Email delivery strategy for Black Friday & shopping season

Shopping season is the stretch of peak retail demand that now runs from October through January; the months when consumer spending, promotional volume, and competition for attention all hit their annual high.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become the most popular shopping days worldwide. Brands now build full campaigns around the last weekend in November, and the discount window has stretched from a single weekend into weeks of promotion on either side.

For retail and eCommerce brands, that means peak season is a fixed point in the global calendar that has to be prepared for every year. To maximize their sales, they need to ensure that potential customers see the messages promoting their offers. As part of an omnichannel communication strategy, email plays a crucial role in this.

Email remains shoppers’ channel of choice. In Infobip’s 2026 shopping season survey of consumers across nine markets, 88% said they prefer email for holiday promotions. Brands are responding as Infobip platform data predicts email traffic will grow 174% year-on-year on Black Friday and 159% on Cyber Monday globally. In this blog, we discuss everything that businesses can do to properly prepare their email delivery processes and infrastructure to capitalize on the season of spending.

Bear in mind that yours won’t be the only business ramping up promotional emails in the run up to the shopping season. You must have your house in order in terms of deliverability and list hygiene to ensure that everything from offers and marketing emails to transactional emails like receipt delivery are seen by consumers and don’t end up in Junk folders.

This is not something that can be left to the last minute as it is a gradual process that takes time and effort, but the reward is getting reliable access to shoppers’ inboxes.

Your sender reputation is one of the most important factors in dictating the proportion of emails that get reliably delivered to your

Several factors contribute to an email sender’s reputation. These include:

• IP reputation: The reputation of the IP address from which you send your emails.
• Domain reputation: The reputation of the domain used in your email addresses and links.
• Email engagement: The level of recipient engagement with your emails, including open rates, click rates and replies.
• Complaint rate: The number of spam complaints received for your emails.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of emails that fail to reach the intended recipients because of bad email data.

As high bounce rates will negatively affect your sender reputation, ensure that your email lists are built and maintained according to industry best practices. When gathering email opt-ins, ensure that your data sources (webforms) produce valid subscriptions in the first place using a double opt-in process and a tool like reCAPTCHA which helps to stop bots and other automated attacks while approving valid users. Regularly cleanse your data by validating your lists and removing invalid or inactive email addresses.

Good list hygiene helps you to avoid sending to emails no longer in use, that have typos, or spam traps, which are email addresses that look like regular email addresses, but which are intended to identify and penalize deceptive email senders.

When starting to send from a new domain it is crucial that you slowly increase the volumes, concentrating on sending to highly engaged recipients first, then to people recently active, and then to the rest of your email list. Do this if you’re just starting with a new email provider, especially if you’re beginning your email program just before important periods like the shopping season. This helps to quickly win the confidence of ISPs that you are a valid, reputable sender.

Our ‘getting started with email’ documentation is a valuable resource with plenty of practical advice. For black Friday and the peak shopping season it is advised to have more than one pre-warmed sending domain that you can use.

Stay vigilant about your presence on email blocklists. If you find your bounces spiking, you may have been added to one or more and should immediately address the underlying issue and request delisting. Additionally, monitoring your sender reputation regularly helps you identify potential blocking issues.

If you send with Infobip, the Email Deliverability Center’s Reputation Reports cover blocklist status across seven major lists, along with Sender Score, SPF/DKIM/DMARC pass rates, and Google and Microsoft reputation, all in one place inside the Infobip portal.

Useful sites for checking your blocklist status include:

Implement authentication protocols like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and DMARC to verify the authenticity of your emails. All three are now required for bulk senders by Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Outlook.com.

Test your content using tools like SpamAssassin and tools that show how the content will look in a variety of email clients like Litmus and EmailOnAcid.

People receive a LOT of emails during the holiday season. To avoid being lost in a sea of irrelevant offers, you need to leverage your customer insights to create targeted and personalized messages that resonate with recipients. Interesting and relevant content increases open rates and reduces spam complaints.

Reducing email message sizes maximizes throughput and increase delivery rates. The two main contributing factors to message size are images and the amount of HTML code used.

Images are important for making emails visually appealing, but you should be picky about how many you use and keep files sizes no larger than they need to be to render properly.

Ensure that your emails are compliant by providing an unsubscribe option but go further and enable recipients to manage what messages they receive from you rather than just

You don’t want to permanently lose engaged recipients just because they get fed up with the barrage of messages that they receive during peak times.

All these measures help build trust with ISPs. You can also include ‘seed’ addresses in your lists which belong to email accounts that you have access to so that you can validate live message content and the time of delivery.

There are a number of measures that you can take to protect the reputation of your sending domain to ensure maximum delivery rates.

• Avoid corporate domains for bulk campaigns: Consider using subdomains instead of your brand’s main domain for bulk emailing. You can maintain separate reputations by using different subdomains for various types of emails, for example separating marketing and transactional emails. This ensures that issues with one type of email won’t affect the deliverability of others.
• Utilize “send behalf of” feature: If you must use the corporate domain as the “from-address,” use the “send behalf of” feature to send emails from a subdomain while displaying the corporate domain as the sender.
• Avoid brand-new domains as “from-address”: New domains lack a reputation with inbox providers, leading to potential deliverability issues. Choose domains with an established email sending history to increase deliverability and minimize spam filtering.
• Don’t use parked domains as sender domains: Avoid using domains that are registered but not connected to any online service. Choose active and relevant domains to enhance your email campaigns’ effectiveness.
• Skip the “no-reply” address: Don’t trigger spam filters and reduce customer interactions by using “no-reply” as the local part of the sender’s email address. Opt for recognizable and readable addresses that encourage engagement.

You may have developed a first-class sender reputation, created highly engaging email content, and nailed down your domain strategy. You don’t want to sabotage your success on the big day when it comes to actually sending your deployments.

Here are a few pointers to help you optimize your deployments.

Spread your email traffic evenly over the day so that you are sending a steady flow rather than a big bang. Review metrics from past years to see what deployment times resulted in the highest engagement rates.

Sending campaigns at random timings (e.g. 11h21 or 13h47) may also help to differentiate you from other senders that send on the hour. Make sure that you take time zones into account so that emails are delivered at the expected time.

Targeting your more engaged users before targeting your less engaged users will reduce the number of bounces and spam complaints that you get in the key early stages of the campaign. In the lead up to the shopping season closely monitor how recipients have engaged with your messages. Avoid sending emails to people that have not engaged at all in the previous 12 months.

Rather than a blast of one-off offers, consider designing a series of messages on a single theme with appropriate follow-up messages sent to recipients that engage. If a recipient misses a previous offer, then give them another chance to take it up.

Test different message content on a small subset of recipients and then use the most successful template for the bulk of the deployment. This process can be automated in most email solutions so that campaigns can be continually optimized.

People’s buying habits change in the excitement of shopping season. Whereas for the rest of the year people usually shop for specific items, in the sale season they are on the hunt for bargains. One strategy that deal hunters use is to leave items in their basket and then come back if they don’t find the product cheaper elsewhere. This makes the abandoned basket use case crucial to cover.

At a time when you are increasing your message volumes and competing for consumers’ attention it is even more crucial than usual to monitor deployments and keep an eye on key stats that might indicate a problem that needs attention.

Some of these metrics include:

• Delivery rate: 98%+
• Bounce rate: ideally less than 3%
• Open rate: from 15% to 25% for marketing email is acceptable
• Click-through rate (CTR): ideally between 2% and 5%
• Click-to-open rate (CTOR): typically, between or greater than 20-30%
• Unsubscribe rate: ideally below 1%
• Spam complaints: ideally less than 0.2%.

The benchmarks above tell you when something is going wrong. They rarely tell you why. During peak season, that gap is expensive. A bounce spike on Black Friday morning could mean a sending IP has been blocklisted, a mailbox provider is throttling you, or stale addresses slipped into the send. Each needs a different fix, and every hour spent investigating is an hour of offers sitting in spam folders.

Closing that gap comes down to three things:

Most teams discover deliverability problems when they review campaign reports. By then, the damage to revenue and reputation is already done. Real-time monitoring changes that, especially when performance is broken down by sender, domain, sending IP, and mailbox provider. That breakdown tells you whether a drop is account-wide or limited to, say, Gmail recipients on one subdomain. That difference decides whether you pause everything or reroute a single stream.

If you send with Infobip, the Email Deliverability Center provides this view inside the Infobip portal. Alongside delivery, open, click, complaint, and bounce rates, it brings in Gmail Postmaster data and Microsoft reputation signals. It flags anomalies as they appear, so you can act before a small issue turns into a blocklisting.

Even good dashboards leave you to connect the dots between bounce codes, reputation scores, and engagement trends. That is specialist work. Most teams don’t have a deliverability engineer on call during Cyber Week, when problems are as likely at 2am as at 2pm.

The Email Deliverability Agent, built into the Email Deliverability Center, is designed to close that gap. You ask questions in plain language, such as “Why did my bounce rate spike yesterday?” or “If I could fix one thing this week, what would have the most impact?” Because it reads your live sending data rather than general best practice, the answer is specific: what’s wrong, why it matters, and the next step to take, down to which authentication record is misconfigured. The Agent was developed with 10 deliverability engineers and built on data from 100 billion emails.

Many retailers split email traffic across providers, for example transactional email on one and marketing on another. Each provider comes with its own dashboard and its own way of reporting. Nobody has the full picture, and a problem in one stream can go unnoticed until it affects another.

Spotlight sits above your existing ESPs, including Infobip, SendGrid, Mailgun, AWS, and SparkPost. It connects through prebuilt connectors or webhooks, with no migration. It shows health per sender, stream, and subaccount, and treats volume spikes and delivery slowdowns as early warning signs. It explains root causes in plain language, so marketing and engineering work from the same data instead of debating whose dashboard is right.

Whatever your setup, the goal for peak season is the same; shorten the time between a metric moving and your team knowing what to do about it.

During the increased tempo of peak shopping season it is crucial that data best practices are not ignored. Maintaining a single customer view enables you to provide consistent messaging across all channels in terms of discounts, offers, stock levels, and customer preferences.

A customer data platform can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns during peak shopping season by consolidating data from multiple channels in real time. This allows you to refine the targeting of your emails based on customer behaviors like purchases, website browsing, or items added to a basket.

Finally, synchronizing your messaging across multiple channels enables you to reach people who may not check their emails daily, or who are actually out and about in search of a shopping season bargain.