Cyber weekend is a notoriously busy time—especially for the inbox. This year, Intuit Mailchimp customers alone sent billions of emails and millions of SMS, all between Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday. Worldwide, email sends for this group peaked on Friday during the hour of 10:00 AM Eastern Time, with more than 133 million emails sent in a single hour. London was the top city by email send volume during the weekend as a whole, followed by New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and San Jose, California. And the around-the-clock activity certainly reflected peaks across many time zones.
In Australia, for example, the most popular time for campaigns was during the 10:00 AM hour in Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) on Black Friday. UK activity also surged during the 10:00 AM hour—but 11 hours later, on Greenwich Mean Time. Spanish marketers got a slightly earlier start, with email volume topping out during the hour of 9:00 AM Central European Standard Time (CEST). But German brands weren't in quite the same rush; they sent the highest number of emails during the hour of 4:00 PM CEST on Cyber Monday instead.
For many, these surges mark the beginning of the holiday hustle. But data says that consumers aren't waiting until Black Friday to kick off their shopping. According to the 2024 Holiday Shopping Report from Intuit QuickBooks, 73% of consumers planned to have the majority of their shopping done before December this year. And brands reaped the benefits: email campaigns for Mailchimp e-commerce customers with connected stores drove 20% more revenue year-over-year during the four weeks leading up to Giving Tuesday 2024, even without necessarily increasing email volume.
It's a strong sign that marketers are not only starting earlier, but also increasingly leaning into the power of Mailchimp's AI-powered features to segment smarter and deliver more impactful, personalized campaigns. Using fewer, better emails to build deeper connections with audiences could be why so many brands continue to convert new shoppers: 64% of purchases made with Mailchimp-connected stores during Cyber Weekend came from new customers (those who had not yet purchased in 2024), representing a promising opportunity to build new relationships and lay the groundwork for growth in 2025.
Marketers are often accomplishing these gains by adopting the more advanced capabilities of Intuit’s business platform, whether they’re activating AI-generated automations or exploring convenient done-for-you segmentation features. The number of Mailchimp customers that leveraged generative AI in their BFCM campaigns increased by 345% between 2023 and 2024. And emails sent using Mailchimp’s pre-built segments, which are automatically populated with conditions and are suggested to the user, had an 85.53% higher open rate and 54.43% higher click-through rate than non-segmented emails. This contributed to a larger trend of targeted and personalized emails—including emails that only used dynamic content and/or cart abandonment segments—outperforming their more generic competition. Intuit's connected business platform helps small and mid-market businesses increase revenue and improve profitability year-round, but the improvement in performance when marketers have access to more advanced tools can be a difference-maker during retailers' busy season.
Increased adoption of these tools is good news for consumers, too, offering them the benefit of fewer messages with more relevant content. Shoppers have broadly expressed support for these kinds of tailored messages. In a report released by Mailchimp and Sapio earlier this year, nearly half (45%) of consumers said they believe that the future of personalisation will mean they won’t need to search for products and services—rather, that their desired purchases will be coming to them. In response, top marketers are using time-saving tools to get it done. The Revenue Blueprint, a report released by Mailchimp last month, found that while nearly all marketers use automation to manage email, 89% of Revenue Leaders—a subset of Performance-Obsessed Marketers who use optimal resources, tools, and investments to drive significant growth within high-revenue organizations—automate nearly the entire customer journey, from initial contact to post-purchase engagement.
Establishing strong automated systems around engagement and customer connection may be especially crucial during the holidays, but marketers who take time to get it right will reap the rewards all year. Congratulations to all the digital marketers who brought their best this landmark weekend. As we celebrate the promising results from Cyber Weekend 2024, we look forward to seeing how Mailchimp customers continue to push the envelope on creative, connection-driving, data-led marketing campaigns in 2025.