- Intro
- 3 months out
- 2 months out
- 2 weeks out
- Day of send
- Post-send
Steadily increase your sending volume
In the weeks before BFCM, you’ll want to start gradually increasing your sending volume each day until you reach your full list. Building a relatively consistent sending volume is key to good deliverability. Depending on your full list size, you may need longer than 2 weeks to gradually increase your audience sending size to its full capacity.
Plan your sending schedule with scaling audience size
The audience size for each campaign send should increase by 50%. Based on this rule, create a work-back schedule to determine how many days worth of campaigns you will need to send in order to ramp the volume appropriately. It’s important to leave a few buffer days in between the end of your volume ramp and BFCM.
These messages should be building hype around your upcoming BFCM promotions, and include compelling, personalized content like recommended shopping categories, or deals based on previous browsing history. Your goal should be to engage as many subscribers as possible prior to your first full list send on Black Friday.
Day 1: Send a campaign to your primary engaged audience
This campaign should be sent to your primary engaged audience, building excitement around the offers you’re about to have for BFCM.
Example: Beantown has managed to increase their 90-day engaged segment to 15,000 through their audience testing and re-engagement efforts. On the first day of November, they send their first campaign to this segment.
Day 2: Send the next campaign to primary engaged + less engaged group
The audience for this campaign should include everyone you sent to yesterday, plus a segment of other subscribers that get the total recipient count to 1.5x the volume of yesterday’s audience.
Example: Beantown sends to 22,500 total recipients (15,000 from their 90 day engaged and then 7,000 from their Unengaged L60 segment. These are profiles who have become unengaged since they did their audience testing.)
Day 3 and after: Repeat daily until you have reached just under your full list size
Gradually increase each daily send volume by 50% until you reach an audience size that is just under the total number of active emailable profiles in your account. Use the Klaviyo audience sampling tool if needed to help control the size of your sends.
Example: Beantown increases their sends each day until they’ve got to just under 600,000 - the total number of emailable profiles in their account.
Days before BFCM: A few days before your big send, pull back to your primary engaged segment
Once you’ve built up your volume to just under your full list size, you should pull back to your typical sending volume for a few days before BFCM. Only send to your primary engaged audience to help repair any recent damage done to your sender reputation. This will prepare you for optimal inbox placement on Black Friday.