How to Prepare for Your Black Friday Email Analysis

How to Prepare for Your Black Friday Email Analysis

Black Friday is a few days out, and the window to clean up your setup is small. The more clarity you create now, the easier your analysis will be next week.

1. Measurement Setup

Confirm that your analytics platform is logging events correctly. That means checking that your pageview and conversion events fire on every major browser, and that your primary conversion has a stable, consistent definition. If you changed this during the year, note the date.

Look at UTM consistency. Every Black Friday email should use the same medium and source values and only vary the campaign name. If your team writes UTMs by hand, fix that now. Mixed labels will break your attribution.

If you have access to hourly reporting in your ESP or analytics tool, verify that it is enabled or that you know where to find it. Hourly patterns during holiday weekends often show the real behavior that daily metrics hide.

2. Subject Lines and Preheaders

Build two or three variants and label them cleanly in your ESP so you know exactly what was tested. Avoid changing too many variables. If the only difference is clarity or structure, your results will be useful.

Check how each line performs in dark mode and light mode previews, particularly for users of the Gmail app. Some ESPs pull the preheader into the preview text in ways that can undermine a well written subject line. Catch that now rather than after the send.

3. Offer Clarity

Simplify your headline offer until it reads correctly at a glance. If you need more than one sentence to explain your discount, it is too complicated. Shorter offers not only convert better, they produce cleaner data because subscribers understand what they are clicking into.

Review the visual hierarchy. If your primary offer is visually competing with supporting content, your results will be skewed. Make sure your CTA is the most obvious interactive element on the screen.

For secondary offers, decide what success means ahead of time. If you want to measure lift from a bundle, a free gift, or a cross-sell, you need to track those behaviors specifically.

4. Deliverability and Technical Checks

Verify SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment. Even a small misalignment can cause temporary filtering during high-volume periods. Most ESP dashboards will show any existing failures or warnings. Clear these now.

Check your sending reputation trends. If your ESP or a tool like Google Postmaster Tools shows a recent dip in reputation, slow your volume for a day and send to your most engaged segments only. A quick reputation reset can prevent inboxing problems later in the week.

Review your bounce categories. Hard bounces, soft bounces, and deferrals each tell a different story. If you see unusual levels of temporary blocks from Gmail or Microsoft, investigate before Friday.

Finally, send a live test to a seed list that includes Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, and a corporate inbox. Make sure your message lands in the inbox for at least your main providers.

5. Accessibility and Rendering

Review your contrast ratios. Buttons and text should be legible in both themes and on small screens. Low contrast can make a CTA look disabled and quietly kill conversions.

Check alt text on key images. If your headline is baked into an image and the image fails to load, your message loses its meaning entirely. At minimum, make sure your offer is visible as live text somewhere in the email.

Test stacking behavior on mobile. Black Friday emails must survive narrow widths. Check how your layout behaves at 320 pixels. If your CTA appears below a long block of text, consider moving it higher.

6. List Health and Frequency Rules

Identify your high engagement segment. These subscribers can handle more sends without reputation risk. Your inactive segment should receive fewer emails or be excluded from certain sends entirely.

Check your suppression logic. Make sure recent unsubscribes, spam reporters, and inactive contacts are removed from aggressive sequences. Protecting your reputation during Black Friday is as important as maximizing reach.

Document your send plan for the weekend. Note which segments get which messages and why. This will make next week's analysis cleaner.

Doing this work before the weekend ensures that what you review next week reflects subscriber behavior instead of technical noise or avoidable mistakes.

CTA: If you want to avoid hidden technical issues that distort your results, MailMoxie helps teams catch deliverability and setup problems before they reach the inbox.