2025’s BFCM Didn’t Win Because of Discounts. It Won Because of Conversations.

It seems that every recent holiday shopping season during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, retailers brace themselves for the inevitable: inbox fatigue, shrinking margins, and customers who tune out anything that feels generic.

But this past Black Friday told a very different story.

When we analyzed what actually drove sales across 1,200+ retail stores during Black Friday week, the results were clear and, frankly, a little uncomfortable for traditional marketing thinking. In a nutshell:

• It wasn’t the loudest brands that won.
• It wasn’t the biggest discount.
• And it definitely wasn’t one-way email blasts from HQ.
  

From the data we captured, the real game changer was based around one thing: conversations.

We tracked 2.2 million messages and over $21 million in attributed sales, and the data pointed to one undeniable truth: engagement, not volume, was the strongest predictor of conversion.

Here’s a quick peek at our BFCM recap (and the full PDF download is here).

Here’s the headline stat that stopped us in our tracks:

Messages that sparked a reply converted up to 8x higher than messages that didn’t.

Meaning, the moment a customer replied, conversion rates jumped dramatically across SMS, email, and WhatsApp. In fact, the customers who received a personal message from a store associate were 30x more likely to make a purchase than customers who only received a marketing email or SMS blast.

Anything that’s 30x should make you take notice. And this wasn’t about fancy copywriting or clever subject lines. The brands that performed best did something incredibly simple: 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 during BFCM. And we think this strategy will apply for your brand’s clienteling tactics in Q1 and the rest of 2026. By turning one-way messaging into true conversations, retailers are nearly guaranteed to see a sales lift in the new year. That’s the power of better clienteling.

Another big takeaway from BFCM: the closer a channel gets to a real human interaction, the better it performs.

Live chat, WhatsApp, and SMS consistently outperformed email when it came to conversion. Not because email is dead by a long shot, but because real-time, conversational channels feel human. And these days, a lot of shoppers are looking for a more personal connection with the brands they know and love.

Across industries, these personal channels delivered the strongest results, especially when the store teams themselves (and not corporate marketing) were driving the outreach.

The implication for your Q1 is obvious: if your stores default to simple, impersonal email follow-ups, your team is simply leaving money on the table.

Call us biased, sure, but we’re just following the numbers here that we saw during BFCM: while inboxes were overflowing with promos, clienteling had its strongest Black Friday ever, with clienteling-attributed sales up 22% year-over-year.

And surprise, it wasn’t driven by more messages; it was driven by better ones.

Brands that saw the highest conversion didn’t spam customers and browbeat them into coming into their stores. Instead, they focused on more thoughtful messages that invited responses and continued the relationship beyond the transaction.

The best-performing brands that we witnessed treated Black Friday & Cyber Monday not as a finish line, but as just the start of a longer conversation. And if that conversation included appointments, that made all the difference. In fact, appointment-related follow-up campaigns converted at 17.2%, nearly 7x the average conversion rate.

Most brands treat January like a reset button. BFCM is over, the lists go cold, and outreach slows down. But the data says January is exactly when retailers should be doubling down.

But taking what we’ve learned from the latest holiday season and applying the lessons to your brand’s clienteling strategy, you’re poised to continue winning more business and higher revenue well into the next holiday season. That is, if you play your cards right by following our playbook: