How many BFCM campaigns is too many? It’s a valid concern. Message fatigue leads to opt-outs and consumers are receiving even more messages during Cyber Week, so you might be hesitant to increase your campaigns.
Shoppers expect more communication from brands during this period, so you can send more emails and texts than you normally would without risking opt-outs.
From the BFCM data we’ve been collecting for nine years and the 3.9 billion emails and texts that were sent through the Attentive platform during Cyber Week 2024, our data shows that the more messages sent during BFCM consistently drives more revenue. But there’s a caveat.
The most successful brands build their campaigns gradually leading up to a big BFCM push. In 2024, those that dramatically increased their email and SMS volume without a gradual build saw 22% lower ROI than all other brands.
So yes, you’ll want to send a lot more email and SMS campaigns during Cyber Week—but you also need to earn your spot in subscribers’ inboxes in advance by ramping up volume through your Q2–Q4 campaigns.
Here are the BFCM frequency benchmarks to shoot for on email and SMS, and details on how to build up to your goal volume.
Revenue increases exponentially as brands send more text messages.
We found that the brands that saw the most success send 3x of their normal weekly SMS campaign volume. In fact, those that increased their weekly campaign volume by 2.5–3x in 2024 saw an average 626% increase in revenue.
We recommend using your August–October average as a baseline to determine this.
For more concrete benchmarks:
This increase in campaign frequency helps your brand compete with hundreds of others for attention, and drives purchase urgency through multiple touchpoints.
If you’re concerned about opt-outs, it’s actually a great time for natural list cleansing. 75% of subscribers who opt out during BFCM have never made a purchase, and most of the remaining 25% have only ever made one purchase, likely from their original welcome message. So this is an effective way to clean your list of non-converters.
In crowded inboxes, visual content captures attention more effectively than text alone. We’ve found that MMS messages achieve a 2.8x higher conversion rate on average than SMS, and that top-performing brands use MMS for approximately 25% of their BFCM sends.
Reserve MMS for high-impact moments like sale announcements and product showcases where the visual helps capture attention or provide essential details.
Keep images and GIFs under 300 KB to stay within Attentive’s reduced file size, ensuring optimal delivery speeds.
Email frequency during BFCM requires a more nuanced approach. It still stands that the best strategy is to ramp up gradually before BFCM—however, a sudden spike in email sending has more consequences than text message campaigns.
Dramatic email volume increases can trigger spam filters and hurt deliverability. To build your sending reputation and avoid deliverability issues, increase your sends slowly over the course of your Q2 to Q4 campaigns—starting now if you haven’t already.
Start by determining how many emails you want to send on BFCM based on last year’s performance and sending volume and this year’s list growth projections. Then create a plan to slowly increase your email sends to reach that goal by Black Friday.
We recommend bumping up your volume no more than 5–10% higher than the previous day’s volume:
Sending more email and SMS campaigns doesn’t mean messaging your whole list more with the same content.
Leverage segmentation, coordinated message sequences, behavioral flows, and content variety to boost your sends strategically while responding to customer preferences and behavior.
Different subscriber segments can handle different message frequencies leading up to BFCM:
To ensure you’re messaging subscribers who are going to act on your messages, use Audiences AI to automatically identify high-intent subscribers and exclude those unlikely to convert.
This AI-powered targeting helps you focus your increased frequency on audiences most likely to purchase, maximizing ROI while reducing wasted sends. Audiences AI improves multi-channel campaign revenue by up to 40% on average.
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:
For a product launch, you might send:
These campaigns can—and should—tell a story across both email and SMS. 58% of consumers are more likely to purchase when receiving the same promotion across SMS and email, so leverage the strengths of each channel across your multi-message campaigns (SMS for immediacy and email for details).
Behavioral flows are an easy way to increase your email and SMS sends while staying relevant to shopper behavior.
Turn these triggered messages on if you haven’t already:
Update these flows with BFCM-specific language as your main event draws nearer and adjust timing to match the faster pace of Q4 shopping.
Use Attentive AI Journeys to personalize triggered messages at scale. Instead of sending generic one-size-fits-all templates, Attentive AI analyzes brand and customer data to create 1:1 personalized journeys for each subscriber based on their shopping history, preferences, behavior, and your brand and product data—leading to 200% more revenue on average.
High-frequency messaging succeeds when your communications offer unique value. Mix different content types and messaging approaches to prevent frequency fatigue while keeping subscribers engaged.
The good news is, with your BFCM sales and gift-giving holidays around the corner, there’s a ton of opportunities to engage shoppers.
A few effective campaign types to use ahead of BFCM:
Higher frequency messaging during BFCM drives exponential revenue growth. But success requires gradual volume building, thoughtful coordination across channels, and content that justifies the increased touchpoints.
Remember these key takeaways as you develop your BFCM email and SMS plan:
