Monica Badiu, Email Copywriter & Copy Coach

Why your Black Friday emails might never reach the inbox and what to do before November

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

In my seven years of writing and strategizing Black Friday campaigns, I discovered that you can have the biggest discount, the best copy, and a big list, and still fail.

Deliverability is the risk most course creators never think about until it's too late and it's the one risk that can't be fixed during Black Friday... only before it.

In September, I flew to Poland for 48 hours. Four trains, four buses, two flights, and one boat. I did it to sit in a room with the people who actually know what happens to emails before they land (or don't) in your subscribers' inboxes. I met Radek Kaczyński, the CEO of Bouncer. I met Aleksandra Szulecka-Szmyt, one of the clearest and most practical deliverability experts I've encountered. I ran into Kath Pay from Holistic Email Marketing (I had been listening to her book on the train there, which made the moment genuinely surreal). And I spent time with Nely and Andrew Bonar from Email Expert, who organise meetups and training for email marketers worldwide.

These are people who think about deliverability every single day, at a scale that makes most email lists look small. What I'm sharing here isn't my opinion. It's what the people sending millions of emails per month are telling everyone who will listen before Q4 hits.

Table of contents

Why Q4 Is a Different Deliverability Environment

During Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the run-up to Christmas, every sender does the same thing at the same time: they increase volume dramatically. What normally might be one to three emails a week becomes daily sends, sometimes multiple per day.

Mailbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail) see that pattern change and flag it as suspicious. You're not just fighting spam filters but competing for attention in the most crowded inbox of the year, against every other brand your subscriber has ever given their email address to. And the filters tighten precisely when everyone is sending the most.

The core finding from the Poland meetup: the decisions you make in September and October determine whether your Black Friday emails land in the inbox, the promotions tab, or spam. By the time November arrives, your sender reputation is already set and you cannot fix deliverability problems during Black Friday. You can only prevent them before it.

The Four Risks And What to Do About Each One

Risk one: volume spikes and reputation shock

When you go from one email a week to seven emails a week overnight, mailbox providers flag the pattern change. It's not the volume that triggers the problem, it's the suddenness of it.

The fix is gradual warming. Start increasing your send frequency progressively in the weeks before Black Friday, not in the week of it. If you're going from two emails a week to daily sends, do that over four to six weeks. And equally important: don't go completely silent in December after a high-volume Black Friday week. The same way you warmed up going in, you need to wind down coming out.

One more note here: if you're setting up a new IP or subdomain because you've identified deliverability issues with your main domain, don't use it for Black Friday. A brand new IP sending high volume during peak week is one of the fastest ways to damage a sender reputation before it's had any chance to develop.

Risk two: sending to the wrong people

This was Aleksandra's core message and the one I'd most want every course creator to sit with. Most senders, when they think about Black Friday, assume maximum reach means sending to their entire list. Every subscriber, every promotional email. That instinct is one of the primary causes of deliverability problems during Q4.

Aleksandra's advice: segment your list by engagement well before peak season. Engagement doesn't just mean email opens and clicks. It can mean visiting your website, logging into your course platform, adding something to cart. Behavioural signals from anywhere in your ecosystem tell you who is actually active and who has quietly checked out.

For inactive subscribers: run a dedicated re-engagement campaign before Black Friday, not during it. September is ideal, with a second pass in October if needed. If people don't re-engage through that flow, suppress them from your main Black Friday campaign. Don't delete them, but don't send your primary promotional sequence to people who haven't shown any sign of life in 90 days. You're not just wasting sends but sending damaging signals to mailbox providers on your most important campaign of the year.

One practical note on the workaround some marketers use: sending to the engaged segment first, hoping good signals carry over when you then send to the disengaged segment immediately after. It's possible, and some people use it. But it's not reliable enough to lean on, and any time you're sending to people who don't want your emails, you're increasing your risk of spam complaints.

Risk three: content and complaint spikes

Spam complaint rates go up during Black Friday for almost every sender. The reason is predictable: higher frequency plus copy that leans harder into urgency than into value. When your emails feel like pressure rather than relevance, people hit the spam button instead of the unsubscribe button. And spam complaints are one of the most damaging signals you can send to a mailbox provider.

Three things you can do before it happens.

  • First, give your subscribers a choice. Before Black Friday, send an email telling them you'll be sending more frequently during the promotional period and give them the option to receive fewer emails if they prefer. It sounds counterintuitive, but the subscribers who opt in for full frequency are your warmest, most engaged contacts. They're essentially telling you they want to hear about your Black Friday campaign.
  • Second, match your copy to the segment. If subscribers have been logging into your course platform frequently, write to that behaviour. If someone bought a low-ticket offer six months ago, write to where they are in their journey with you. Relevant emails generate fewer complaints and higher conversions.
  • Third, test your subject lines and copy before the campaign goes live. If your sender reputation is already strong, spam trigger language is less of a concern. But if you're heading into Q4 with any deliverability uncertainty, run your copy through a spam checker and test inbox placement across different mail providers before you hit send on your first campaign.

Risk four: infrastructure and authentication gaps

This is the most technical piece, but you need to know it exists.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are authentication protocols that tell mailbox providers your emails are legitimately coming from you. If these aren't configured correctly, your emails are more likely to be filtered regardless of how good your content is. Most email marketing platforms have setup guides and checklists for this and many won't let you send without having them in place. But it's worth confirming everything is correctly configured before Q4, not assuming it is.

If you're on a shared IP, which most course creators using standard platforms are, this isn't something you need to manage manually. But if you're on a dedicated IP, or you're considering switching email service providers entirely, don't make that change in November. Make it now, with enough runway to warm up properly before peak week.

The Data Types Worth Knowing

One of the most useful frameworks from the meetup came from Radek, the CEO of Bouncer. He categorised the types of problematic email data that end up on lists and understanding the difference helps you prioritise what to address first.

  • Undeliverable addresses are emails that simply can't receive mail. Often a typo in the domain name, sometimes in the local part of the address. Double opt-in catches most of these at the point of entry. Bouncer also has a plugin that validates email addresses in real time as someone types into your opt-in form, catching problems before they enter your list at all.
  • Obsolete addresses are accounts people have moved on from (old employers, abandoned providers, inactive personal accounts). This is especially relevant in B2B, where up to 25% of business email addresses go stale within a year. Your email platform shows hard and soft bounces; hard bounces should be removed immediately.
  • Risky addresses are your inactive subscribers (people who haven't engaged in a long time). Not gone yet, but heading that direction. This is your re-engagement segment.
  • Fake or disposable addresses are bots, temporary accounts, and addresses created just to access a lead magnet. Double opt-in catches most of these before they enter your list.
  • Toxic addresses are the ones that do active damage: complainers who hit the spam button instead of unsubscribing, spam traps maintained by inbox providers to catch senders with poor list hygiene, and privacy litigators who pursue senders for email law violations.

For complainers specifically: make unsubscribing frictionless. One-click unsubscribe is the standard in 2026. No redirects, no preference pages, no logins. If someone wants off your list, let them go. Holding people captive only generates the complaints that damage your deliverability for everyone else.

What to Actually Do and When

If you're reading this before October:

  • Pull your hard bounces and remove them immediately. Then identify everyone who hasn't opened or clicked in 90 days, that's your re-engagement segment. Run a dedicated re-engagement campaign for that group before anything else.
  • Check your authentication. SPF, DKIM, DMARC. If you're not sure whether they're configured correctly, contact your email platform's support team, it's a standard check they can walk you through.
  • Create at least three engagement segments: active subscribers, at-risk subscribers showing reduced engagement, and dormant subscribers. These groups will receive different treatment during Q4. In many cases, the dormant group won't receive your main Black Friday campaign at all.
  • Start increasing your send frequency now, gradually, not in November.

Two to three weeks before Black Friday:

  • Check your list one more time. Anyone who didn't re-engage goes into a suppressed segment for the main campaign. (Exception: if that segment contains previous buyers and you have a dedicated Black Friday offer for them, create a separate campaign rather than suppressing them entirely.)
  • Run inbox placement tests. Set up email addresses across different providers Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and send your regular emails to those addresses for the next two to three weeks. Where are you landing? Inbox, promotions, or spam? This tells you where you actually stand before the campaign goes live.
  • Check Google Postmaster if you don't already have it set up. It shows your true sender reputation and spam complaint rate for Gmail users, information your email marketing platform alone can't always give you.

During Black Friday:

  • Check email performance daily: delivery rate, inbox placement, complaint rate, engagement. Watch your spam complaint rate closely. If it spikes after the first two or three sends, pause and diagnose before continuing.
  • Keep your unsubscribe process frictionless. One click. No loops.
  • Don't add new contacts to your main campaign at the last minute. New subscribers don't know you well enough to receive ten emails in seven days without complaint. Consider a smaller, separate send for them or ask them directly whether they want to receive your Black Friday emails.

After Black Friday:

  • Don't go silent. Wind down your sending frequency the same way you wound it up.
  • Move to double opt-in and real-time email validation at your opt-in forms if you haven't already.
  • Build list hygiene into your regular calendar, not just as a pre-launch emergency. Twice a year at baseline. More frequently if you're running paid traffic.

The takeaway from the entire Poland meetup, and the one I keep coming back to:

The senders who win peak week did the boring work back in September and October.

Reputation is earned before Black Friday. Not during it. The infrastructure, the list hygiene, the re-engagement, the warm-up — all of it has to happen before the campaign goes live. By the time November arrives, the work is either done or it isn't.

If you're reading this in September, you still have time. Use it.

What to Do Next

  • Revive Your Email List → If you want to go deeper on the re-engagement piece specifically — the part that most course creators need to start with — the Revive Your Email List course walks you through the exact three-step framework: how to audit your list, the email templates to re-engage inactive subscribers, the nurture strategy for bringing people back after they re-engage, and real case studies from actual campaigns.

Listen to Master The Inbox

This is the podcast for course creators, coaches and consultants who want to know how to use email marketing to nurture and convert their audience in a non-spammy, non-bullshit BUT data driven approach. See all episodes right here.

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Monica Badiu

About the Author

Monica Badiu is an email revenue strategist and conversion copywriter who helps course creators turn their email lists into reliable revenue systems.

With over 17 years of marketing experience and more than 25,000 hours spent studying and practicing customer-centric email marketing, she specializes in diagnosing the gaps that prevent email from performing at its full potential. Her strategies have helped course creators generate over $3 million in revenue, and her work focuses on building thoughtful email systems that drive sales while strengthening genuine relationships with audiences.

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