The BFCM Conversation Playbook: What to Text on Black Friday

Black Friday 2026 falls on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30. Most stores plan the texts they will send that week: an early access announcement, a launch message, a last-chance reminder. Fewer plan for what happens when shoppers text back, or for the questions that stop a checkout halfway, or for the order-status and return messages that follow a record week.

The BFCM conversation playbook is a plan for every text a store sends and answers in sale week, and it covers Black Friday SMS marketing in three parts. Before the sale: building a list with real consent, offering early access and staffing the replies. During the sale: answering cart questions, stock questions and shipping cutoffs in time, inside the rules on quiet hours and opt-outs. After the sale: order status, returns and turning first-time buyers into second orders. If you want the full store checklist for the six weeks before the sale, start with the Shopify BFCM checklist and come back here for the messages.

What changes for shoppers over Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

The week is large and keeps growing. The National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics counted a record 202.9 million consumers shopping over the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday 2025, well above NRF's forecast of 186.9 million¹². Online drew 134.9 million of them¹.

Black Friday is still the busiest single day. It drew 85.7 million online shoppers and 80.3 million in-store shoppers, and Cyber Monday drew 75.9 million online¹.

Spending follows the same pattern. Adobe measured $11.8 billion in US online spending on Black Friday 2025 and $14.25 billion on Cyber Monday, with $44.2 billion across the five days of Cyber Week³.

Most of that buying happens on a phone, which is where your texts land. Adobe reports that 57.5% of Cyber Monday 2025 online sales came through a mobile device, up from 41.4% in 2020, and mobile share reached 61.6% on Thanksgiving Day³.

More shoppers also means more stalled checkouts. Baymard Institute puts the documented cart abandonment rate at 70.22% across 50 studies, and the top reasons are extra costs at 40% and slow delivery at 20%⁴. Both get sharper in sale week, when shoppers compare totals across tabs and worry about arrival dates. Each of those stalls is a question a text can answer.

What should you text shoppers before Black Friday?

The weeks before the sale decide who you can text, what you will say and who will answer. Work on all three before November.

Build the list with consent you can show

Every number you text needs the consent your messages require, recorded with the date and the form it came from. Grow the list with a clear sign-up offer, such as early access or a reminder when the sale opens, on the site, at checkout and in your emails. Say what the shopper is signing up for and how often you will text. A list built in a rush with vague consent language is a risk for the whole program.

Offer early access, and tell people what it is

Early access is a reason to join the list that does not require a deeper discount. It works when the message is specific: the date and time the sale opens for subscribers, which products are included and whether stock is limited. Send it once when it opens and once before it closes. A shopper who joined for early access and then hears nothing until Friday has been let down.

Staff the replies before you send anything

Every marketing text invites a reply. During sale week, replies arrive in waves right after each send, often in the evening, and many of them are buying questions. Decide before November who answers, during which hours, and how fast. Write down what they can offer and what they cannot: which codes stack, whether price adjustments are allowed, what the return window is for sale items. A person who knows these answers can turn a reply into an order. A reply left until Monday is usually a lost sale.

Write the answers to the questions you already know

Most sale-week questions are predictable. Put the answers in one place the person answering texts can read quickly.

Question shoppers ask	What to have ready
Does this code stack with the sale price?	A plain yes or no for each active offer, and what to say when the answer is no.
Will it arrive by a given date?	Your own order cutoff for each shipping method, set earlier than the carrier's.
Is my size coming back?	Which items will restock, roughly when, and whether you take back-in-stock requests.
Can I return a sale item?	The holiday return window, any final-sale items and how exchanges work.
I bought last week. Can I get the sale price?	Your price adjustment policy, stated the same way every time.

Sketch the message calendar

Put every planned send on one calendar, with the time zone and the person on reply duty next to it. A simple version for the 2026 dates looks like this:

• Early to mid November: the sign-up offer for early access, on site and in email.
• Monday, November 23 to Wednesday, November 25: early access opens for subscribers, with one reminder before it closes.
• Thursday, November 26: Thanksgiving. Decide whether to send at all, and if so, how little.
• Friday, November 27: Black Friday launch message, then replies and stalled carts all day.
• Monday, November 30: Cyber Monday message, a last-chance note in the evening inside quiet hours, and your published shipping cutoffs.

Leave time between sends, because each one creates a wave of replies, and the calendar should show who is answering each one.

What should you text during Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

During the sale, the scheduled messages matter less than the answers. The goal is to remove the reason a shopper stopped, quickly, and without sending more texts than the shopper agreed to.

Cart and checkout questions

A shopper who reaches checkout and stops in sale week usually has a reason: the total with shipping, a code that did not apply, a size they are unsure of. A short text from a person that names the item and asks whether they need anything gets the question out. Answer it and include the link back to their cart. Do not open with a bigger discount. A shopper with a question about a code wants it explained, and an extra discount teaches every shopper to wait for one.

Abandoned Checkout emails are very profitable.

Why?

Because people forget to buy!

(we get distracted, forgetful, etc)

NOTE: This is different from Abandoned Cart - these customers have already started checking out.

Timing still matters. In field experiments published in the Journal of Marketing, cart reminders sent 30 minutes to one hour after abandonment lowered purchases compared with no message, while reminders one to three days later raised them⁸. In sale week a later reminder may land after the offer ends, so test the delay against your own sale calendar. A reply to a question the shopper asked is different from a reminder and should go out as soon as possible.

Stock questions

Popular sizes and colors sell out first. When a shopper asks about an item that is gone, the person answering can offer the closest alternative, say honestly whether a restock is coming before the sale ends, and take a back-in-stock request if you support one. Do not invent urgency: mention low stock once, and only when it is true.

Shipping cutoffs

From Cyber Monday on, many shoppers are buying gifts with a date attached. The US Postal Service's recommended send-by dates for delivery before December 25 in the lower 48 states are Thursday, Dec. 17 for USPS Ground Advantage and First-Class Mail, Friday, Dec. 18 for Priority Mail and Saturday, Dec. 19 for Priority Mail Express⁵. Your own cutoff is earlier, because it includes picking and packing during your busiest weeks. Publish it, and have the person answering texts give a yes or no with the date.

What rules apply to Black Friday texts?

Sale week adds pressure to send more, earlier and later. The rules stay the same, and the business sending the texts must follow them. Get your own legal advice for the details that apply to you. A few points are worth building into the plan:

• Quiet hours. Federal rules bar telephone solicitations to residential subscribers before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., local time at the called party's location⁶. Some states set narrower windows. A launch text at midnight Eastern lands at 9 p.m. Pacific, and a 7 a.m. Pacific send lands at 10 a.m. Eastern. Schedule by the shopper's time zone.
• Opt-outs. A reply of "stop" has to work every time, including in a reply thread a person is handling. The same rule requires opt-out requests to be honored within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days⁶. Keep opt-outs on the customer profile, so a shopper who opts out in one flow stops getting texts from every flow.
• Consent. Text only people who agreed to receive the kind of message you are sending, and keep the record.
• Frequency. Sending what you promised at sign-up is part of keeping consent meaningful. If early access sign-ups were told to expect two texts, do not send eight.

Thanksgiving Day needs its own decision. Many shoppers start on Thursday, as the mobile figures above show, and many others do not want a sale text during dinner. If you send on Thanksgiving, send fewer messages, keep them inside quiet hours and give people who reply a person to talk to.

What should you text after Cyber Monday?

The week after the sale is when a record week turns into support work. The texts that go out then decide whether a first-time buyer comes back.

Order status before shoppers ask

"Where is my order?" is the most common post-sale question. Texting a shipping confirmation with a tracking link, and a short note if an order is delayed, answers it before it becomes a ticket. If carriers slow down, say so plainly and give a new estimate. A shopper who hears about a delay from you is more forgiving than one who finds out from the tracking page.

Returns, stated plainly

Holiday orders come back at a higher rate. In a National Retail Federation report, retailers estimated that 16.9% of 2024 sales would be returned, and a separate NRF study cited in the same release found retailers expected their holiday return rate to be 17% higher than their annual rate⁷. The same report found 67% of consumers said a negative return experience would discourage them from shopping with a retailer again⁷. Text the holiday return window and the exchange option before the shopper has to look for them. When a shopper texts about a return, the person answering can often offer an exchange for the right size, which keeps the sale.

Turn first-time buyers into second orders

Sale week brings in buyers who have never ordered before. Over the following weeks, focus on a good first experience before any second discount:

1. Check in after delivery. Ask whether the order arrived and whether it fits or works as expected. Answer any reply with a person.
2. Send care or how-to tips for what they bought, if the product needs them.
3. Recommend one next product based on what they bought, not the whole catalog.
4. Respect the opt-outs and the quiet weeks. A shopper who joined for the sale may not want weekly texts. Ask what they want to hear about.

How do Profiles, Workflows and FDE fit the sale week?

Each part of this playbook depends on one record of the customer. The early access sign-up, the consent record, the cart, the open ticket about a late order and the opt-out all live in different tools. When they do not share a customer, a shopper with an open complaint gets a launch text, and a shopper who opted out on Saturday gets a reminder on Monday. This is where VYG fits.

Profiles, VYG's customer data platform, builds one living profile per customer from the systems a store already runs: orders, browsing, messages, tickets, subscriptions, reviews and loyalty, matching the same person across devices and email addresses. Workflows, which is in beta, runs flows that read the whole profile, so a sale message can branch on history, such as an open ticket or a refund, and one flow can mix email, SMS and human steps. FDE, VYG's forward deployed engineering service, connects the store, email, SMS and helpdesk tools to Profiles and builds the first flows with the team, for one monthly fee.

VYG Conversations covers the replies. It puts a real, professionally trained person inside the brand's SMS flows. When a shopper stalls, pushes back or asks something off-script, a person reads the moment and replies. Agents are trained on the brand's products, policies and voice before they send a text, and every conversation is written back to the customer profile. Conversations brands pay only on recovered sales, with no setup fees and no engineering needed.

How do you measure the week?

Sale week makes attribution harder, because many shoppers would have bought anyway. Measure with a holdout. Keep a random slice of stalled checkouts, for example one in ten, out of every message, compare order rates over the same window, and count only the difference as recovered revenue⁸. Report it separately for automated messages and for conversations with a person.

Use clear benchmarks for the conversations. When a real person reaches out, a reply rate of 10-15% is good and 15-25% is excellent. For recovery rate, the share of conversations that end in an order, 8-12% is good and 12-20% is excellent. Brands typically see a 10-20X return on investment. Afterward, tag what shoppers asked about (codes, stock, shipping, returns) and use the tags to write next year's answers sheet.

To see how a real person handles sale-week replies for a store like yours, see Conversations in action.