This Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), we saw one thing loud and clear: triggered email and text messaging isn’t just a tactic—it’s the engine driving e-commerce success. With consumers shopping earlier, buying smarter and demanding a seamless experience across devices, brands that leaned into identity-driven triggered messaging crushed it this year. Wunderkind’s identity and behavioral tracking technology helped brands go beyond the basics, turning intent into action and browsers into buyers at record rates.
The shift in shopping behavior: earlier, faster, smarter
This year, brands started hard and fast by sending promotions as early as Halloween, and shoppers were definitely on board. Wunderkind clients saw huge lifts in marketing opt-ins throughout November, with some brands seeing as much as 30% to 50% of their total year-to-date opt-in numbers come in during the month. This not only propelled the opportunity to sell more via email and text during BFCM but it will fill the funnel with new contacts that can be engaged the remainder of the holiday and well into next year. Instead of emptying the funnel at the end of the year, brands were filling it with long term prospects.
What’s also interesting is the timeline shift. Black Friday is no longer just about the midnight rush. And what about Cyber Monday? It’s still big but doesn’t own the spotlight like it used to. More revenue shifted earlier in the week to Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Even the weekend between the two dates grew in importance. Still, urgency ruled: as late as 10 PM on Cyber Monday, we saw a tidal wave of conversions as people scrambled to grab last-minute deals with large conversion spikes just before midnight in each time zone across the US.
Big wins with identity-driven messaging
Shoppers also don’t shop in a straight line anymore—they bounce between devices by opting-in with device A, browsing site deals perhaps on device B only to show up again and make the final purchase on device C. This phone, tablet, desktop hopping can create confusion for ESPs and brands trying to understand who is onsite during the hottest revenue week of the year.
Wunderkind clients, however, benefit from understanding cross-device behaviors by matching those unknown devices to an actual human in a brand’s first-party database. By tracking the browse and click behavior on a given consumer across all of their devices, it provides an opportunity to trigger right time messaging with personalized offers. And those opportunities stack up to real-deal revenue.
To put that into perspective, Wunderkind delivered nearly 250 million behavior triggered emails and almost 100 million texts with clients generating over $4 billion in sales across the week. So it’s safe to say that if you’re playing the game without an identity and triggered messaging solution, you’re leaving money on the table.
Urgency works. Always.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: urgency sells. This year, low-stock notifications and price-drop alerts outperformed generic campaign promotions, with shoppers acting fast when they felt the pressure. Personalized messages—like telling someone the exact size or color they browsed is about to sell out—drove faster conversions than blanket discounts. AI decisioning with access to trillions of consumers’ behavioral data points allowed Wunderkind to execute on these signals at scale, reducing the need for humans to determine what and when to send. BFCM moves fast and AI seems to be the only way to keep up these days.
How brands can win the rest of December
Cyber Week may be over, but the game isn’t done. Here’s what brands should focus on to keep the momentum going:
- Leverage shipping deadlines: People need gifts, and they need them fast. Highlight your cutoffs for guaranteed delivery, and watch the urgency drive conversions.
- Think small but mighty: As the season progresses, shoppers shift to smaller, last-minute purchases. Lowering free shipping thresholds or offering bundled deals can nudge those final sales.
- Gift cards are gold: Once shipping deadlines pass, it’s time to pivot. Gift cards cater to the ultimate procrastinators and keep revenue flowing right up to the holidays.
Lessons for 2025: Make it bigger, better, sooner
This year proved that e-commerce success doesn’t happen in November alone—it’s the result of a year-round strategy. The brands that dominated 2024 were the ones who played the long game:
- Always be collecting: Make sure your lead capture is always on, because those emails and phone numbers are the foundation of your holiday success.
- Start early, stay relevant: Get in front of shoppers long before the sales start. Build anticipation, tell your story and make sure you’re top of mind when they’re ready to buy.
- Personalize at scale: One-size-fits-all messaging doesn’t cut it anymore. Leverage tools like low-stock and price-drop alerts to create high-impact, one-to-one communications that drive action.
The bottom line
So here’s your challenge as you round out the year: think big, act fast and make every messaging opportunity count. Your customers are waiting for you to engage so they can buy—and your CFO wants to know how you’ll meet the demand in 2025. Exploring something like the Power of Identity Resolution Guide will give you a better understanding of how to elevate your efforts and become the revenue champion inside your brand. Put it on your holiday reading list.
