What should you email before Black Friday?

Three messages, not thirty: what is coming and when, the offer as it opens, and a last reminder. Everything else trains people to stop opening.

What decides it

The most valuable of the three is the first, sent a week ahead. It gets the date into people’s heads while every competitor is still silent, and it costs nothing but the send.

The part that gets skipped

The preparation that matters happens in October. A store deciding its Black Friday plan in November is already reacting.

Discounting into a crowd where everybody is discounting wins volume and loses margin. The stores that do well have a reason to be chosen that is not the price.

Traffic spikes break the things that were nearly broken already — usually image weight and a checkout step nobody tested under load.

Where an app fits

This is the one week where owning a notification channel pays for the year — reaching last year’s buyers costs nothing per message.