Black Friday lands on November 27 this year and Cyber Monday on November 30. That is about eight weeks away, which sounds like plenty of time. For Black Friday push notifications, it is barely enough, and the stores that do best with push that weekend are the ones that set it up now.
This guide covers the three things worth doing before the rush: growing your push subscriber list while there is still time for it to grow, getting abandoned cart notifications firing and tested in October, and adding browse abandonment so you can reach shoppers who looked but never added anything to their cart. Then it covers why push stands out on a weekend when every inbox is overflowing.
The real deadline is not November 27. It is roughly two weeks before that, because you want your Black Friday setup finished, tested and frozen before the sale starts. Nobody wants to be debugging a tracking snippet on the busiest shopping day of the year.
Work backward from the sale and the calendar looks like this:
| When | What to have done |
|---|---|
| This week | Install the opt-in prompt and a Welcome Notification. Every day from here adds subscribers. |
| Early October | Add abandoned cart and browse abandonment tracking, then confirm the events appear in your log. |
| Mid October | Activate the triggered campaigns and let them run on normal traffic. Read the results. |
| Early November | Rehearse on a small sale of your own. Fix whatever surprises you. |
| Mid November | Freeze your setup. Write and schedule your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sends. |
| Nov 27 to Nov 30 | Send. Your automation is already proven, so the weekend is about the offer, not the plumbing. |
Every row in that table depends on the one before it. A triggered campaign you switch on the week before Thanksgiving has no history, copy nobody has tested, and no proof that its trigger even matches the event your store sends. Start now and you arrive at Black Friday with numbers you already trust.
Push only works on people who have subscribed, and subscribers accumulate one visit at a time. There is no way to add eight weeks of sign-ups in the final week before a sale. The arithmetic is simple:
New subscribers per week = visitors who answer your prompt × your opt-in rate
Your opt-in rate is approved prompts divided by approved plus denied, and Aimtell shows it for your own site. The opt-in percentage documentation explains exactly how it is counted. Use your own number, not someone else's benchmark.
To see why timing matters, take an illustration with made-up round numbers. Say 3,000 visitors a week answer your prompt and 10% of them say yes. That is 300 new subscribers a week. Start this week and you reach Black Friday with around 2,400 people you can reach instantly. Start two weeks out and you have around 600. Same store, same prompt, same offer. The only difference is the start date.
That is the structural point. Subscriber growth is linear in time and the sale is a fixed date, so every week you wait is a week of subscribers you never get back.
Your opt-in prompt is the only part of your push setup that compounds, so it goes first. A few things make it work harder:
Then plan how you will use the list. Building subscriber segments now means you can send deal alerts to the people who asked for deals and new-arrival news to everyone else, instead of one message to the whole list.
Abandoned cart notifications are the highest-value automation you can run over the holidays. Shoppers compare prices across several tabs, get distracted, and leave full carts everywhere. A timely push brings them back to yours. The setup has three parts.
1. Track the cart. On Shopify and WooCommerce, the Aimtell integration tracks carts for you. On a custom store, add two lines, one on the cart page and one on the order confirmation page, as shown in our guide to tracking abandoned carts:
<!-- Cart page: start the abandoned cart timer (minutes) -->
<script>_at.track("cart", {"type": "add-to-cart", "delay": 30});</script>
<!-- Order confirmation page: the cart was not abandoned after all -->
<script>_at.track("cart", {"type": "order-complete"});</script>The delay is how many minutes an untouched cart waits before it counts as abandoned. The order-complete call tells Aimtell that the shopper checked out, so they do not get a reminder about a cart they already paid for.
2. Confirm the event is arriving. Open Tools & Logs > Logs > Events and look for your cart events. This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that catches problems. A trigger has to match the event category and action word for word, and the only way to be certain that it does is to see a real event arrive in the log.
3. Build the triggered campaign. Go to Triggered Notifications and click Create Campaign, or start from the ready-made Abandoned Cart template, which comes with the trigger and conversion tracking already configured. On the Trigger tab, enter the event category and action exactly as they appear in your event log. On the Settings tab, set a Time Delay and turn on Expire On Conversion, so the notification never goes to someone who bought in the meantime. The full walkthrough is in our guide to creating a triggered push campaign.
Run it through October on normal traffic. You will learn which delay works for your store, whether the copy gets clicks, and whether the conversion tracking is recording sales. That is the knowledge you want before Black Friday, not during it. Our ecommerce retargeting quick start guide has more ideas for the copy.
For every shopper who fills a cart and leaves, many more look at a product and leave without adding anything. That is a much bigger group, and it is hard to reach any other way. They have not given you an email address and they have no cart to remind them about. If they subscribed to push on an earlier visit, a browse abandonment notification can still bring them back to the exact product they were looking at.
How you set it up depends on your platform:
<script>
function _aimtellReady() {
document.addEventListener("mouseout", evt => {
if (evt.toElement === null && evt.relatedTarget === null) {
_at.track("event", {
"category": "Page",
"action": "Exit Intent",
"variables": { "page": window.location.href }
});
}
});
}
</script>Aimtell tracks the same event only once per session, so a shopper who moves their mouse around will not trigger a string of notifications. Whichever route you use, the rest is identical to abandoned cart: confirm the event in Tools & Logs > Logs > Events, then build a triggered campaign that matches it exactly.
Here is the real reason to use push for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That weekend, your email competes with every other retailer's email in the same inbox, often dozens in a single morning. A push notification appears on its own, directly on the subscriber's screen, and it does not need an email address to get there.
That advantage only lasts if you respect it:
For more holiday tactics, see our guide to maximizing holiday revenue with push notifications.
Before you freeze your setup in mid November, run through this checklist:
The payoff for doing this early is real. In November and December 2023, one ecommerce brand using Aimtell earned $98,892 from manual campaigns and $90,446 from triggered campaigns, nearly $200,000 in two months. Read the full holiday case study. Notice that the automated half earned almost as much as the promotional half, and the automated half is exactly the part that needs lead time to get right.
Eight weeks is enough time to grow a real subscriber list and walk into Black Friday with abandoned cart and browse abandonment campaigns you have already tested. It is not enough time if you wait until November.
New to Aimtell? Start your free trial and have your opt-in prompt live today. Plans start at $49 a month. You can also browse the full feature set, or get in touch and we will help you plan your holiday push strategy.
