Your Black Friday rival report: a one page template to send clients on 1 December

A Black Friday email report for a client is one page: for each of 3 rivals, the first Black Friday email you received and when, the emails and texts a day, the deepest offer and how it works, and the page the email sent people to, then what the client did differently and 3 decisions for January. Collect it by signing up to each rival with its own new address and logging every message as it arrives.

On 23 October 2026 we looked for a count of when brands sent their first Black Friday email in 2025. We found advice on when to start and none that counts when brands did. Klaviyo’s guide puts teasers 2 to 4 weeks before the day. One open set of brand emails, TargetBay’s 5,025 emails from 1,404 brands, counts discount wording, not first sends. Whether your client’s 3 rivals followed it, none of the guides we read says.

That is the line your client will ask for on Tuesday 1 December, the day after Cyber Monday. A Black Friday email report, as used here, is one side of A4 on what rival brands sent a new subscriber, set beside what your client sent.

Your client already has its own Black Friday numbers, because Shopify and the email platform report them. The page it doesn’t have is the outside view: who started first, who sent most, who went deepest and where each button led. A dashboard shows what was sent. Only a subscriber sees what arrived.

That is a platform wide figure, and it isn’t your client’s inbox. Klaviyo’s recap tells a brand how its senders did together. The page below tells it what 3 named rivals sent.

The page a client reads in 2 minutes

Each rival gets one row. It holds the first Black Friday email you received and when, the emails and texts a day, the deepest offer with its mechanics (the code, whether it stacks with sale prices, the free shipping line) and the page the main button led to. Your client gets a row too, from its own send log. Under the table sit two short blocks: what the client did differently, and what to decide in January.

• What Hartley Roast did differently (example). Its first Black Friday email went out on Mon 16 Nov, two weeks after Brindle & Co’s. It was the only brand with no code to type. Its button led to the homepage, and all 3 rivals sent people to a page built for the offer.
• Decision 1. Test a first teaser in the first week of November. Receipt: Brindle & Co, Mon 2 Nov, 07:14.
• Decision 2. Choose, before the creative is written, whether the code works on sale prices. Receipt: Brindle & Co refused its code on sale prices, and Tern Roasters let its code stack with subscriptions.
• Decision 3. Build one page for the offer and send every button there. Receipt: the pages of Brindle & Co, Marrow Coffee and Tern Roasters.

Nothing on the page says a rival’s choice worked. It shows what arrived in a new subscriber’s inbox, not what sold, so each decision is a test to run, with the receipt that raised it.

Collect it by hand: sign up first, then log every message as it lands

An address sees only what a brand sends after it joins. Every step below follows from that.

Sign up to each rival with its own address

Use the public form any customer meets: the pop up, the footer, the checkout box. Make one new address for each rival, so every message in that inbox is one brand’s, and set one Gmail label per rival. Add a spare phone number for the text lists. Each brand texts separately, so one number can join several. Sign up as yourself, buy nothing and write to nobody at the brand. Terms and consent rules differ by country, so read each brand’s terms first. This isn’t legal advice.

Sign up at least 4 weeks before Black Friday. Klaviyo’s guide puts teasers 2 to 4 weeks out, which makes Friday 30 October the date to beat this year. If you are reading this in the last week, sign up today anyway. Klaviyo’s guide cites its 2024 data for the most active marketing hour of BFCM, 9 to 10 a.m. ET on Black Friday, and a new address catches that hour. The page then says the day you joined, and its column reads “first email received”, not “first email sent”.

Log every message the minute it lands

Keep a sheet with 6 columns: rival, time received (in your time zone, written at the top of the sheet), email or text, subject or first line, the offer with its code and fine print, and where the button led. Save the email itself as well as a screenshot. The email, with its arrival time, settles an argument. A screenshot starts one.

To count a day, search one rival’s label with Gmail’s from, after and before operators and read the first and last message of each day by eye. Name the peak day on the page as well as the average.

Open each new offer’s button once and record where it lands

Use a private window, write down the page the button reaches after its tracking redirect, and take a screenshot with the date showing. Senders see clicks, and a click can start a browse or basket email to that address, so open each new offer once and note in the sheet that you did. Record the code, whether the page says it stacks, and the free shipping line.

Pull your client’s row from its own send log

The client’s row needs no sign up. Take the first Black Friday email, the sends per day and the offer from the email platform’s campaign list, and the landing page from the email itself. Write the times in the same time zone as the rivals’.

What the log costs in hours

Take the minutes a day you spend on one rival’s log, times 3 rivals, times the days from sign up to Cyber Monday, times your clients. 10 minutes a day is a deliberately low figure: it covers opening the email, logging it and one screenshot. At 10 minutes and 38 days (a sign up today, Friday 23 October) that is 19 hours for one client and 190 hours for ten. Put your own timesheet number in and price the hours at your strategist’s day rate.

Keep it fair: one new address shows one subscriber’s view

• A new subscriber is not a loyal customer. Brands send different things to people who have bought, clicked or lapsed. Your address has done none of that, so the page says it shows a new subscriber’s view.
• Arrived is not sold. The page counts messages, offers and pages. It can’t see a rival’s opens, clicks or revenue, and it shouldn’t estimate them.
• First received is not first sent. A teaser sent before you joined is invisible to you. Write the day you joined at the top, and head the column “first email received”.
• A blank is not a zero. Write “none received by Mon 30 Nov” only if the address was on the list that whole time. If a text form refused your number, write “not tested”.
• 3 rivals make a page, and more make a sheet. Pick the 3 the client names when it asks about competitors, and keep the rest in the log, linked from the page.

For one client and 3 rivals you joined in time, that is the whole job. No tool will make the page better.

A library shows the weeks before you joined

A library of emails can show what a rival sent before your address existed. Panoramata’s pricing page, checked on 23 October 2026, lists emails, flows, SMS and ads, says it covers more than 20,000 brands, and gives its $99 plan 20 competitors and 6 months of history, with unlimited on the $179 and $399 plans. MailCharts says it helps agencies collect competitor emails and share them with clients. If your client’s rivals are in a library, use it for the weeks before you joined, and check the date range and the texts it holds for each rival.

Where the by hand method stops

It stops at the edge of one inbox. An address sees only what is sent after it joins, one rival at a time, with a sheet and screenshots as proof. For ten clients the log is 190 hours in the weeks before the page is due.

Obsession’s email and SMS tracking recipe is the same method run by AI agents: each has its own inbox and texting number, logs every message, offer and code on 1 timeline with the original email, and its history starts the minute an agent first subscribes. You can join its waitlist.

Present it so the client can see what the retainer does

A report doesn’t keep a client. It shows what you watched, what you found and what you propose, on one side of A4 where the client can check it.

• Send it on Tuesday 1 December, the day after Cyber Monday, with the client’s own Black Friday numbers beside it, not instead of them.
• Open with the table and close with the decisions. The client reads the evidence first and the ask last.
• Give each decision an owner and a date, and put them in the January calendar. In February the client can see what came from the page.
• Link the sheet instead of pasting it. The log holds every message and screenshot. The page holds what the client needs in 2 minutes.
• End with what the page can’t see: a new subscriber’s view, the day you joined, messages counted, sales not seen.
• Leave out scores and verdicts. “Brindle & Co’s code is not valid on sale prices” can be checked. “Brindle & Co won Black Friday” can’t.

In house, the same page goes to leadership before they ask about a rival. The retention lead who sends it first answers with a date and an email.

The page is due on Tuesday 1 December. Three sign ups and one sheet, started today, give it its first row before Black Friday morning.

Questions