01 / Demand
Peak is a
period, not
a moment.
Plan for sustained intensity across weeks. Your calendar, data, creative and team cadence need endurance, not one-day heroics.
Fuse Growth Studio / Peak planning playbook / 2026
PEAK IS a system UNDER PRESSURE.
Black Friday is not the strategy. Your ability to sense, decide and respond faster than demand changes is.
A Fuse point of view for CRM and customer engagement teams. Build the system before the traffic arrives. Protect customer trust while everyone else is chasing volume. Then turn seasonal demand into long-term value.
Scroll the playbook
01 / The Fuse point of view
Stop planning
for a day.
Peak has stretched from a promotional spike into a prolonged operating condition. That changes the job of CRM. The winning team is not the team that schedules the most campaigns. It is the team that can keep making good customer decisions as demand, inventory, intent and operational capacity move underneath them.
Peak is a
02 / Decisioning
Volume is not
the same as
relevance.
Do not scale communication faster than your ability to distinguish intent, value, stock reality and customer fatigue.
03 / Operations
CRM is part
of the operating
system.
Inventory, fulfilment, service and returns are customer engagement signals. Peak exposes every broken hand-off.
04 / Value
The sale is
the start, not
the finish.
Peak acquisition only compounds when post-purchase turns a seasonal buyer into a customer who comes back.
02 / The pressure is moving
What peak
looks like now.
The research points in one direction: customer attention is more fragmented, mobile is dominant, AI is becoming a discovery surface, and service after the purchase is still badly under-designed. Peak performance is increasingly won in the joins between marketing, commerce and operations.
56.4%
of holiday online spend was mobile, rising to 66.5% at Christmas.
Research pack / source 17
+693%
year-on-year growth in AI-referred holiday retail traffic.
Research pack / source 17
59.9B
messages were sent through Braze from Black Friday to Cyber Monday in 2025, up 19% year on year.
Braze / BFCM 2025
9%
of surveyed consumers said brands exceeded their expectations during the 2025 BFCM season.
Braze / 2026 consumer research
Third-party benchmarks are directional and vary by market, category, audience and methodology. The operating implication matters more than any single number: design for responsiveness, resilience and retention.
Braze partner lens / What the platform saw
Scale is real.
So is the need
for judgement.
Fuse is a Braze partner. That matters here because peak puts the platform and the operating model under pressure at the same time. Braze has shown it can handle extraordinary scale. The harder question for most teams is whether their data, decisioning, creative and governance are ready to use that capacity well.
100B+
messages sent through Braze across Cyber Week 2025.
Braze / 2025 year in review
100%
reported uptime while Braze handled 59.9B messages from Black Friday to Cyber Monday.
Braze / BFCM 2025
+90%
year-on-year growth in SMS and WhatsApp sends during BFCM 2025.
Braze / BFCM channel data
17B
messages sent on Cyber Monday 2025, which eclipsed Black Friday for the first time in Braze history.
Braze / BFCM 2025
If you run Braze,
use peak to test the whole system.
These are not feature recommendations for their own sake. They are the Braze capabilities we would map to the operating problems elsewhere in this playbook.
B / 01
Get customer state into the moment.
Use the right ingestion pattern for the job: SDKs and APIs for first-party behavioural signals, Data Transformation for real-time webhook flows, and CDI or zero-copy access where warehouse data should stay warehouse-owned.
B / 02
Control pressure across channels.
Use frequency capping, suppression logic and explicit channel roles so email, push, SMS, WhatsApp and in-product messaging work as one system rather than competing campaigns.
B / 03
Build Canvas for exceptions, not just the happy path.
Peak journeys should react when someone purchases, stock changes, fulfilment slips, a service case opens or a return starts. The branch that prevents the wrong message is often more valuable than the next promotion.
B / 04
Warm before you need the volume.
Braze's 2026 deliverability guidance recommends planning a seasonal warm-up ahead of a material volume jump, typically over three to four weeks, while prioritising engaged recipients and relevance.
B / 05
Use decisioning where the decision is genuinely complex.
BrazeAI Decisioning Studio can optimise dimensions such as channel, creative, offer, timing and frequency at an individual level. The opportunity is not “more AI”. It is better choices against a defined business outcome.
B / 06
Measure whether the extra contact earned its place.
Holdouts, control groups and journey-level measurement matter most when pressure is highest. Peak should tell you which decisions created incremental value, not simply which campaigns generated revenue.
Braze figures above are reported by Braze and reflect activity on its platform. Consumer research is survey-based. Fuse's recommendations are our interpretation of the operating implications, not claims made by Braze.
03 / The Fuse peak operating system
Build the
runway early.
A peak programme is a sequence of readiness gates. Each phase should reduce uncertainty before the next one increases traffic. Click through the phases. The page will also flag the phase that matches the current month.
04 / Peak mode
Change the
settings, not
just the volume.
Your always-on programme was tuned for normal demand. Peak changes intent velocity, stock risk, mailbox pressure and service load. The answer is not to send everything harder. It is to deliberately switch how the system behaves.
Peak mode is an operating state.Example trigger timings are a starting point, not a universal rule. Test against category, purchase cycle and customer behaviour.
05 / Six plays that matter
Where to
put the work.
These are the six areas we would pressure-test first with a CRM, lifecycle or customer engagement team. They are deliberately cross-functional because peak breaks wherever ownership stops.
F / 01
Know the
customer state.
Data / DecisioningAt the moment of decision, know what just happened. Purchase completed, stock changed, return started, service case opened, loyalty tier moved. Batch latency becomes customer friction when demand moves fast.
Peak testCan the journey see the truth now?
F / 02
Protect
permission.
Deliverability / TrustAuthentication is table stakes. Reputation is behaviour. Warm deliberately, segment by engagement, suppress aggressively and protect transactional traffic from promotional ambition.
Peak testWould you still send this if inbox capacity were scarce?
F / 03
Make triggers
intent-aware.
Timing / RelevancePeak compresses consideration windows. Review cart, browse, price-drop and back-in-stock timing. Then use customer value, inventory, margin and fatigue signals to decide whether the next message should happen at all.
Peak testIs the trigger fast enough and selective enough?
F / 04
Build creative
as a system.
Modularity / SpeedPeak is the wrong time to rebuild the same message thirty times. Create modular, platform-aware components with clear rules for offers, inventory, localisation, content and channel adaptation.
Peak testCan one idea safely become many executions?
F / 05
Orchestrate
friction removal.
Channels / JourneyCross-channel does not mean duplicate-channel. Email, push, SMS, in-app and content cards should each have a job. Move channels when behaviour shows friction, not because the campaign plan says everyone gets everything.
Peak testDoes the next channel solve a problem?
F / 06
Design the
second purchase.
Post-purchase / LTVShipment, WISMO, delivery, unboxing, returns and exchanges are not operational afterthoughts. They are the first retention journey for every new peak customer.
Peak testWhat happens after the order confirmation?
06 / The peak control room
When reality
moves, move.
Peak plans fail when teams treat the calendar as fixed. A control room is a decision rhythm: what changed, what does it mean, what do we protect, what do we stop, and who owns the next move?
07 / Two-minute readiness check
How ready
are you for peak?
Use this as a conversation starter, not an audit. Tick what is genuinely true today. If a statement depends on one person remembering a workaround, it is not ready.
08 / What we would kill before peak
Peak
anti-patterns.
Not because they look untidy in a strategy deck. Because they create avoidable customer friction, margin leakage or operational risk exactly when the system is under the most pressure.
×One calendar built around one Black Friday blast.
×Promotions sent to everyone because “it’s peak”.
×Batch data pretending to be real-time customer state.
×Cart triggers untouched from the rest of the year.
×Creative production that depends on heroic manual effort.
×Order confirmation treated as the end of CRM’s job.
Research notes
Sources used for directional benchmarks and supporting research
- Braze. How Braze powers customer engagement during peak sales.
- Braze. 2025 Black Friday and Cyber Monday platform trends.
- Braze. 2026 BFCM consumer expectations.
- Braze. 2026 pre-holiday email and seasonal warming playbook.
- Braze. Data ingestion patterns for Braze.
- Braze. Cross-channel frequency capping.
- Braze. BrazeAI Decisioning Studio.
- Scurri. Unpacked ecommerce insights.
- Digital Applied. Q4 2026 ecommerce peak season prep.
- Stord. 2025 mystery shopping report.
- Gorgias. Conversational commerce trends.
09 / Your peak plan
Build the system.
Protect the customer.
Make peak compound.
Fuse works across strategy, data, technology, creative and activation to turn customer engagement platforms into operating capability. If your peak plan still feels like a campaign calendar, there is more work to do.
Talk to Fuse↗