The two highly anticipated email events of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), are almost here! For some, it’s smooth sailing - scaling effortlessly, preventing issues before they escalate, and delivering on revenue expectations. For others, it’s the most stressful week of the year, full of queue delays and rising help desk costs. 

This year, the stakes are higher than ever. Mailbox providers are tightening authentication rules, emails are being sent at unprecedented volumes over longer periods, and vying for consumer attention has never been fiercer. This year, BFCM will look different, and whether you sink or float depends on how steady your boat (email infrastructure) is. 

Three email trends we've seen in 2025: A rougher sea

The waters have become choppier in the past year, and several industry shifts are shaping how your company navigates BFCM. These include: 

Inbox placement under pressure: Global inbox placement rates decreased from 85% in 2023 to 82% in 2024, according to Validity's 2025 Email Deliverability Benchmark report. Concurrently, spam placement rose to 13%. That’s millions of messages missing their mark every day. Mailbox providers now prioritize engagement signals (opens, clicks, deletions, and replies) more than ever. If recipients aren’t engaging, even legitimate senders can suffer.

Increased volumes doesn’t always mean increased sales: During BFCM, many brands often loosen filters to grow their reach, driving up sending volumes but also creating inboxing pressure. To handle the surge, ESPs spin up additional infrastructure, adding manual overhead and costs only to watch them sink under throttles and blocks. The trend shows that higher volumes alone don’t guarantee sales. Smarter automation and coordinated scaling are becoming essential.

Volume spikes are shifting: “Black Week” is replacing “Black Friday.” According to Klaviyo, in 2024, many brands launched their BFCM promotions by early November. This shows that senders are shifting volume earlier, spreading out the load and competition. 

For mailbox providers, this means a storm of incoming traffic to manage. For senders, it means sailing in tighter lanes with stricter rules and higher expectations.

Common pitfalls that rock the boat

Every year, we see the same missteps that send email operations teams overboard, causing enterprises to lose clients, revenue, and their competitive edge. Here’s just a few of the biggest pitfalls we see: 

Using email infrastructure that doesn’t cut it
BFCM is the highest-stakes weekend of the year. If you’re stuck on archaic or static infrastructure that isn’t capable of keeping up with the latest trends or scaling on demand, sorry to break it to you, but neither will you. Instead of growing the business, it will cost you business. And money. And clients. Do we need to say more?  

Getting bogged down in manual updates
It’s okay, we’ve all been there. You’re stuck tinkering with one queue and then something in another queue breaks, and another, and another. Before you know it, it’s a hot mess and you’re reaching for a lifejacket (or an ornate wood panel - RIP Jack). BFCM doesn’t have to be a flurry of manual updates, high help desk costs, and constant firefighting.

Losing insight into what’s happening before it’s too late 
Delivery issues, such as rejected emails, bounces, and high deferral rates, can cause your email delivery to grind to a halt. If you can’t see issues in real-time, you’ll waste precious hours diagnosing problems and pulling in extra engineers. Critical time you and your customers can’t afford to lose.

Here's how to stay afloat this year

If email is really, really important to your business (clue: it is), you can’t afford static infrastructure with no flexibility or control. Email was made to flow, and so should your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals (and, of course, all other emails too). Here are some tools in our boat to help you avoid capsizing during email silly season (and all the other seasons, too).

Scale effortlessly: Panicking about high-traffic peaks is a thing of the past. With Ultra IO, you can effortlessly handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections per instance. Reduce delays, enhance your email operations, and achieve unmatched throughput - even during peak traffic. Halon’s Cloud Path enables our clients to scale up the number of instances effortlessly. For senders, it automatically drains the queue to other instances when the peak is over, and it’s time to scale down. 

Automate, do not repeat. There’s a reason this is a guiding principle of Dynamic Email Operations™. With Delivery Guru Warmup, Halon Engage automates the entire IP address ramp-up process. This enables you to warm up multiple IPs across clients faster without the manual burden. The result: smoother delivery and fewer surprises when scaling up volumes for your clients during the critical BFCM period. We also launched Code Companion, our AI coding assistant that makes coding a breeze and accelerates time to market 10x faster. 

Delivery Insights in real time: Forget siloed tools for monitoring and configuration management. Delivery Insights provides a one-stop monitoring and management solution for your entire email infrastructure. Delivery Insights combines current and historical time series data with policy controls, giving teams both observability (what’s happening NOW and what has happened in the PAST) and levers to act.

Play by the rules: With inbox placement under pressure, playing by the rules of mailbox providers has never been more important. Halon’s Sender Shield and Delivery Orchestrator make it simple to stay compliant while optimizing performance, so you can protect reputation, maximize deliverability, and scale with confidence.

And there’s much more where that came from! Find out more here. 

Beyond BFCM: Building for the future

BFCM won’t be the end of your email story, but it is a make-or-break moment. The inbox has never been more competitive, and the filters never more unforgiving. However, with proper preparation, composable email infrastructure, and trusted partners, it’s also an unparalleled opportunity. Now is the time to decide whether you'll sink or float this email silly season. Discover how Halon can help you this BFCM through Dynamic Email Operations™.