How digital marketers maximized the biggest shopping weekend of the year
Cyber Monday is traditionally a busy time, especially for inboxes. This year alone, Intuit Mailchimp customers sent billions of emails and millions of SMS messages between Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday. Globally, the peak email volume for this group occurred on Friday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time, with over 133 million emails sent in just one hour. London led in email volume over the entire weekend, followed by New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and San Jose, California. The round-the-clock activity clearly reflected peaks across different time zones.
For instance, in Australia, the most popular time for campaigns was 10:00 a.m. Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) on Black Friday. Activity in the UK also peaked sharply at 10:00 a.m., but in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), which is 11 hours later. Spanish marketers started earlier, with email volume peaking at 9:00 a.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST). German brands, however, took their time: they sent the most emails at 4:00 p.m. Central European Summer Time on Cyber Monday.
For many, these activity spikes mark the start of the holiday rush. However, data shows that consumers don’t wait for Black Friday to begin shopping. According to Intuit QuickBooks’ 2024 Holiday Shopping Report, 73% of consumers planned to make most of their purchases before December. Brands also benefited: Mailchimp customers’ email campaigns using e-commerce with connected stores generated 20% more revenue year-over-year in the four weeks leading up to Giving Tuesday 2024, even without increasing email volume.
This is a strong indicator that marketers are not only starting earlier but also increasingly leveraging Mailchimp’s AI capabilities for smarter segmentation and more effective, personalized campaigns. Using fewer but higher-quality emails to build deeper audience connections may explain why so many brands continue to attract new customers: 64% of purchases made in stores connected to Mailchimp during Cyber Monday were by new customers (those who hadn’t made a purchase in 2024 yet), representing a promising opportunity to build new relationships and set the stage for growth in 2025.
Marketers often achieve these results by implementing more advanced features of Intuit’s business platform, whether it’s activating AI-based automations or using convenient “out-of-the-box” segmentation tools. The number of Mailchimp customers using generative AI in their BFCM (Black Friday/Cyber Monday) campaigns increased by 345% between 2023 and 2024. Emails sent using Mailchimp’s ready-made segments, which are automatically populated with conditions and offered to users, had an 85.53% higher open rate and a 54.43% higher click-through rate (CTR) compared to unsegmented emails. This contributed to a broader trend: targeted and personalized emails—including those using only dynamic content and/or abandoned cart segments—outperformed their more general counterparts. Intuit’s connected business platform helps small and medium-sized businesses increase revenue and profitability year-round, but improving efficiency while accessing more advanced tools can be a game-changer during a busy retail season.
The growing use of these tools is also good news for consumers, as they benefit from fewer messages with more relevant content. Shoppers overall expressed support for such personalized messages. In a report published by Mailchimp and Sapio earlier this year, nearly half (45%) of consumers said they believe in a future of personalization where they don’t have to search for goods and services—the desired purchases will come to them. In response, leading marketers are using tools to save time. Mailchimp’s Revenue Blueprint report, published last month, found that while nearly all marketers use automation to manage email, 89% of Revenue Leaders—a subgroup of results-oriented marketers who use optimal resources, tools, and investments to drive significant growth in high-revenue organizations—automate nearly the entire customer journey, from first contact to post-purchase engagement.
Building reliable automated systems for customer engagement and communication can be especially critical during the holidays, but marketers who take the time to get it right will reap the rewards year-round. Congratulations to all the digital marketers who delivered their best results during these landmark weekends. As we celebrate the promising results of Cyber Monday 2024, we look forward to seeing how Mailchimp customers continue to push the boundaries of creative, connection-oriented, and data-driven marketing campaigns in 2025.
About Intuit Mailchimp
Intuit Mailchimp is an email marketing and marketing automation platform for growing businesses. We help millions of customers worldwide launch and grow their businesses with world-class marketing technology, award-winning customer support, and inspiring content. Mailchimp puts data-driven recommendations at the heart of your marketing so you can find and engage customers through email, social, landing pages, and ads—automatically and with AI. In 2021, Mailchimp was acquired by Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU), a global financial technology platform that creates Intuit TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp.
About Intuit
Intuit is a global financial technology platform that helps people and communities thrive. About 100 million customers worldwide use products like TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, and we believe everyone should have the opportunity to prosper. We never stop working to find innovative ways to make this possible. Please visit us at Intuit.com and find us on social media for the latest information about Intuit, our products, and services.
