if the subject line has a dollar sign in it, a percentage offer, emojis, a certain keyword, etc. 
• Subject length: Being that most engagement is on a mobile device, subject length can lead to more or less conversions. Test different subject line lengths across your campaigns and triggered sends—we’ve found shorter-length (fewer than 25 characters) subject lines drive the most opens for campaigns, but medium-length (25-35 characters) subject lines drive the most opens for triggered sends. 
• Days between purchase: Learn when to trigger your winback campaigns based on the average days between purchase and unsubscribe so you can keep a valuable subscriber. For example, let’s say your average subscriber takes five days until their first purchase and 24 days until their second purchase. But digging into the data, you find that there’s an average of 12 days until they unsubscribe. You could do some testing with when to launch your winback campaigns to shorten that window to a second purchase or extend the time until they unsubscribe. 

Another test you could run as it relates to your sign-up source is the timing of the sign-up unit. Or, you could let AI do the testing and optimizing for you. 

AI Grow automates when and how your sign-up units appear for each unique visitor, increasing the likelihood they’ll convert. AI Grow has helped Tommy John engage more high-intent visitors and contributed to a 23% increase in new subscriber growth and over 39% lift in welcome series revenue.

You don’t have to stretch your imagination to come up with some creative BFCM email campaigns this year. We rounded up some of our favorite and successful strategies our customers have used to drive clicks and conversions during BFCM. 

Pro Tip

Last year, Cyber Monday was the top-performing day across channels as subscribers shopped before promotions came to an end. Be sure to bookend your promotions with emails announcing your BFCM deals and a last-chance reminder email.

Take inspiration from these holiday email sends to begin crafting emails that'll drive revenue and drive up engagement, thus improving your deliverability rate. 

Make recommendations

Send emails ahead of BFCM that feature gift guides, product finder quizzes, or show off your best sellers. Subscribers are looking for recommendations for gifts for family and friends and might be keeping an eye open for some self-gifting, too. With email, you have plenty of real estate to include images of your products. 

Generate and keep momentum 

Bookending your promotions is always a good idea as you want to generate excitement as you launch an offer and remind people to buy before the promotion ends. This strategy is especially important during BFCM as shoppers are getting deals left and right and could use a friendly nudge in either direction. 

In-store events or promotions

Use a digital channel to drive subscribers to a physical store by inviting them to in-store events or let them know about exclusive savings not available online. This could also be a great time to remind customers if your products can be found at big-box stores, like Beachwaver did by reminding subscribers they’re now at Target. For shoppers who prefer to fill a physical cart rather than an online one, they can keep a lookout for your brand while doing other holiday shopping. 

Offer freebies

Everyone is on the hunt for the best value during BFCM and offering something free can increase the perceived value. Whether it’s a free gift with purchase, a Bogo offer, or free shipping, these incentives can often close the deal as consumers do their holiday shopping. 

Emphasize your brand’s values

We’ve stated that value-based messaging is really the name of the game in 2025. Your messaging needs to be specific, targeted, and meaningful. Any brand can offer a discount, but what can your brand offer your customers that no one else can? By promoting your brand’s values, whether it’s sustainability, ethical practices, or exclusivity, you can create a deeper connection with your customers that goes beyond transactions. This approach can resonate particularly well with younger demographics, who often prioritize purpose and authenticity when making purchasing decisions. 

Lead with pricing

Leading with pricing immediately captures the attention of price-sensitive shoppers. This approach clearly communicates the value proposition upfront and can build trust and transparency with your customers. In a season where competition is fierce, a straightforward price can be the differentiator that drives a conversion.

Optimize your journeys

BFCM isn’t just about one-off campaigns. They're impactful, but targeting subscribers based on their onsite actions can have even more impact—and drive more revenue. Create BFCM-specific journeys ahead of the holiday shopping season. This can include welcome, cart abandonment, session abandonment, low inventory, or restock journeys. 

Keep learning how to optimize your marketing campaigns for BFCM by returning to the Marketers Sanctuary.