This past Thanksgiving week, furniture and home decor brand CB2 used artificial intelligence as part of its text messaging marketing campaigns. Over the busy holiday sales periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when so many retailers are trying to reach customers, the more targeted messages helped the brand stand out from the crowd, said Ami Patel, CB2’s associate director of brand marketing.

Retailers and brands have faced a challenging 2024, making a successful holiday season more crucial than ever. According to Adobe Analytics, online shoppers spent a record-breaking $10.8 billion this Black Friday. The biggest retail event of the year gave Listrak’s savvy clients an opportunity to outperform the competition and win consumer dollars with AI-powered, hyper-targeted, omnichannel messaging. Our experts have crunched the numbers and analyzed retailer strategy and results in order to bring you an informative recap of our Black Friday retail marketing data.

The frenzy of Cyber weekend 2024 has now passed! And we’ve wrapped up our annual breakdown of ecommerce performance. Analyzing over a hundred million website visits to over a thousand Nosto-powered stores, here’s your breakdown of how retail’s most anticipated weekend looked for ecommerce this year.

Overall weekend performance

Percentages represent year-on-year increases and decreases.

Traffic: +14.71%

As peak season spending soars, so do customer expectations. Retailers face a tough challenge; delivering exceptional service amid extremely heightened demand, while avoiding customer churn. In our latest whitepaper, Retail Gazette and Zendesk explore how utilising AI for your frontline staff could be the solution.

Key learnings:

AI-powered tools can take on administrative work, leaving employees to focus on impactful interactions

You’ll know peak season is coming to a close when the influx of pre-holiday orders have been packaged and delivered to their final destinations, and now you have a bit of breathing room — right? Think again. It’s not enough for a retailer to excel at peak season. After the surge of online orders and deliveries, retailers are put in the tricky position of coordinating smooth customer returns and getting those items back into the sales pipeline, recycled, or disposed of quickly and efficiently. 

The days of peak retail season are fast approaching. And as they arrive, your peak season strategies are put to the test. Have you secured enough last mile capacity? Are your operations well-oiled for peak performance? Is there time to implement a last-minute option to address an unexpected challenge? 

As peak unfolds, strategies are put to the test. There will be some tactics that overperform and some that underperform. It’s nearly impossible to plan for everything, and that’s why taking a holistic approach with a combination of solutions is necessary. By not relying on a single solution, you can fill delivery gaps. That’s exactly where UPS and Roadie come in. 

It’s time to start planning for the last major retail holiday of the year in the UK, Canada, and Australia. Gaining traction beyond these regions, US brands and those based elsewhere—with or without a global presence—can get in on this marketing moment, too.

Boxing Day (December 26) is a traditional gifting holiday that serves as a time to gather with loved ones, watch sports, and hunt for great deals—both in stores and online. While it follows Christmas Day, many brands expand their post-holiday promotions, starting a day or two early or extending them for weeks after.

This holiday shopping season promises to be another marathon for e-commerce brands, filled with the expected twists and turns that a three-month shopping period brings. Although, while an extended shopping period might sound like good news for e-commerce brands wanting to capitalize on the season, one already prominent thorn in the side threatens to dampen the mood: inexpensive online marketplaces.