Black Friday lands on November 27 this year. If your SMS setup gets its first real stress test that week, you are testing in production on your biggest revenue days. October is the last month where fixes are still cheap, so here is an order of operations, one week at a time.
Start with the things that quietly break everything else. Check that your A2P 10DLC registration is approved and that the legal entity on it matches the business that is actually sending. Then review your consent language and opt-in sources. You should be able to say where every subscriber came from. If you can't, now is the time to find out, not the week before BFCM.
Make sure opt-outs are honored everywhere, not just inside the one tool where the shopper replied STOP. Then suppress recent purchasers from cart recovery so nobody gets chased about an order they already placed. Both problems are small in a normal month. At BFCM volume they turn into complaints, carrier filtering, and unhappy customers.
Decide your frequency caps across every channel, including email and any one-off SMS campaigns, so a single shopper isn't hit from three directions in one afternoon. Confirm quiet hours by the shopper's time zone, not yours. And map where your Klaviyo flows and your cart recovery texts could overlap, so the two work together instead of talking over each other.
Holiday shoppers ask real questions. Shipping cutoffs, stock, return windows, a discount code that won't apply. Update the answers your program relies on before the volume arrives, and agree on what gets escalated to a human and who picks it up. Replies are where recovery actually happens, and they are the part a blast-only setup has no answer for.
Volume spikes are where carrier throughput limits show up. Stagger sends instead of firing everything at once, and check that the promo terms in your messages match what is actually live on the site. A text promising a code that expired yesterday costs more than it earns.
Lock your templates, codes, and sending rules. Run one last pass on consent, suppression, and escalation paths. Anything you change after this point is something you will be debugging during peak traffic.
Monitor delivery, opt-out rate, and reply volume every day. Fix only what is clearly broken. The urge to optimize mid-weekend is strong, and it is usually the wrong call. The work that matters was done in October.
BFCM doesn't create new problems. It exposes weak points that were already there, at a scale where they can't be ignored. A calendar won't make your program perfect, but it gets you to the weekend with fewer surprises and a clear idea of what to watch.
Run your next 250 abandoned carts through CART, $0 charged, and see what it recovers before you commit to anything.
Book a Revenue Proof Call →