Black Week is the loudest week in every inbox. A small shop cannot win by shouting louder than the chains; you win by preparing earlier, targeting warmer, and following through when the big players go quiet. Here is the timeline.

September: build the audience

The campaigns you send in November can only ever be as good as the list they land on. Spend September and October growing the list: checkout opt-ins, an early-access promise ("subscribers see the Black Week offer first") converts especially well this time of year.

Early November: the teaser

One short email: our best prices of the year are coming, subscribers see them first, here's the date. No numbers yet. This primes opens for the week itself and quietly warms your sending volume before the peak, which matters for deliverability.

The week itself: three sends, not ten

  • Launch (Monday): the offer, clearly. Curated selection, honest discount, one button.
  • Reminder (Thursday): social proof angle; what's selling out, what people are loving.
  • Last call (Sunday): the offer ends tonight. One sentence, one button. Skip the fake countdown timers.

Everything else that week is noise you're adding to your own list. Restraint reads as confidence.

December 6: the Mikołajki follow-through

Here is the small-shop advantage in Poland: while international brands go dark after Cyber Monday, Polish inboxes have a second gifting moment two weeks later. A Mikołajki gift guide (small gifts, fast delivery) lands in a suddenly quiet inbox with your warmest audience of the year. It is routinely the highest-ROI email of December.

Don't skip the check

Peak week is exactly when a broken discount link or a wrong price costs the most. Every SendMerlin campaign gets Merlin's pre-send review (links, images, subject length, spam signals) before it flies, and the campaign calendar proposes this entire timeline, teaser to Mikołajki, so you approve it instead of building it.

Frequently asked questions

Should I discount my whole shop for Black Week?

No. A deep, honest discount on a curated selection beats 10% off everything. Blanket discounts train customers to never buy at full price and erode margins you can't recover.

When should the first Black Week email go out?

A teaser in early November ("our best prices of the year are coming") primes the list without revealing numbers. The offer itself opens when the week starts; a reminder mid-week and a last-call close it out.

Is Black Week a thing in Poland too?

Very much so. Poland adopted the full week rather than just the Friday, and Mikołajki on December 6 gives Polish shops a second gifting peak that international calendars miss entirely.