Growth, Delivery and Clicks: A Landmark Black Friday/Cyber Monday for Vibes, Powered by AI

Every year for the last 20+ years, Vibes’ approach to the extra-long Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend has been consistent. We fortify our systems, keep the engineering team on standby, partner with our customers on the most effective SMS marketing tactics – and make sure that we deliver the uptime, the speed and the engagement our customers expect and deserve.

We’re especially happy about what’s just happened in 2023 - here are some observations along with some exciting results.

Record-breaking volumes of SMS and MMS messages with zero delays.

Predictions around the ever-expanding holiday season for marketers certainly became our reality. Because the shopping season started earlier this year, we were ready for a surge in messaging traffic – a 65% year-over-year increase over 2022, as it turned out.

The graph above shows SMS traffic on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Traffic patterns were similar, however there is a slight preference for the morning on Black Friday when compared to Cyber Monday. This makes sense since Black Friday marketing is about getting shoppers into physical stores.

And because time is of the essence during the holiday weekend, we are pleased to report that not only were 99% of marketing SMS/MMS messages successfully delivered within 30 seconds, but also 99% of time-sensitive transactional messages  - think one-time passwords, two-factor authentication etc. - were successfully delivered within 3 seconds. This means messages got to consumers at the exact times marketers wanted them to get to consumers.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday were the lowest performing days of the week.

With so many messages going out on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, consumers may be oversaturated on those particular days. Smart marketers shifted their sends to other days during the week and it paid off.

Compared to last year, 17% of Black Friday / Cyber Monday traffic shifted to other surrounding days. This change in traffic was correlated to our AI-driven Nexus engine predicting higher engagement rates outside of the traditional pillar days and encouraging our customers to send on days with higher engagement.

Our AI was right! Click through rates were in fact much higher on Saturday (9.54%) than on Black Friday (8.84%) and Cyber Monday (8.84%) so this shift in traffic benefited brands significantly. Black Friday and Cyber Monday were the lowest days for engagement for the entire week!

As you can see from the graph above, this sustained messaging traffic across multiple days is what drove us to achieve record-breaking volumes of SMS and MMS messages with zero delivery delays.

AI drove a dramatic increase in click-through rates this year.

This year was the first year our customers had access to our new AI-driven Nexus engine. The results were amazing: not only did Vibes’ customers send more messages this year, but they also saw an average 72% increase in click-through rates on those messages compared with 2022. This is impressive evidence that AI really does make a difference with SMS marketing.

This is a new level of proof that Vibes’ Nexus engine easily improves results, even during the busiest days of the year.

Achieving better marketing results with lower effort.

The Vibes platform removes guesswork, eliminates busywork and provides our customers with the tools they need during these critical promotional and revenue-generating days. We’re incredibly proud that our platform is built in a way that saves our customers time while empowering them to achieve great results, such as what we’ve just seen over Black Friday/CyberMonday 2023.

What makes us even more proud is how Vibes has earned the trust of so many enterprise brands to make sure they effectively reach every customer on their list (yes, even the naughty ones), driving up their return on investment during one of the most critical seasons of the year.