Customers who got a personal message from a store associate during BFCM 2025 were 33x more likely to buy than customers who only got a marketing blast. That's not what retailers brace for every Black Friday and Cyber Monday: inbox fatigue, shrinking margins and customers who tune out anything that feels generic.

When we analyzed what actually drove sales across 1,200+ retail stores worldwide during Black Friday week, the results were clear, and a little unflattering to traditional marketing thinking. In short:

• It wasn't the loudest brands that came out ahead.
• It wasn't the deepest discount.
• And it definitely wasn't one-way email blasts from HQ.

If you want to know what separated the strong results from the average ones, it was conversations.

We tracked 2.2 million messages and $15 million in attributed sales across more than 1,200 stores in 22 countries, and the pattern held throughout: the messages that produced a two-way exchange converted far better than the ones that only broadcast.

What Did BFCM 2025 Prove About Discounting?

Retailers discounted harder than ever and still grew mostly on price rather than on volume. Peak Cyber Monday discounts hit 31% off list price in electronics, 28% in toys and 25% in apparel, figures recorded by Adobe Analytics. Adobe's lead analyst described the season bluntly: US retailers leaned heavily on discounts to drive online demand.

The problem with a lever everyone pulls is that it stops being a lever. It becomes the entry fee.

Look at what the extra spending was made of. Average selling prices across Cyber Week rose 6% year over year while order volumes grew 2% globally and just 1% in the US, a gap measured in Salesforce's Cyber Week data. Shoppers paid more for roughly the same number of items.

Across the full season, US holiday retail sales grew 4.1% across stores and online, according to the CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor. Set a 25% apparel markdown against 1% more US orders and the trade becomes hard to miss.

So the useful question isn't whether discounts worked. It's what separated the brands that grew from the brands that simply handed over margin.

One caveat, stated plainly. The market data above and the Endear data below come from different places. Adobe, Salesforce and NRF measure the whole US market. Everything below measures 1,200+ stores on a single clienteling platform. They're two observations sitting side by side, not one controlled comparison.

One Simple Shift Changed Everything

Two-way conversations converted nearly 9x higher than one-way email broadcasts.

Exchanges where the customer replied and the associate replied back converted at 13.16%, against 1.49% for one-way email broadcasts. Customers who received a personal message from a store associate were 33x more likely to make a purchase than customers who only received a marketing blast: 1.65% against 0.05%.

Here is the shape of what we measured:

These figures come from Endear's BFCM 2025 data, and Endear marks the 0.05% blast rate as an estimate. Anything at 33x should still make you look twice. And it wasn't about clever copywriting or subject lines. The brands that performed best did something plain: they ended messages with a question.

• "How's the sweater working out?"
• "Want me to put together a lookbook?"
• "Do you want me to pull a few options in your size?"

When customers replied, sales followed. That's the mechanic underneath good clienteling, and it doesn't expire on Cyber Monday.

Which Channels Converted Best During BFCM?

Channels that sit closest to a real human exchange converted best. Live chat, WhatsApp and SMS outperformed email, not because email is finished, but because real-time, conversational channels feel human. Shoppers increasingly want a personal line to the brands they already like.

Across industries, these personal channels delivered the strongest results, and they did so most reliably when store teams, rather than corporate marketing, were driving the outreach. Live chat led every channel at a 7.33% conversion rate, ahead of WhatsApp at 3.37%, SMS at 1.87% and email at 1.52%, the full spread of which sits in our BFCM 2025 benchmarks.

None of that makes email a waste. Email is still how you reach everyone at once, and it did plenty of work over BFCM 2025. What it can't do is hold a two-way exchange, which is the exact thing that produced the lift. Treat email as the opener and the personal channels as the follow-through.

The implication isn't subtle. If your stores default to impersonal email follow-ups, your team is leaving money on the table.

Why Did Clienteling Have Its Best BFCM?

Endear retailers sent 24% more clienteling messages than the year before, so this was never a story about restraint.

What separated the strongest campaigns was shape, not volume. The ones that converted best invited a response and carried the relationship past the transaction, instead of shouting a discount and hoping.

The strongest performers treated Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the opening of a longer conversation rather than a finish line. Where that conversation turned into booked appointments, the difference was stark: appointment-related follow-up campaigns converted at 17.2%, more than ten times the average.

How Do You Start a Real Conversation?

Messages that invited a response were a consistent feature of the strongest campaigns: questions, preference requests, options to choose between. None of it holds up unless the rest of the message earns the question.

Give the message a reason to exist. A reference to something the customer already bought, browsed or tried on beats a generic promotion every time. Your CRM knows what that is.

Ask something they can answer in five words. "Do you want me to pull a few options in your size?" works. "How can we help you today?" doesn't.

Let the associate send it. A message from a named person at a store the customer has visited reads differently from a message from a brand. A named sender is part of why clienteling and blasts perform so differently.

Reply in minutes, not days. A conversation that stalls is just a slower blast. Staff the inbox during peak hours the way you staff the floor.

Write down what comes back. Sizes, preferences, occasions, who they were shopping for. That's the raw material for the next message, and the reason the next one can open where the last finished.

What Should You Do After BFCM Ends?

The weeks straight after Cyber Monday are when most brands go quiet and when the BFCM cohort is still warmest. Lists cool, outreach slows and everyone waits for the next campaign calendar.

The data argues for the opposite. Returns season is also conversation season: returns reached 14% of all global online holiday purchases, with total returns value up 10% year over year, in Salesforce's full-season data. Handled by a named associate who can offer an exchange or a size swap, a return becomes a chance to keep the customer.

Handled by a form, it's just a refund.

This is where a deliberate post-Black Friday sequence earns its keep: segment the new buyers, hand them to the associates who served them and keep the thread open rather than starting a new one in March.

What Does This Mean for BFCM 2026?

BFCM 2026 hasn't happened yet, so treat all of this as a planning input rather than a result.

Two things carry forward from BFCM 2025 with reasonable confidence. Discount depth is unlikely to differentiate you, because the whole market is already there. Conversational channels need staffing decided in October, not discovered on Black Friday morning.

A third is worth testing rather than assuming: that the customers most likely to reply this November are the ones your associates have been talking to since last January. Endear hasn't published a cohort analysis on that, and it would make the quiet months a BFCM decision rather than a lull.

The brands that posted the strongest BFCM 2025 numbers were not the ones who planned the loudest November. They were the ones who never stopped talking to people.

FAQs

Did discounts stop working during BFCM 2025?

Discounts still moved volume during BFCM 2025, but they stopped separating brands from each other. Adobe recorded peak markdowns of 31% in electronics while Salesforce recorded US order volumes up only 1% year over year, which means most of the extra spend came from higher prices rather than more purchases.

Which channel works best for BFCM clienteling?

Live chat converted at 7.33% across the 1,200+ stores in our BFCM 2025 analysis, ahead of WhatsApp at 3.37%, SMS at 1.87% and email at 1.52%. The pattern is consistent: the closer a channel sits to a real-time human exchange, the better it converts.

How many messages should a store send during BFCM?

Endear retailers sent 24% more messages than the year before, so volume wasn't the constraint. Reply rate is the better target than send count, because two-way conversations converted nearly 9x higher than one-way email broadcasts.

Does clienteling only work for luxury brands?

Clienteling performed across industries in our BFCM 2025 data, not just in luxury. What travels between categories is the mechanic, which is a named associate, a reason to reach out and a question the customer can answer.