Last year’s Black Friday generated an impressive $11.8 billion in online sales, marking a 9.1% increase from the previous year. This year, expectations are high for even more impressive figures and innovative marketing campaigns.
To help you prepare for the upcoming shopping frenzy, we’ve curated a selection of ten standout email and SMS examples from successful Black Friday campaigns. These examples showcase effective strategies for engaging target audiences, creating a sense of urgency, and enticing customers with time-sensitive deals.
A great way to drive clicks and sales is through urgency, scarcity, and FOMO (fear of missing out).
Adding countdown timers in emails gives a sense of urgency, and the design can make the email feel interactive and visually engage the reader.
Virgin Atlantic’s Black Friday email campaign is a great example of how to effectively use a countdown timer. The brand ingeniously combined an animated countdown timer with a boarding pass.
The whole ticket graphic looks personalized, with the first name field matching the email body copy. Now, imagine you’ve been searching flights to a particular destination, and then you get this email land in your inbox. Seeing your name on that ticket would certainly tempt you.
The email is undeniably on-brand and different from generic campaigns, so it stands out from the competition.
The Black Friday and entire Cyber Week period isn’t just about huge discounts. Campaigns that show your brand supporting a charitable cause or giving back to the community can be a refreshing change of pace that stands out and is well received by your audience, improving brand loyalty overall.
This campaign from clothing brand Everlane is as refreshing as the alpine air in the photograph used. The email lets readers know how their support of the brand has in turn supported cashmere farmers and the regeneration of Mongolian grasslands.
The brand shares what it’s doing for good, but doesn’t make it about them, rather about the support of the customers. It also educates, in a non-preachy way, letting people know why this is important.
The campaign’s mixture of blocks showing stats, meaningful copy, and real-life photography of gorgeous Cashmere goats makes it one of the best email examples out there.
This campaign from Thortful, a card marketplace, is a couple of years old now, but we still love it.
Black Friday is a busy day for inboxes, so don’t be afraid to think outside the box and make your own occasion.
From November 24 to 27, Thortful introduced “Thortsgiving” – a celebration that gives back to its creators. This unique take on a Black Friday message sends a powerful message to customers: Thortful is not just a place to buy meaningful cards; it’s a tight-knit community that stands by its creators and supports small businesses.
Thortful skillfully establishes an emotional connection with its customers, using the attention around holiday promotions to drive sales and build deeper connections with its audience, all the while remaining true to its core values.
Writing memorable copy is important during the holiday rush. With so many messages fighting for attention, your goal should be to create copy that stands out and leaves a lasting impression.
Use persuasive language to stimulate your subscribers’ curiosity and emotions, and create a sense of urgency that encourages them to take action.
For instance, Coach was able to successfully target its SMS subscribers during Black Friday by weaving a sense of urgency into its message, without resorting to shouty ALL CAPS messages with lots of exclamation marks.
In the brand’s typical quiet luxury style, the urgency is conveyed, but not pressured, with the copy emphasizing that it was the final chance for customers to save big on their purchases before the deals disappeared.
SMS gets a click-through rate seven times higher than email at 25.7%. You can learn all of the basics on SMS marketing here, written by our SMS expert, Lucia.
SMS lends itself especially well to flash sales, which are very popular during Black Friday. We know that Black Friday is a hectic time for marketers, so adding SMS into your channel mix isn’t much extra work at all.
If you want to send cross-channel campaigns but are short on time, Dotdigital’s AI tools mean you can convert your existing emails into SMS messages in one click. It will automatically adjust your message to fit the character limit, suggesting copy that aligns perfectly with your email content.
Technically, this is another example of Black Friday campaigns not being tied to Black Friday as it’s about a ‘spring Black Friday’ offer, but the part of this campaign we love is the exclusive early access for email subscribers.
Making your customers feel valued and giving them perks for being subscribed is never a bad idea. Dotdigital’s recent survey of 4,000 global consumers found that 27% of shoppers want loyalty schemes to offer early access to new products and sales.
This example from PLUSH + OAK tells subscribers that they’re on the brand’s VIP mailing list, so they’re getting access to a big discount a whole three days before other people will even know about the sale. This is extra valuable to subscribers as the email highlights how the brand anticipates certain items to sell out, so this pre-sale window is a valuable perk for email subscribers.
On Black Friday, shoppers are eager to find deals from their favorite brands quickly and effortlessly. As SMS messages have a limited character count, getting your message across in just a few words is necessary, but you can still build excitement.
BCBG’s SMS campaign is a great example of how keeping things short and clear can really pay off. During its Black Friday promotion, BCBG sent out a simple and clear SMS message to subscribers that provided all the essential information about the offer, without overwhelming recipients with unnecessary details.
In just a few words, the message tells shoppers:
One way to leave a lasting impression during the Black Friday email scramble is to avoid using basic, overused design templates.
By creating a unique and cohesive design that stands out from generic email layouts, you can set your brand apart and draw attention to the content within.
Vans’ Black Friday email campaign is an excellent example of innovative and fun design.
The email features a mountain-side ski scene that offers a playful interactive game feel in the styling of the design and CTA button placements.
When it comes to the content, the campaign has something for everyone. From regular shopping CTAs to helpfully curated gift selections sorted by price range, and even a holiday playlist option so that people not looking to shop still get something to enjoy from the email.
Emojis are part of modern communication and can be perfect for adding emotion and personality to text-based messages.
SMS is still a channel that’s used for chatting with friends and loved ones, so using emojis along with a conversational and relatable tone here can make the message feel less salesy and more natural.
Youth to the People’s message added a clock emoji to deliver the sale information in a more visually engaging way and to show an element of fun to the campaign.
When using emojis in your SMS marketing campaigns, moderation is key. Using too many emojis can overwhelm your audience and feel spammy.
And always be sure that you’re on top of your character count, as some newer emojis can count as two characters instead of one.
Across the month of November in 2025, mobile saw 52.8% of all online orders, and on Cyber Monday it accounted for 57.5% of orders, so your Black Friday email campaigns need to be optimized for mobile users.
Your promotional emails need to look good on every device. Whether someone opens them on a phone, tablet, or desktop, a well-formatted email makes it much easier for them to click through and buy.
Most email marketing platforms have mobile optimization built into the email builder, so this doesn’t need to be something you think about too hard. The main thing to check is that elements like CTAs and side-by-side content blocks stack into a single column on smaller screens, making your emails just as easy to read on a phone as they are on a desktop.
Last-minute reminders are a great way to make the most of Black Friday hype and give anyone who’s been on the fence a reason to finally hit buy.
Snacks brand, Nuts, used this SMS to make one thing very clear: this was their last chance to shop the Black Friday sale. The loudspeaker emoji helped dial up the urgency without needing to say much more.
The key is to be clear about what’s ending and when. And keep those deadlines genuine; repeatedly extending a sale can quickly frustrate customers, who’ll see through the urgency tactic. In the EU, brands have also faced fines for misleading practices around fake discounts and deadlines.
A well-timed reminder can bring back customers who missed, forgot about, or simply needed one final nudge to take advantage of your offer.
As we approach Black Friday, now is the perfect time to start planning your marketing strategy. It’ll be upon us quicker than you know it, and anything we can prep in advance will make it a lot easier. We hope these examples can provide a springboard for inspiration when designing your upcoming email and SMS campaigns. And remember, you’ve got this.
