Black Friday email marketing: 9 newsletter ideas to boost sales this year

But you can win out by creating a Black Friday email campaign so irresistible that customers can’t help but open, click, and snatch up the deal.

In this article, we look at 9 outstanding Black Friday newsletter ideas you can use: from presale teasers to last-chance reminders. Plus, we’ll include plenty of other email marketing tips to help you make 2026 your best Black Friday ever.

In 2026, Black Friday falls on November 27, and Cyber Monday falls on November 30. It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving and the peak of the holiday season shopping period.

Most brands will send multiple emails before, during and after the Black Friday weekend. A typical Black Friday email promotion sequence looks something like this:

• Email 1: Teaser email sent in the week before Black Friday

• Email 2: Main offer sent when the sale opens

• Email 3: Reminder (or multiple reminders) sent while your campaign is running

• Email 4: Last chance email sent just before the end of your campaign

Many brands promote an offer for one full week (or even longer). So based on your needs, industry, and competitor research, you should decide what’s best for your company this year.

We’ve gathered 9 ideas for conversion-boosting Black Friday newsletters along with examples that show how to pull them off. Consider using some of these emails to promote your own offers.

1. Build anticipation with a teaser email

The first email you send should be a teaser message. This builds excitement and lets subscribers know when the sale opens, so they can plan their purchases.

Remember that this email could actually cause people to put off purchasing until the sale opens, so just send it shortly before the sale starts to minimize any negative impact.

2. Make VIPs feel special with an early access email

Black Friday is a great opportunity to reward loyal customers by offering exclusive access to your sale before it starts. 

You can target these customers by using our prebuilt segments for High spenders or Repeat purchasers; these segments will appear as soon as you connect your e-commerce store. 

You can also create your own segments. Choose from filters such as:

• The products someone bought

• The links they clicked or emails they opened

• How highly engaged they are

• Whether they’re a repeat customer

• The number of products they have bought

• Their location

The key is to think about the data points you can use to identify your most important customers and then create segments based on this information.

Withings rewards VIP members with access to a special Black Friday offer. This offer makes recipients feel valued, so they’ll be keen to take advantage of the exclusive promotion.

• The email highlights the exclusive benefit, which is being able to access the Black Friday deals before anyone else

• The email includes products that may appeal to the customer

• Using words like “you” makes the holiday email seem personal

Don’t get so caught up in bringing in new customers that you forget to reward the ones you already have. This type of Black Friday campaign can really boost your customer retention and build brand loyalty. 

3. Start your sale with a Black Friday launch email

Once you’ve sent your teaser and an optional VIP access email, it’s time to launch your sale to your entire list. Send this email the moment the sale goes live. Include all the details that subscribers need to know, such as:

• What the offer is

• How long it will last

• Links to the sale page

• Links to top products 

• Practical information like shipping

You can also use segmentation or dynamic blocks to make the offer relevant to each subscriber. 

For example, a clothing store could send women’s clothing to people who have bought women’s clothing before, and men’s clothing to those who have previously purchased men’s clothes.

4. Build trust with social proof emails

Send a social proof email to build trust and show customers the benefit of your product. 

Social proof includes any type of recommendation about your product from real customers. This could be testimonials, social media posts, reviews, star ratings, or even highlighting how many products you have sold during your sale. 

Social proof works so well because we’re hardwired to trust other people’s opinions, especially when we’re on the fence about something. 

Founder of French in Plain Sight, and MailerLite customer, Alex Barron, made great use of customer testimonials in his Black Friday promo email, along with some other très bien sales tactics. 

• His email header perfectly summarizes his Black Friday deal, meaning his subscribers don’t even have to scroll to get the most important info 

• The three testimonials from happy students are powerful proof that his membership works 

• He includes a money-back guarantee to overcome objections to purchase 

Remember how hesitant your subscribers are. Showcasing happy customers and including a risk reversal, like a money-back guarantee, can help reduce purchasing anxiety. 

5. Boost conversions with an abandoned cart email 

When someone starts the buying process but doesn’t commit, you can send a cart abandonment email to remind them of the unfinished purchase. 

Abandoned cart emails are super-effective. Our e-commerce email marketing data found that they have an average open rate of 53% and click rate of 12%, which is far higher than a typical campaign. That’s a lot of people heading back to your store to finish their purchase! 

This is exactly what Columbia did with their Black Friday abandoned cart email to awesome effect. 

• The email shows that the product the customer was interested in has a discount

• It promotes other similar products and shows their discounted prices

• It includes a CTA button that links to the Black Friday landing page

Just don’t forget that you still need someone’s express permission to send abandoned cart emails. Get more cart abandonment email inspiration here, or check out our abandoned cart automation template to set one up for your store in minutes.

6. Keep people engaged with a Cyber Monday email

Many brands combine their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales into one super sale. If that’s you, consider sending an email on Cyber Monday highlighting that your offer is still on.

This can be extremely effective since Cyber Monday was 2025’s biggest day for online spending, with consumers splashing out around $2.5 billion more online on Cyber Monday than Black Friday.

7. Extend the sale with a further-discounts or new-stock email

As your sale continues, you may decide to add new stock to the sale or increase the discounts on items already in the sale. 

In this case, be sure to send an email highlighting the additions. This gives people who couldn’t find what they wanted initially, or who were waiting for a bigger discount, a reason to buy. 

Plus, people who have already checked out will have another reason to make a purchase.

8. Create urgency with a last chance email 

Most customers will either buy at the beginning or at the end of a sale, so capture as many customers as possible by creating urgency with a ‘sale-ending’ Black Friday email. 

These emails don’t have to resort to the digital equivalent of shouting—highlight the savings they’re about to lose and make your CTA clear (and don’t forget to have fun!). 

Surreal has done a great job at making their sale-ending email fun while driving a sense of urgency to encourage their subscribers to get the deal while it’s hot.

• The design is eye-catching, clean and draws attention to the most important elements: the CTA button and the savings they can make 

• The copy is fun and engaging, opening and closing with a joke. Humor is a great way to stand out in busy inboxes 

• They’ve created a sense of urgency throughout the email without resorting to over-the-top exclamation points or capitalization (SALE ENDING!!!!)

Get creative with your sale-ending emails and use them as a way to show off your brand personality, while encouraging subscribers to take advantage of your deal.

9. Build loyalty with a post-purchase email

Has a subscriber taken advantage of your hot Black Friday deal? Great! Now you can target them with a personalized post-purchase email to help them feel like a valued customer.

Post-purchase emails sent when someone buys a specific product have higher open rates than any other kind of email, so we highly recommend setting one up. MailerLite customers can easily do this by creating an automation and choosing one of the triggers for purchasing a product.

Sundays is a dog food company that has nailed its post-purchase email strategy.

• The brand sends a follow-up email offering resources to help new customers make the switch to their dog food even easier 

• It’s written in first-person, which makes the email feel personal and sincere 

• They’re boosting customer retention by helping their customers be successful with their products 

Remember to create post-purchase emails to send out to customers after they convert. This will help create loyal customers who come back again and again, not just the ones who’ll take a Black Friday deal and disappear. 

A good Black Friday subject line increases your open rate. Make your Black Friday email subject line stand out with personalization, adding emojis, and appealing to your audience’s needs.

Here’s more on writing great email subject lines, or you can use our email subject line tester to analyze your subject line and get suggestions for how to improve it.

Not feeling inspired? Simply choose one of our automatically generated subject lines in the Campaign details section of your dashboard. These subject lines are generated based on your email content using subject line best practices. 

What’s more, our testing found that campaigns sent using this feature generated 14% more opens than those that didn’t. 

Alternatively, take a look at the Black Friday subject line examples below for some inspiration.  

Creating all those emails isn’t easy! Follow these tips to quickly create effective Black Friday emails.

Write engaging email copy

Make your copy clear and focus on how your Black Friday sale benefits the reader. Include information about the offer so people know how good a deal it is, as well as any extra details that will help people buy, such as coupon codes, start and end dates, and links to relevant pages. 

Check out the examples in the section above for tons of great examples of email copy. Or read this article for more about writing impactful newsletter copy. You can also use our AI email content assistant to write content that connects faster. Our AI tools are available on our advanced plan, while all new signups get free credits to use.

Fussy is truly living the maxim, ‘when everyone else zigs, you zag’. Their Black Friday email copy manages to turn what could be just another Black Friday offer into an expression of their customers’ core values: sustainability. 

• They create curiosity in their reader with the opening sentence: “Black Friday is on the horizon, but this year we’re changing it up.” Begging the question, how?

• They create a sense of urgency when announcing their 20% off sale by saying “while stocks last” motivating people to buy now 

• They make their products about their customers and the good they’ll do: “your money goes towards supporting green energy…”  

• They use a clear CTA in both the header image and the button, which helps their deal stand out if someone is just scanning the email 

Bravo, Fussy!

Show products in your emails

Connect your e-commerce store provider with MailerLite to unlock automatically generated product blocks. Use these to showcase your best products and add clear links to checkout pages to simplify the buying process. 

See how it looks in the email template below.

When you connect your store and add products to your emails, you’ll also get access to deeper analytics that highlight factors such as the number of orders and the total value generated by each campaign.

Personalize your content

Use customer data to personalize your emails and subject lines. You can use any information you have in a custom field in your email content. The most common type of dynamic content to add is the user’s name, but you can also add factors like their location, industry or company.

You can also use our dynamic content settings to personalize the email based on the segment the customer is in or data in their custom fields.

This lets you do things like promote different products and offers to people depending on their interests or previous buying habits. Just add the block to your email and then hit the dynamic content icon to decide who to show (or not show) the content to.

Design great-looking emails

Pay attention to your Black Friday email design. Visit our newsletter gallery for inspiration or pick one of the pre-built e-commerce templates when creating a new campaign. 

Our updated Drag & drop editor includes plenty of new design options, including the ability to create boxes and then reuse them across any campaign. This can save a ton of time when creating a Black Friday sequence with multiple emails.

Test your campaigns

Use email A/B testing to optimize your campaign. Analyze the open rate or click-through rate of two different emails on a small email subscriber sample, and then send the best version to your entire list. If you plan to send your Black Friday emails via automation, you can even A/B test each individual step to ensure the best results. 

Optimize your email send times

Black Friday demands a high-impact email strategy. To maximize your sales, you'll need to send multiple emails in the lead-up days, and crucially, several targeted messages throughout the main event itself.

Consider using our send-by-time-zone feature so that everyone gets the email at the same time, no matter what time zone they are located in. You can also use our Smart sending feature that identifies the best time to send the email to each subscriber based on prior engagement.

Automate your emails

Black Friday is a super busy time for most businesses. Save time while still benefiting from email marketing by automating your emails. 

The easiest way to do this is to create campaigns for each email and then schedule them to go out on the relevant dates.

You can also use automation to send follow-up emails based on how people interact with your campaigns. For example, you can send follow-up emails to people who click on a buy link but don’t actually buy your product.  

Click here to find out more about email automation.

We’ve created several Black Friday and Cyber Week email templates you can use to start creating effective campaigns fast. 

All paid MailerLite customers can access these designs by heading to the Template gallery tab in the Email design section of any campaign or automation. You can also access templates during your free trial, so sign up for MailerLite today if you’re not yet a customer. 

Online store Black Friday sale template

This online store template has an eye-catching black and pink design that fits the theme of the holiday perfectly. 

The email opens with a big graphic and a link to the sale. It then cranks up the urgency with a countdown timer that’s sure to get people to buy asap. Finally, the template showcases several of the brand’s top products; just swap out the examples for your own. 

Black Friday coming soon newsletter template

We built this coming soon email template to help you build anticipation of your upcoming sale so your audience is ready to buy!

It starts by highlighting how much time is left and asking people to create their wishlist. You can easily swap this CTA for something more relevant to your brand and offer. 

The email then has a large image of one of its products, followed by links to the store’s most important shopping categories, so people can still get ahead of the game if they really want to make a purchase now.

Black Friday countdown timer email template

This Black Friday template keeps things simple with a black design and a bright light graphic that introduces the sale. It also has a prominent and clear explanation of what the Black Friday offer is. 

Since the design is quite simple, you could use this email with minimal adjustments, no matter what your brand is. 

Cyber Week email templates

We’ve also got several templates for Cyber Week and Cyber Monday. Check them all out in the gallery below.

What gets measured gets improved, so don’t forget to dedicate some time to reviewing your Black Friday campaigns. Start with last year’s emails, so you can see what worked. But also keep an eye on your real-time metrics and adjust your strategy accordingly. 

The most important factor is orders and revenue per email. When you connect your e-commerce store to MailerLite, you can track exactly which emails lead to sales, based on whether someone who clicks on the email goes on to make a purchase. 

You can also track general email marketing metrics to get an idea of how your messages perform. 

You want to review things like: 

• Results of A/B tests 

• Open rates 

• Click-through rates (CTRs)  

• Hard and soft bounces

• Unsubscribes

All this juicy data is just a click away with our Performance reports feature. With our E-commerce integrations, you can understand exactly how well your campaigns are performing at driving direct sales. 

Did a certain email perform really well? We recommend turning it into a template so you can use it in other campaigns to generate similar results. 💪

Don’t put off planning your Black Friday and Cyber Monday email marketing strategy. Starting early ensures you're ready for one of the most important times of the year and guarantees you a slice of that pie.

Remember that you can create your emails in advance and then schedule them to go out at optimum times for Black Friday shopping. You can even use our Black Friday and holiday email templates to reduce the time it takes to build your emails.

This will help you implement an effective campaign while freeing up time to handle all the other tasks you have going on at the busiest time of year. 

What are your plans for Black Friday email marketing? Let us know in the comments.

Editor's note: This article was originally published in October 2022, but has been updated with fresh ideas and examples.