Holiday email marketing: How to plan the whole season

By Thanksgiving, holiday emails have been landing in shoppers' inboxes for weeks, and they'll keep coming until late December. That's close to three months of asking for attention. The Cyber Five gap report shows how fast it runs out: 54% of shoppers who got holiday messages unsubscribed from, muted, or blocked at least one brand during Cyber Five, the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.

Holiday email marketing works when you send for the whole season. Start when inboxes fill in October and let what each shopper does set the timing, so your list is still there in December.

About the data: Centiment surveyed 1,048 US adults who bought online during Cyber Five 2025 and 295 in-house marketers at US retailers, September 28 to October 5, 2026. Holiday shoppers are the 981 who did holiday shopping, and shoppers who got holiday messages are the 908 who got promotional emails or texts that week. Shopper results are unweighted, and answers about 2025 rely on recall. The report gives every base.

Key takeaways

• 88% of retailers sent their first holiday message by late October 2025.
• 54% of shoppers who got holiday messages cut off at least one brand during Cyber Five.
• 46% of retail marketers said most or nearly all of their Cyber Five messages were relevant, against 22% of shoppers who got holiday messages.
• 35% of retailers sent half or more of their 2025 holiday messages in response to something a shopper did.

When should holiday email marketing start?

Holiday email marketing should start in October, when inboxes begin to fill, and keep going through December. 88% of retailers sent their first holiday message by late October 2025, and 28% of holiday shoppers did most of their holiday buying in December.

If your first holiday email hasn't gone out yet, send it to the shoppers already showing interest: the ones browsing your holiday products or adding items to carts.

How do you keep holiday email marketing from burning out your list?

You keep holiday email marketing from burning out your list by capping messages per person across every channel for the whole season. More than half of shoppers who got holiday messages cut off at least one brand during Cyber Five, and a majority of them said the main reason was too many messages. Keep that cap in place for your Black Friday marketing too, when it’s most tempting to send more.

A cap on its own won't stop the losses: 87% of retail marketers enforced a limit during Cyber Five 2025, and 58% still saw unsubscribes rise. So add a fatigue score: a score per shopper, built from how they've responded to your recent emails, texts, and push notifications, that shows who's near their limit. It lets you hold back the next send for those shoppers while everyone else still gets it.

The best cap is the one each shopper picks, so use a preference center that feeds personalization to ask which channels they want and how often.

What should holiday emails say so shoppers don't tune out?

Holiday emails should say something about what the shopper is shopping for. Irrelevant offers and too many messages tie as the top reasons shoppers stop paying attention to a brand during the holidays, and false urgency comes in close behind them.

Shoppers who got holiday messages, n=908. Multiple answers allowed; the four most-cited reasons are shown.

Marketers see their own messages differently. 46% of retail marketers said most or nearly all of their Cyber Five messages were relevant, against 22% of shoppers who got holiday messages. That's a 24-point gap. A few habits narrow it:

• Mention the item they looked at. Leave out how you know.
• Use urgency only when it's true, like a real shipping cutoff or an offer with a real end date; if stock is low, say how many are left.
• Write subject lines that tell the shopper what's inside, such as the product or the deadline.

Which holiday emails should be triggered instead of scheduled?

The holiday emails that should be triggered are the ones that answer a shopper's own action, with scheduled sends filling in the rest of the calendar around them. A triggered message goes out because a shopper did something: viewed a product, left a cart, placed an order. A scheduled send goes to a list because the calendar said so.

The holiday emails worth triggering:

• The abandoned cart. Cart abandonment emails follow up on the items left behind while the shopper is still deciding.
• The product view or abandoned browse. Follow up on the item itself.
• The order. Confirm delivery timing against holiday shipping deadlines.
• The item back in stock. Send it only to the shoppers who viewed the item, added it to a cart, or joined its waitlist.

Only 35% of retailers triggered half or more of their 2025 holiday sends. Build the cart, product view, and order journeys first, since those actions sit closest to a purchase. Let each triggered email take the place of a scheduled one for the shopper who triggered it, so that shopper stays inside the cap.

How do you protect holiday email deliverability at peak volume?

You protect holiday email deliverability at peak volume by meeting the mailbox providers' bulk sender requirements and raising volume gradually into the holiday peak. Yahoo and Outlook.com both require bulk senders to set up SPF and DKIM and to pass DMARC, and Gmail publishes similar requirements for bulk senders.

SPF and DKIM prove a message came from your domain, and DMARC tells the provider what to do with mail that fails. Here's how Yahoo's sender best practices and Microsoft's authentication requirements for high-volume senders to Outlook.com compare:

In order, from now through the peak weeks:

1. Fix authentication before volume rises. Run an email deliverability checklist against every domain you'll send holiday email from, and check Gmail's current sender guidelines while you're there.
2. Clean the list before the peak. Remove addresses that never opted in, misspellings, spam traps, and long-inactive addresses.
3. Raise volume gradually. Step it up through November, starting with your most engaged recipients, and send big holiday emails to a seed list first to see where they land.
4. Watch complaints by provider. Check spam complaint rates every day of the peak weeks and act on a rise well before a provider's limit. Keep unsubscribing easy too, because an easy unsubscribe protects your sender reputation.

What should you measure in holiday email marketing?

In holiday email marketing, you measure one business outcome and one cost across the season: orders or revenue on one side, the unsubscribe rate on the other. Open rate makes a poor guide, because mail privacy features load images and register opens that no one made.

44% of retail marketers judge a holiday email mainly by orders, conversion rate, or revenue, while 14% still lean on open rate.

Read both every week from your first holiday send, and use email marketing analytics to tie each send to the orders and revenue it started. If orders hold steady while unsubscribes climb, the season is wearing down the list. Those two numbers tell you whether you sent for the whole season and still had a list in December.

Check your holiday email marketing against the Cyber Five gap report

Get the Cyber Five gap report for the full 2026 playbook: what to change before Thanksgiving, during the five days, and after. Book an Acoustic demo to see how marketers keep shoppers near their limit out of the next send with the Fatigue Index, and run email, SMS, WhatsApp, and mobile push from one system.

Holiday email marketing FAQs

What does a holiday unsubscribe cost?

Multiply your average subscriber lifetime value by the extra unsubscribes you see during the holiday season to get a working dollar figure; fewer than half of retail marketers have put a number on what they lose when people unsubscribe. In Acoustic, the Fatigue Index shows who's near their limit, so you can leave them out of the next send.

Does SMS work better than email for holiday promotions?

More shoppers want holiday deals by email first than by any other channel, so lead with email and keep text for the shoppers who opted into it and engage there. Acoustic sends email, SMS, WhatsApp, and mobile push from one system, so each shopper can hear from you on the channel they chose.

How should holiday emails handle shipping cutoff dates?

From December 8 until the cutoff, every holiday email should carry the order-by date for holiday delivery, since about one in five shoppers who got holiday messages say unrealistic delivery promises make them stop paying attention to a brand. Marketers build and change journeys in Acoustic without an IT ticket, so adding the cutoff date to every holiday journey stays with the marketing team.