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Every year for the last 25 years, Vibes’ approach to the kickoff of the holiday season has been consistent. We fortify our systems, keep the engineering team on standby, partner with our customers on the most effective SMS marketing tactics, and make sure that we deliver the uptime, the speed and the engagement our customers expect and deserve.
We’re especially happy about what’s just happened in 2024 - here are some of those exciting results.
Predictions around the ever-expanding holiday season for marketers came as no surprise to us. Despite the anticipated surge of holiday-related messages spanning a longer period of time, the results our customers saw were amazing: not only did they see an average 26% higher engagement rate on their Black Friday weekend messages, but they also saw an average 18% increase in mobile-attributed revenue compared with Black Friday weekend 2023.
So what were the key drivers of such improved performance seen by these retailers over Black Friday Weekend 2024? Glad you asked.
Consumer enthusiasm for SMS continues to grow.
Compared with 2023, Vibes' 3.7x increase in message volume just on Black Friday alone further proves how SMS is the preferred way for consumers to interact with the brands they love.
We knew consumers were not only going to see an unprecedented number of messages more days in a row this holiday, but we also expected there could be a significant uptick in a single day.
Here's how Vibes helped our customers stand out from the flurry of holiday messaging this season.
Vibes' AI-powered tools improved message performance.
Here are a few examples of our customers' success from using certain Vibes' AI-powered features in our platform.
10% of Vibes customers took our AI-generated SMS copy recommendations - and they worked!
Our AI-generated copy recommendations significantly improved subscriber engagement for our customers who took advantage of it.
One specialty retailer applied data-driven SMS copy recommendations to their planned SMS sends for Black Friday weekend to their entire list of 3.5M subscribers.
The Results: the brand saw an 18% increase in their click-thru rate compared to their 2023 Black Friday weekend messages that did not incorporate AI-generated copy recommendations.
Vibes predicted the best send days to stand out from the crowd - and we were right!
We forecasted optimal days that our customers should send their holiday messages to help them stand out among their competitors.
The Results:
- One specialty retailer’s holiday MMS click-thru rate was 20% higher than their average CTR for all of 2024.
- Another apparel-specific retailer increased their holiday click-thru rates by 22% compared to their holiday SMS messages in 2023 that were not optimized for ideal send days.
Vibes AI-powered tools not only improved our customers' holiday results, but also made it easier than ever for them to use the tools that fueled such great results. That's because our platform is built in a way that removes guesswork, eliminates busywork and saves our customers time - all while producing remarkable results such as what we’ve just seen over Black Friday weekend 2024.
Record-breaking MMS message volume with revenue-driving impact.
While Vibes predicted our customers would see success with their messages on other days besides Black Friday & Cyber Monday, by no means were we recommending that they avoid these key days altogether. So it came as no surprise to us when we saw slightly higher volumes of messages sent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year.
The difference this year, however, was that the increased volume of messages was driven by more MMS volume than ever before: Black Friday was up 1.5x over 2023 for MMS, while Cyber Monday was up a whopping 10x over 2023 for MMS.
The Results: a large apparel retailer, for instance, who sent a combination of SMS and MMS promotional messages to their subscribers over the holiday weekend saw their MMS messages earn an average $0.375/message, over 2x greater than their SMS messages that earned an average $0.018/message.
On top of the business impact seen by MMS vs. SMS, this increased usage of images and videos by brands as a means of providing a richer experience to their customers is further evidence of how the market is getting ready for the next era of mobile message marketing: RCS business messaging.
Vibes is incredibly proud to remain the trusted mobile engagement partner to so many enterprise brands to make sure they effectively reach every customer on their list (yes, even the naughty ones), and drive up their return on investment during one of the most critical seasons of the year.
Results are based on Vibes retail customer data, anonymized by request, from Sunday, November 24th through Monday, December 2nd (AKA Cyber Monday) 2024.
