Most of a Holiday Campaign Is Decided Before the First Sale Email.

Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26, 2026. Black Friday follows on November 27, and Cyber Monday on November 30. Christmas falls on a Friday. Counting back from Thanksgiving week, a business that starts the week of October 19 has five working weeks to prepare.

That is enough time to settle offers, clean a list, and raise email volume gradually. It is not much time to also repair a sending domain or rebuild a texting signup form, so those checks come first.

The plan is dated. After about November 2 the early weeks no longer fit, and a shorter version near the end applies instead.

Put your own deadlines on the calendar first

The national dates are the easy part. The dates that decide whether a holiday message helps or hurts belong to the business: the last day an order can ship and still arrive before Christmas, the last pickup day, the days the shop is closed, the week a key person is away, the day inventory for the best offer runs out.

Check shipping cutoffs with the carriers you actually use when they publish them. Do not copy last year's dates into a promise to customers. Write every one of these dates on the same calendar before writing a single message. A deadline message is only useful if the deadline is true.

Why the list comes before the offer

Inbox providers judge a sender partly by its recent pattern. Google's sender guidelines tell senders to start with low volume to engaged recipients, increase slowly, and avoid sudden spikes when there is no history of sending large volumes. They ask senders to keep the spam rate shown in Google's Postmaster Tools below 0.10 percent and never reach 0.30 percent.

Since February 1, 2024, senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts must also authenticate with SPF and DKIM, publish a DMARC policy, and align the visible From domain with one of those, and since June 1, 2024 they must support one click unsubscribe on marketing messages. Yahoo sets similar requirements for bulk senders, asks that unsubscribes be honored within two days, and asks all senders to keep complaints below 0.3 percent. Smaller senders still have to meet Google's baseline, including SPF or DKIM. The earlier article on what inbox providers require walks through the setup.

The practical risk follows from that guidance. A small business that emails a few thousand people once a month and then emails all of them every day for a week has changed its pattern abruptly, and both filters and people react to the change, not only to the content. The frequencies and windows in the plan below are working recommendations, not rules. Adjust them to how often your list normally hears from you.

Week by week, from October 19

1. Week of October 19. Decide the offers, their start and end dates, and their exclusions. Confirm inventory and staff. Ask your email platform whether your domain passes SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and compare your texting signup form with the rules described below. Fixing either one takes longer than writing emails.
2. Week of October 26. Clean the list. Suppress hard bounces, past unsubscribes, and past complaints. Define who counts as engaged for this season. People who clicked or bought in roughly the last three to six months make a reasonable starting definition, because clicks and purchases are firmer signals than opens.
3. Week of November 2. Send one useful message that is not a sale to the engaged group: holiday hours, a gift guide, or an invitation to early access. This is the first step up in volume, so watch complaints and unsubscribes for two or three days before the next send.
4. Week of November 9. Widen the audience one step if the first send was clean. If you plan to text, invite people to opt in now, through a form that says what they are agreeing to. Starting a texting program during Thanksgiving week leaves no time to fix mistakes.
5. Week of November 16. Send early access to your most engaged customers. Test the opt out path on a staff phone: reply STOP and confirm the number stops receiving marketing. Set texting windows by time zone.
6. Week of November 23. Run the core campaign from Black Friday into the weekend. For most small lists, one email a day to engaged subscribers is a sensible ceiling, with reminders going only to people who opened or clicked an earlier message, and two or three texts across the whole stretch through Cyber Monday. A list used to frequent mail can carry more. A list that hears from you twice a year should get less.
7. Week of November 30. Close the sale on Cyber Monday with one final email and, at most, one text, then keep the rest of the week deliberately light. Send nothing promotional until the first deadline message, so the list has a few quiet days after the busiest stretch.
8. Weeks of December 7 and December 14. Lead with your verified shipping cutoffs, pickup options, and gift cards. Deadline messages answer a question customers are already asking, so they are a reasonable place to spend December's frequency.
9. Week of December 21. Leave Christmas week quiet apart from pickup and returns information customers need.
10. Week of December 28. Thank customers, explain returns, ask for reviews, and lower frequency on purpose so January does not feel like a continuation of the sale.

What texting permission requires this season

A marketing text needs more permission than a marketing email. Under the FCC's rules at 47 CFR 64.1200, a marketing text sent with an autodialer requires the recipient's prior express written consent: a signed agreement, electronic signatures included, that authorizes the business to send marketing texts to that number and says agreeing is not a condition of purchase. Whether a particular platform counts as an autodialer is narrower than it once was, but CTIA, whose industry guidance the carriers apply, expects express written consent for marketing texts either way. Florida's statute on telephonic sales calls, section 501.059, names text messages outright, requires prior express written consent for automated sales texts, and allows $500 per violation. A phone number collected for order updates or appointment reminders is not permission to send promotions.

Stopping is the other half. Under the rule in effect since April 11, 2025, a business must honor any reasonable request to stop, including a reply of stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel, or unsubscribe, within no more than ten business days, and may send one confirmation text with no marketing in it. On September 30, 2026, the FCC adopted an order that lets a sender name an exclusive opt out method, such as replying STOP, if it is disclosed in every text, and that makes a revocation in response to a marketing text cover all future marketing from that sender. It takes effect 30 days after Federal Register publication, which had not happened as of October 12, 2026, so it may start partway through the season. A program that puts reply STOP to opt out in every text and stops marketing within minutes, and treats any other reply that sounds like no as a request to stop, meets both versions.

Timing matters too. The federal rule keeps telephone solicitations to the hours from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the recipient's location, courts are still deciding whether that reaches texts people signed up for, and Florida's telemarketing statute ends at 8 p.m. Scheduling marketing texts between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. in each recipient's time zone stays clear of both.

None of this is legal advice. If you text customers in several states, let a vendor collect consent for you, or plan to text numbers you did not collect yourself, ask a lawyer before Thanksgiving week rather than after.

A gift shop, invented to show the arithmetic

The shop and its numbers here are made up for illustration. It has 3,200 email subscribers who hear from it monthly and 900 phone numbers saved from register receipts.

In the week of October 26, the engaged group comes to about 1,400 people. The shop emails them first, adds the rest of the list in early November only after two clean sends, and leaves a block of long inactive addresses out of the season entirely.

The phone numbers are the harder decision. None of them came with written permission for marketing, so none of them get a promotional text. Instead, the November 9 email invites subscribers to join a text list for early access through a form with the full disclosures. About 150 people join. The shop texts 150 people on Black Friday instead of 900, and every one of them asked.

Watch the numbers that warn you early

After each send, look at spam complaints, unsubscribes, and bounces alongside revenue or bookings measured over the same window each time. For Gmail traffic, Postmaster Tools reports the spam rate Google uses. For texts, track opt outs per send.

Set the stop rule before the season starts. If the Gmail spam rate rises toward 0.10 percent, pull the next send back to the engaged group. For texts, take the opt out rate of each of your last several sends, use the middle value as your baseline, and skip the next planned text if a send comes in at roughly double that baseline.

If you are starting after November 2

The useful part of this plan shrinks quickly. Starting late, do not add new segments, and do not launch texting for the first time in Thanksgiving week. Fix authentication if it fails, because that affects every message. Email only the engaged group, keep the core weekend modest, and put the effort into December deadline messages, which are still useful in the second week of December.

The decision to make this week

Before writing any holiday copy, decide who is on the holiday list and who is not, for email and for texts. That one decision sets the sending pattern, the complaint risk, and the legal exposure for the season.