Another Black Friday and Cyber Monday is in the books, and it’s been a noteworthy shopping season in more ways than one.
But what exactly did we learn from this year’s BFCM frenzy?
That’s what we’re here to answer. We’ve dug into the details, analyzed the data, and pinpointed the most important insights you need to shape your strategy moving into 2025.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday by the Numbers
Let’s break down the peak season stats we gathered from Bloomreach customers and see what they can tell us about this year’s trends:
Mobile App Notifications Are on the Rise
Bloomreach customers sent 243 million mobile push notifications this Black Friday, a 103% year-over-year (YoY) increase.
While this stat is a drastic jump from last year, it shouldn’t surprise you that mobile app campaigns are becoming more popular for marketers. Mobile push notifications can deliver timely and personalized messages right to your audience’s lock screen, making them an ideal touchpoint for attention-grabbing campaigns.
Email Is Still the Undisputed Leader of Marketing Channels
Email marketing continues to reign supreme in 2024, with Bloomreach customers sending over 500 million email campaigns on Black Friday alone, representing a 32% YoY increase.
These numbers reinforce a simple truth: Email is still one of the most effective tools in a marketer’s arsenal. It may be one of the oldest digital channels, but when emails are smartly segmented, deeply personalized, and visually engaging, it’s hard for any other campaign to hold a candle to their results.
Personalization Is a Top Priority
A closer look at 2024’s peak season emails shows just how important personalization is for success. Personalized email campaigns increased by 7% YoY on Black Friday and 35% YoY on Cyber Monday, reinforcing that relevancy drives meaningful engagement.
And it’s not just email — personalization is a common theme for companies across every industry and campaigns across every channel. Personalized product recommendations, dynamic content, and AI-powered insights are essential tools that marketers used to cut through the clutter of the 2024 shopping season, ensuring their brand stayed top-of-mind while meeting the needs of an increasingly discerning audience.
SMS Continues To Grow
While email remains the dominant channel by volume, SMS continues to gain traction as a lucrative marketing tool.
Enticed by the immediacy of personalized texts and the channel’s high open rates, Bloomreach customers significantly increased their use of SMS campaigns this holiday season, sending 13 million SMS campaigns on Black Friday — a 45% year-over-year increase.
A Good On-Site Search Experience Is Essential
Marketing campaigns can be impactful during peak season, but a seamless product discovery and search experience is the backbone of BFCM success. Bloomreach powered 1.49 billion searches from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, generating 70% of search and category revenue on Black Friday alone.
These numbers highlight a crucial reality for brands — helping customers quickly and easily find what they’re looking for directly translates into peak season sales. Effective search tools not only enhance the user experience but also pave the way for higher conversions, making them a must-have for every ecommerce strategy.
Key Takeaways To Build on Your BFCM Success
So, what’s next now that the holiday rush is over? How can we use this data to retain our new customers, build brand loyalty, and stay ahead of the competition?
Here’s everything you need to keep in mind to translate your peak season success into a rock-solid 2025 strategy.
Connect the Whole Customer Experience
If the peak season taught us anything, it’s that a holistic approach to customer relationships is essential for modern brands. You need to know your audience, wow them with personalized campaigns, and orchestrate experiences on whichever channel they choose to engage with — and that can’t end once they make a purchase.
To keep the momentum going post-BFCM, companies need to leverage all the insights from peak season campaigns and use them to deepen customer relationships. Data on each shopper’s preferences, past interactions, and interests needs to inform their next touchpoint with your brand, whether that’s a social ad, email campaign, or on-site visit.
It all needs to feel like a cohesive, connected customer journey. That’s the personal touch that customers are looking for to keep them coming back to your brand.
Harness Automated Workflows for Timely Reengagement
Personalizing your campaigns might sound like a lot of manual work, but it doesn’t have to be. Marketing automation was a key factor in helping the most successful brands build personalized Black Friday campaigns this year, and it’s just as valuable for your 2025 retention efforts.
With the right automation tool, you can employ real-time triggers and conditions that personalize each touchpoint based on your recipient’s individual needs, like their optimal send time, preferred cadence, and hyper-personalized content. Every campaign can feel tailor-made without the need to painstakingly build each message.
Nip Null Search Results in the Bud
Few things frustrate shoppers more than searching for a product and hitting a dead end with “no results found.” If you want to build valuable customer relationships that last well into 2025, your search experience can’t cut these shopping journeys short.
AI-powered search is the best way to sidestep these roadblocks. By analyzing the intent behind a search query, AI-powered search ensures that your search experience always produces the most relevant results.
If there’s no exact match to a search term, AI can display similar products from your catalog, suggesting alternatives that keep your results proactive, your shoppers engaged, and your customer journeys moving forward.
Embrace Multi-Modal Search
Brands that empowered their customers were the big winners during Black Friday 2024. That’s why it’s so important for companies to embrace multi-modal search — it gives customers more dynamic and intuitive ways to find the products they’re looking for.
Shoppers don’t want to rely solely on traditional keyword searches anymore. They expect a customer experience that offers innovative search capabilities like visual search, which is becoming an increasingly popular tool for product discovery.
Allowing customers to upload a photo or screenshot to find product recommendations that match their aesthetic or preferences can go a long way toward building brand loyalty. It simplifies the search process, opens up new ways to engage, and proves how committed you are to helping your customers find the products they want.
Unlock Seamless Customer Journeys With Conversational AI
From a bird’s-eye view of this year’s peak season data, it’s easy to see where ecommerce is heading. Automation, personalization, and connected, dynamic search experiences all point toward the same future: one where conversational commerce is the norm, and conversational AI is the driving force behind shopping experiences.
With tools like Amazon’s Lex and Apple’s Siri paving the way, AI-powered chatbots are already deeply embedded in today’s shopping experiences. Customers can engage with these AI-powered tools as they need, chatting with them in real time like they would with a personal shopping assistant.
It’s absolutely vital for brands to recognize the game-changing opportunity that these conversational AI tools provide today. They’re no longer a “what-if” to plan for — they’re already here, engaging customers at key moments in their buying journey to offer instant customer support, personalized recommendations, and expert advice, all while learning and improving with each interaction.
Bloomreach’s own conversational AI tool, Clarity, helped one of our customers achieve incredible results on Black Friday this year. The brand saw a 35.2% higher conversion rate, 28% lower exit rate, and 39.8% more revenue per visit when a customer engaged with Clarity during their on-site experience, proving just how impactful these AI-powered tools can be.
Get the Tools You Need To Thrive in 2025
Looking for more insights for your post-holiday strategy? Check out our BFCM hub, where you’ll find use cases, expert advice, and proven strategies to build loyal relationships with your customers that extend well beyond Black Friday.
