Every year, somebody on a DTC marketing team asks the same question in the second week of October: "when do we start?" And every year, the honest answer is that the question is already a few weeks late, because the brands they're actually competing with for inbox attention started answering it back in September.
This isn't a listicle of "10 BFCM email tips." It's the actual shape of the season — when the early movers open, how send frequency escalates, where discount depth really lands, and the one planning mistake that costs more margin than a shallow discount ever does.
The "cyber creep" problem
Retail analysts have a name for this: "holiday cyber creep." It describes exactly what it sounds like — Black Friday pricing bleeding earlier into the calendar every year because retailers are fighting for a fixed pool of holiday budget before their competitors get to it first. The 2025 data on this is specific enough to plan around:
- Ulta Beauty launched "Early Black Friday Deals" on October 26, with discounts up to 40% running through November 22.
- Lowe's opened an early Black Friday sale on October 30, running through November 26.
- Best Buy kicked off early Black Friday deals on Halloween — October 31 — through November 19.
None of these are outliers. They're the pattern. Big-box retailers with the biggest media budgets move first because they can afford to sustain a longer discount window, and every category underneath them — including most DTC and mid-market ecommerce brands — gets pulled earlier along with them, whether they're ready or not.
Six weeks, not one weekend
If you're still planning BFCM as a four-day event, you're planning for a season that stopped existing around 2022. The realistic shape looks more like this:
Big-box retailers set the outer boundary in late October. Mid-size DTC brands, watching that movement, typically open their own "early access" push two to three weeks behind — landing somewhere in the first half of November. Then the actual Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday weekend functions less like the start of the sale and more like its final, loudest push: the moment urgency language peaks and the last round of holdouts get their discount.
That means the brand that waits until the week of Thanksgiving to send its first BFCM email isn't being disciplined. It's arriving to a conversation that's already three weeks old.
A working BFCM calendar
This is the shape we'd build a calendar around, based on how the season actually plays out across categories. Adjust the exact weeks to your category — beauty and consumer electronics move earlier than furniture and higher-consideration goods — but the sequence holds:
The cadence math
Outside of peak season, a healthy engaged DTC list gets somewhere around 2 to 4 campaign emails a week on top of automated flows. Push much past that in a normal month and you start seeing the predictable cost: rising unsubscribes and Gmail treating you like the noise you've become.
BFCM breaks that rule on purpose. Across the actual Thursday-through-Monday weekend, most brands run 4 to 6 campaign sends — not to the whole list at once, but split by segment, so a highly engaged VIP subscriber might see five emails while a cold subscriber sees one, timed around a win-back offer instead of a generic blast. Klaviyo's own 2024 send data put the most active engagement window for Black Friday email specifically between 9 and 10 a.m. ET, with order volume climbing right behind it — a detail that matters if you're trying to time your own send against a competitor's, not just count how many emails they sent that day.
The number worth tracking isn't the total volume. It's the acceleration — the week a competitor's cadence visibly steps up is a better signal of their internal BFCM start date than anything on their homepage.
Discount depth isn't linear, and that's the point
The lazy assumption is that discount depth climbs in a straight line toward Black Friday and then drops off. In practice it's staged, and the staging is deliberate: an early-access discount that's real but modest, a mid-window escalation, and a final-hours number that's held back specifically so it can be framed as the "biggest of the season." Brands that reveal their full discount depth in week one lose that lever entirely — there's nowhere left to escalate, so their Cyber Monday email reads exactly like their October one.
Watching a competitor's discount depth over the full six weeks, not just checking their homepage on Black Friday itself, is what tells you whether they're holding a card in reserve or already playing their strongest hand.
Discount depth is the easy number to match reactively. Timing is the one you can't undo — once a competitor's early-access email has already reached the inbox, you don't get to retroactively claim the earliest-mover advantage.
What to actually watch for, week over week
- First mention date. The week a competitor's subject lines shift from generic promo language to explicit "Black Friday" or "early access" framing.
- Discount depth by week. Track the actual percentage or dollar figure each send offers, not just whether a sale exists.
- Free-shipping threshold changes. A dropped minimum-order threshold is a quieter, less obvious lever than a percentage discount, and it's one a lot of teams miss entirely.
- Urgency language escalation. "Limited time" becomes "24 hours only" becomes "final hours" — the pace of that escalation tells you how close they think they are to their ceiling.
- Segment-specific sends. A VIP-only early access email you catch on a general capture address tells you they're segmenting by engagement — worth knowing if you're not doing the same.
The mistake most teams make
It isn't sending too many emails, and it isn't discounting too shallow. It's building the entire BFCM calendar off a guess about when competitors will move, locked in during a planning meeting in September, with no mechanism to actually see what's happening once the season starts. By the time the marketing team notices a competitor opened early — usually from a customer asking "why haven't you started your sale yet" — the early-mover window is already gone.
The fix isn't more prediction. It's visibility that updates in real time: a capture address on every competitor worth watching, checked against the calendar above, so "when do we start" gets answered by what's actually landing in an inbox instead of what felt right in a planning doc six weeks earlier.
FAQ
When do ecommerce brands actually start sending Black Friday emails?
Large retailers now start weeks before Thanksgiving. In the 2025 season, Ulta Beauty launched "Early Black Friday Deals" on October 26, Lowe's started an early sale October 30, and Best Buy opened its early Black Friday window on Halloween, October 31. Mid-size DTC brands typically follow two to three weeks behind the big-box early movers.
How many emails do DTC brands send during BFCM weekend?
Outside of peak season, engaged DTC lists typically get 2 to 4 campaign emails a week. During the BFCM weekend itself, that usually climbs to 4 to 6 sends across Thursday through Cyber Monday, split across list segments rather than blasted to everyone at once.
What's the best time of day to send a Black Friday email?
Klaviyo's own send-time data for Black Friday 2024 showed the most active email engagement window between 9 and 10 a.m. ET, with order volume climbing shortly after. That's a benchmark, not a rule — watching when your specific competitors send tells you more about your own category than a platform-wide average.
Is it worth tracking competitor email cadence before BFCM?
Yes, more than tracking price alone. Discount depth is easy to match reactively. Timing isn't — once a competitor's early-access email has already reached inboxes, you can't retroactively claim the earliest-mover advantage.
Where to go next
If you're setting up capture addresses for the first time, burner email for competitor signups covers why the free workarounds break and what actually holds up over a full season. For the analysis side once emails start arriving, see the twelve signals worth tracking in competitor campaigns.
And if you'd rather not build this calendar from memory every October, CompetitorTrack's ecommerce monitoring tracks discount depth, cadence and flash-sale timing automatically, so the six-week window gets watched whether or not anyone remembers to check.