Email remains top channel for Black Friday campaigns - SMS gains ground

According to the study, email marketing is still most effective around Black Friday as opposed to Cyber Monday.

Email marketing campaigns were particularly successful on Black Friday. Over 40 percent of the weekend's campaigns were sent on this day and benefited from an average order value of 9.44. While 30 percent of the campaigns on Cyber Monday took place over the weekend, the average number of orders was only 5.56.

In marketing automation, shopping cart recovery emails performed significantly better in the 2018 Black Friday period than in 2017.

In 2017, the open rate for abandoned cart emails was 37.69%, the click-through rate was 7.5% and the order rate was 1.65%. While the open rate fell to 34% in 2018, the click-through rate rose to 9% and the order rate to 2.13%.

The most surprising thing about this holiday weekend: Marketers switched to SMS marketing to reach their customers. On Black Friday alone, 33 times more SMS messages were sent than on a normal working day. Some Omnisend customers stated that SMS campaigns achieved an ROI of over 2000 percent during the holiday weekend.

Rytis Lauris, CEO of Omnisend: "The figures show that email marketing is still the top channel for the Black Friday period. We know that the success rate of cart abandonment automation is increasing year on year and that SMS campaigns can be used to increase profitability. With the growth of SMS marketing, we're seeing the channel further amplify already high-performing email campaigns, offering our marketers a more effective connection with their customers and an associated higher ROI."

Marketers should therefore start using SMS campaigns and integrate the channel into their email automation workflows to achieve very good results more regularly.