5 stats to help you sleep better this Black Friday/Cyber Monday

It’s going to be a massive year for holiday shopping – based on responses from 3,500 consumers in the U.S. and Canada, a new survey from Klaviyo and Qualtrics finds that 65% of consumers plan to spend either the same amount or more on holiday gifts in 2022 compared to 2021. With Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) around the corner, we wanted to give you a peek under the hood of how we’ve been preparing for the influx of activities on the Klaviyo platform: multi-channel messages sent, data ingested, forms submitted, and more. 

If your marketing automation and customer data platforms aren’t set up to handle the volume of data and messages that all of their customers need to execute for BFCM, you’re in trouble. If your abandoned cart doesn’t go out on time or your segmentation is inaccurate, your marketing strategy plummets. If other providers aren’t telling you what they are doing to get ready for BFCM, that might be cause for worry.  

Fortunately, we’ve been thinking about this all year. Hundreds of Klaviyo team members across our product and engineering teams have been diligently getting our infrastructure ready to meet the scale of our expanding customer base with additional development and vigorous testing. That means you don’t have to sweat the small (but important!) stuff, like whether your messages will be delivered or sent on time, if you’re able to capture all the new subscribers that come to your website, or if you’re able to capture data from every interaction customers have with your brand with tools across your tech stack. 

With this peace of mind, instead, you can focus on the fun part: executing holiday strategies, building beautiful branded content, and connecting with your customers – allowing you to maximize sales and build customer relationships that last a lifetime. 

Laura Stone, one of our Senior Engineering Managers, weighed in on our BFCM readiness:

“Preparing for BFCM is an intensive effort spanning the entire Klaviyo organization and several months of work. SRE (site reliability engineering) works with Business Intelligence to gather accurate estimates for customer behavior. Then, in the summer, each engineering team prepares a written document with detailed information on what their product area needs to achieve to meet that customer need for BFCM (translating BI’s customer behavior data into peak throughput numbers related to their product area, translating to approximately 10x what we would see on an average day). Accompanying this information are detailed plans on the changes the team will need to make — via code, architecture, and infrastructure — for their systems to successfully reach that scale reliably and without customer impact. These plans are carefully vetted by partner teams across the engineering organization, then teams execute on these plans in the months leading up to November.

In addition to team-focused efforts, the engineering organization also engages in quarterly org-wide load and scale testing to ensure our systems can safely and efficiently reach anticipated scale. Beginning in September, these tests occur weekly, then in October, biweekly. Additionally, starting in early November, the SRE team begins to place additional barriers to change in the system, such that it is harder to introduce bugs or changes that will impede a successful BFCM. Additionally, we invest in organization-wide operational readiness training on commonly-owned infrastructure and the incident response process.”

Whether you’re an entrepreneur experiencing your first BFCM, or an established enterprise brand gearing up for another holiday season, we’ve got you covered. Read more below to see our outlook for the biggest sales weekend of 2022. 

1. Over 12 billion emails and 180 million text messages sent 

We know BFCM is an opportunity to reach all of your customer base — even the ones who only purchase around the holidays — and we want to ensure your messages get delivered to each of them. In 2021, we sent over 7.5 billion emails and 55 million texts, and as you can see, we’re planning on drastically increasing our sending volume this year, allowing more brands to send even more emails and texts to more of their customers and drive sales.  

Aligning on a strong omni-channel BFCM strategy will set you up for success, and Klaviyo gives you the infrastructure to power it all. 

2. At peak times, we’ll be delivering 262 million messages every hour 

We know how important it is to reach your customers at the right time – at their moment of intent when they are ready to purchase – and we’re doing everything in our power to ensure that every message is delivered in a timely manner. That means your daily flash sales, your exclusive BFCM collections, and your personalized VIP offers should reach your customers at the time you strategically chose when you planned out your strategy in advance. 

To make sure your campaigns go according to plan, we’ve built our sending infrastructure to handle sending a lot of messages at once – and we mean a lot – 63% more emails and 363% more texts than last year, to be exact. 

3. Over 6.2 billion data points processed and aggregated each day

At the peak of this holiday season, it’s projected that Klaviyo will process over 6.2 billion data points, while allowing you quick, real-time access to this data, giving you the ability to send targeted messages to the right segments of your subscribers. That’s 50% more than 2021, meaning we’re continuing to scale our database capabilities as we grow year over year. 

Over the course of BFCM, customers will be coming to your website looking at products, and, hopefully, making some purchases. The power of Klaviyo is the breadth of data that you are able to ingest, pulling in every customer’s interaction from every platform across your tech stack. That means data like:

• Email opens
• Website browsing history
• SMS click-throughs
• Customer support messages
• Form submissions
• And more 

You can then use that data to create hyper-targeted VIP segments of your customer base, or personalize your messaging down to granular behaviors a customer took on your website, like what color shirt they clicked on but never purchased. 

Our infrastructure is built for speed and scale. During BFCM and year-round, we’re processing all of our customer’s data in real-time. Our built-in CDP and NoSQL database can collect, store, and process incredible amounts of data super fast—and maintain that speed, even at peak times. This is a huge benefit for marketers who want to understand their audience on a deeper level, and get actionable insights that may translate to smarter decision-making. All year, Klaviyo stores over 500 terabytes of data – over 13.6 billion customer profiles and half a trillion events, so come BFCM every year, you can see everything you need to know about your customers to inform your decisions most effectively – like what time they prefer receiving text messages, and what product categories they browse through the most. 

In the short-term, our built-in CDP allows you to use real-time data to convert customers on the fly by triggering real-time automations, or powering real-time hyper segmentation – enabling you to be reactive without putting any effort in. Klaviyo’s flow triggers like inventory changes, price drops, or starting a checkout, all fire real-time messages to customers automatically. And in the long term, you have mounds of valuable data collected on how your customers engaged with your brand on the busiest weekend of the year. That means you can understand their behavior better and communicate to them more effectively going forward. 

*Bonus stat for developers*  Over 160M API calls per hour

One of the best things about our infrastructure is the ability to connect it to other systems through our APIs, which just got a major enhancement. We take pride in the scale and stability of these APIs, because if one thing in your tech stack breaks, everything breaks. They also allow for real-time data synchronization, ensuring that you’re using your most updated data, no matter what platform you’re looking in. 

4. More than 17.4M form submissions processed per hour 

BFCM is the speed-dating moment of ecommerce: You’ve got just a short time to market your brand extensively to a whole big audience of potential new customers, focusing not only converting customers you already know, but starting new relationships with new customers, who could then stick with you for years to come. It’s a great time to grow your email and SMS lists as well as drive revenue. 

Not only can we handle all of your new form submissions, Klaviyo forms are built for conversion, with countless options to customize your branding, test your messaging, and ultimately drive submissions. 

Klaviyo also comes loaded with tons of onsite experiences optimized for email and SMS, like embedded forms, pop-ups, fly-outs, form teasers, mobile tap-to-text, and more. And, we also have completely customizable multi-step forms, allowing you to collect more data about your customers, all stored as custom properties to use in advanced personalization. So if you’re a children’s apparel brand, you can ask customers what their favorite animal is, or who their favorite superhero is, so you can tailor your communications accordingly. Take advantage of our form features this BFCM and reach new heights of personalization.

5. 99.99% uptime over the last year 

We’re proud to report that over the last 365 days, our uptime — as in when you’re able to log into your Klaviyo account — has remained 99.99%, and our performance has flourished. Providing this level of reliability to our customers is why we work so hard year after year. 

Our scale and speed are only tip-top if our infrastructure is stable, and we won’t lie: Things go down from time to time, but part of being prepared — for an event like BFCM or for any other time — is working tirelessly to ensure these instances are rare and of little impact. That’s why we post our historical and live uptime publicly: We believe that all software providers should be transparent and honest about their stability and performance.  

“Reliability is paramount at Klaviyo, especially during BFCM. We set ambitious internal metrics on how available, scalable, and reliable we want our systems to be, and monitor these metrics continuously. When acute issues arise that impact reliability, we utilize our robust incident response process to mitigate, monitor, and communicate out progress quickly and in an organized manner. Leadership also monitors high-level metrics around bugs and other indicators of poor platform performance and steers teams toward producing short and long-term solutions to these issues.”

Take advantage of our scale, speed, and reliability to power your BFCM strategy today. 

This holiday season, it’s clear Klaviyo is built to power all of your messaging and data needs, allowing you to confidently execute your BFCM strategies. We’ve been working hard for over a decade to achieve this level of speed, scale, and reliability, so that you can focus on what matters most, from differentiating from your competitors, to crafting the perfect messaging to convert new customers, to building long-standing relationships with the customers who love you the most. 

Not only do we provide you with the infrastructure to send your messages at the right time, to the right person, on the right channel — Klaviyo also provides you strategic guidance to succeed this BFCM. Learn more at the Klaviyo Academy today.