The BFCM aftermath report: Klaviyo users generate $2.2B in revenue via email and SMS

The new 2023 BFCM aftermath report is now available!

Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday 2022, brands using Klaviyo for email, SMS, or both attributed $2.2B in revenue to Klaviyo messages—a record high and a 46% increase from $1.5B in 2021.

Proportionally, brands attributed 37% of their online store BFCM revenue to Klaviyo. During a time of ongoing paid media changes and struggles related to data privacy, it’s a number that represents the power of email and SMS as complementary—and essential—marketing channels for the future.

Over the last decade, owned marketing took a back seat to paid and performance marketing as targeting on third-party platforms and long attribution windows won over revenue-hungry businesses. But 2021 saw a marked shift in this paradigm when Apple’s iOS 14.5 update built a walled garden around iOS users—and significantly reduced Facebook’s targeting and attribution capabilities.

Direct-to-consumer businesses which hadn’t yet prioritized owned marketing found themselves scrambling to figure out the new algorithms, or shift paid social media platforms entirely (TikTok marketing and advertising took off for this industry around this time).

These impacts bled into 2022—but based on the numbers from this year’s biggest ecommerce event, it’s clear that Klaviyo users didn’t just shrug away the revenue woes.

Instead, they heavily invested in their customer relationships by doubling down on their owned marketing efforts, reaping the rewards of those efforts this BFCM.

In other words, owned marketing is growing alongside the brands that are investing in it. Read on to learn exactly how.

Owned marketing order amount and volume increase >30% YoY

Over BFCM 2022, businesses using Klaviyo delivered over 10.7B emails and text messages—up 41% from just under 7.6B in 2021.

The most messages went out on Black Friday (2.9B) and Cyber Monday (2.6B), followed by Small Business Saturday (1.8B) and Sunday (1.7B). Thanksgiving logged the lowest number of marketing messages for the period at 1.5B.

10.7B is a pretty staggering volume of emails and texts—and it worked. Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, the marketing messages businesses sent via Klaviyo generated $2.2B in orders, up 46% from 2021.

Total order count from Klaviyo sends increased 34% YoY. Together, the 34% increase in total order count and the 46% increase in Klaviyo-attributed revenue prove email and SMS continue to grow, earning more and more revenue for brands that invest in them year over year.

Cyber Monday’s total revenue growth outpaces Black Friday’s

Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Black Friday remains the higher send and revenue day for marketing. But that gap may be closing.

First, remember that message volume was comparable on Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Brands using Klaviyo email and SMS delivered 2.9B messages to customers on Black Friday, compared to 2.6B on Cyber Monday.

On Black Friday alone, Klaviyo drove $674.8M across just over 4M orders for brands, compared to $471M across 3M orders in 2021. That’s a 43% YoY increase in total order amount and a 32% YoY increase in order count.

Cyber Monday, meanwhile, was a similarly successful day for marketers: Klaviyo drove just over $483M across 2.8M orders, compared to $329.2M across 2.1M orders in 2021. While those numbers are still lower than Black Friday’s, they reveal faster growth YoY: a 47% increase in total order amount and a 34% increase in order count.

Klaviyo-attributed SMS revenue grows >200% YoY

According to recent Klaviyo research into SMS marketing, nearly all consumers in the US and Canada (96%) are willing to receive a text from a brand at least once per week. That’s over triple the proportion who agreed (31%) in a similar survey conducted just a year prior.

That means SMS is gaining serious traction as a method for communicating faster and creating better customer experiences—and our SMS marketing data from BFCM 2022 reveals similar levels of growth in the channel.

While average order value (AOV) remained strong YoY, Klaviyo-attributed SMS revenue grew more than 200% and SMS order count grew 190% between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.

Your time is money: how Klaviyo helps marketers scale

There’s a lot happening behind the scenes on Klaviyo when brands launch email and SMS segments and campaigns. Our goal is to empower you to leverage our infrastructure and scale yourself across dozens to millions of customer relationships—and our BFCM data shows just how far those efforts go for Klaviyo users.

Conversational and support text messaging

Over BFCM, Klaviyo processed more than 1.9M incoming text messages from our customers’ customers. In other words, conversational and support text messaging from consumers to brands that use Klaviyo was high—averaging 480K per day.

To help manage volume, Klaviyo-powered businesses used our built-in machine learning that offers suggestions brands can use to respond more quickly.

Our integrations with Gorgias and Zendesk help ecommerce support teams move quickly to answer questions and provide best-in-class service.

AI copy generation

Klaviyo users generated nearly 14K email headlines and SMS messages from our new AI copy tools launched in 2022. Our AI assistants are now live for email campaigns and flows, and SMS.

We’ve specifically trained each AI for their specific use case (email or SMS) based on tens of thousands of the most-clicked and highest-converting messages on the platform.

BFCM coupons and discounts

Klaviyo users sent more than 245M unique coupons over BFCM, continuing to highlight the driving factor of this US ecommerce holiday: discounts and deals. Klaviyo offers several ways to manage coupons and discounts within the platform, including strong integrations with both Shopify and Magento (Adobe Commerce Cloud) coupon tools and features.

Product recommendations and merchandising

The Klaviyo platform generated more than 663M product recommendations for businesses in their email messages over BFCM. This functionality allows brands to better personalize their email messages without having to custom code every single email that goes out to every single customer.

Customer lifetime value predictions

Klaviyo’s platform has built-in analytics and machine learning intelligence to help businesses better understand how they are performing, when to message customers, and how new customers might generate more revenue for them over time. Our customer lifetime value (CLV) predictions look across your database of buyers and make predictions about how any new customer may purchase in the future, and help your brand make better CLV decisions over time.

On Black Friday alone, Klaviyo generated 32.2M CLV predictions for brands using the platform. This is crucial because Black Friday is often the biggest new customer acquisition event of the year for ecommerce brands, but because these new customers were acquired via discounts, fear remains that they won’t have the same value as customers acquired at other times of the year.

Our CLV predictions work to tell brands their unique story based on who they acquired, how those new customers relate to their existing customers, and what they may be able to expect in 2023 revenue-wise based on this Black Friday performance.

It’s not over until it’s over: 76% of consumers are still shopping

Numbers always spike over BFCM. For most ecommerce brands, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

But that’s not the whole story.

When Klaviyo surveyed more than 1.5K US consumers on Sunday-Monday, November 27-28, we found that 56% of shoppers had already started their holiday shopping prior to Thanksgiving—and only 24% said they’re finished after Black Friday Cyber Monday.

That means 76% of consumers are still open to investing serious dollars into your products between now and the end of December—especially because the vast majority of them plan to spend either the same amount or more on 2022 holiday gifts compared to last year, according to Klaviyo’s recent report on ecommerce trends and consumer spending.

Our survey this week also found that 37% of consumers said this year’s BFCM discounts were smaller than they expected, and 89% expect brands to continue offering deals before Christmas—which means there’s massive opportunity for ecommerce businesses to:

1. Analyze your marketing data from BFCM.
2. Figure out what worked—and what didn’t.
3. Pivot if necessary.
4. Continue implementing winning email and SMS strategies to keep the momentum going strong, now through the end of the year (shipping deadlines run through December 23).

Not sure how to put your BFCM data to good use over the next few weeks? Klaviyo’s learning tools can help. Here’s how it works:

• Predictive analytics help you forecast a customer’s next order date, lifetime value, churn risk, spending potential, and more.
• Rich pre-built and custom reporting give you insights on marketing performance, customers, ROI, and the other marketing tools in your tech stack.
• Peer benchmarks show you how your campaigns compare to those from companies like yours, and offer suggestions on how to improve.
• Automated A/B testing lets you test your Black Friday emails, texts, and sign-up forms to learn the best ways to communicate with your customers during the Cyber Weekend.

Remember: Klaviyo is more than just a marketing automation platform. It’s also a powerful database that gives you the full story on every customer who visits—what makes them click, what makes them bounce, and what makes them buy. Over time, it reveals trends that help you acquire and retain new customers while inspiring existing customers to buy again.

With Klaviyo, it’s easy to talk to every customer like you know them, and grow your business—on your own terms.