OREANDA-NEWS. December 04, 2015. Retailers are kicking off the holiday season earlier and earlier each year, however Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain key focal points of the holiday marketing season. Brands that succeed this time of year need to connect with customers on their unique shopping journey, providing the right offer at just the right time for the greatest impact, making every interaction count.

Thanks to the scale and performance of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we delivered another record two days for our customers this Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This year, our customers sent more than 2.3 billion emails using Marketing Cloud on Cyber Monday, which is a 44% increase over Cyber Monday 2014. It is also a 77% increase over our daily average in November, where we sent more than one billion messages 23 days in the month. Marketing Cloud topped out at a whopping 191 million emails sent in a single hour on Black Friday.  

Additionally, with people constantly on the move, retailers are leveraging mobile messaging. Our customers sent 16.2 million SMS, MMS messages, and push notifications using Marketing Cloud on Black Friday alone.  

Predictive Intelligence Provides Greater Personalized Communication

Not only did we deliver a record amount of message volume, our customers delivered more personalized communication to their customers using our predictive intelligence capabilities. Marketing Cloud predictive intelligence leverages data science and machine learning to automatically determine the next best offer, product, or content for each customer and delivers it across all channels. Predictive content drives an average of 25% increase in email conversion. On Cyber Monday, Marketing Cloud predictive intelligence powered 55 million unique predictions, with a peak of 1,100 predictions per second. On Black Friday, we powered 48 million predictions. These volumes represent a 67% increase over last year.   

Digital Advertising Analysis of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

As the holiday season gets into full swing, Facebook has historically had a large jump in advertising revenue. Last year, Facebook’s advertising revenue in the United States jumped from \\$1.51 billion in Q3 to \\$1.86 billion in Q4, an increase of 23%. Many of our customers used our advertising products to connect with their customers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Here is a look at ad pricing trends on our platform for those days. Facebook U.S. ad CPM prices rose a full 98%, from \\$4.30 to \\$8.86 CPM, between the start of November and Cyber Monday.


Social Analysis of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

All November long, our team has been tracking global social media conversations around Holiday shopping, using Social Studio, our leading app for social content marketing, engagement, publishing, and analytics. In our latest social analysis, we saw more than 1.6 million social posts related to Black Friday, up 19% from 2014. We also saw more than 379,000 posts around the topic of consumers waiting for Cyber Monday for the best deals.

The Opportunity Ahead

There has never been a better time to be a digital marketer, with the ability to put the customer at the center, as they engage with your brand throughout the enter customer journey. We look forward to continued success with our customers, this holiday season and beyond.

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