Brands using Attentive AI™ during BFCM 2024 saw 2x higher attributed revenue growth. Learn how to use AI to personalize at scale and convert more shoppers.

Black Friday/Cyber Monday brings unmatched opportunity—and unmatched complexity. You’re managing more campaigns than usual, planning your segmentation strategy for each one, and optimizing across channels, making split-second decisions as traffic surges.

Meanwhile, economic pressures are reshaping shoppers’ BFCM plans—85% are concerned about the US economy and 44% plan to compare Cyber Week prices across retailers to get the best deal.

The brands that thrive during BFCM in 2025 will work smarter by activating their customer data to deliver the personalized, relevant experiences that stand out against the competition and encourage purchases.

Attentive AI™ transforms your BFCM approach by automating busy work and amplifying results better than you can get manually:

• Grow your list intelligently with sign-up units that adapt to each visitor’s behavior
• Identify more shoppers and personalize effectively by overcoming site traffic signal loss 
• Refine your audiences by automatically identifying high-intent subscribers
• Convert shoppers with behavioral messages that take your sitewide sales into account
• Generate high-performing copy that resonates with your specific audience
• Personalize send times outside of time-sensitive sale periods without constant manual testing

In this guide, you’ll learn how to use Attentive AI™ to create the personalized, relevant experiences that drive results during the biggest shopping event of the year—and build lasting customer relationships well beyond Black Friday.

BFCM demands more campaign creation than any other time of year—multiple sale announcements, reminder messages, updated offers, and segmented variations. In fact, brands that increased campaign volume by 2.5–3x during Cyber Week 2024 saw a 626% average revenue increase.

Attentive’s AI writing tools help you create compelling copy faster while keeping your brand voice consistent.

Copy Assistant and Subject Line Assistant

Part of the AI Essentials package included with every Attentive plan, Copy Assistant and Subject Line Assistant help generate SMS campaign copy and email subject lines in seconds. You get multiple variations to choose from, all optimized for engagement based on high-performing message patterns.

Brand Voice AI

Brand Voice AI learns your brand’s unique tone and voice from your historical messages to amplify Copy Assistant and Subject Line Assistant to sound more like your brand. Brand Voice AI is included in AI Pro and AI Journeys.

If you’d like more control—such as excluding certain keywords, emojis, or phrases—you can review and adjust your brand voice settings in Brand Kit.

Using these tools for BFCM means you can:

• Write high-quality campaign copy in half the time
• Maintain brand voice consistency across campaigns
• Generate multiple variations for different audience segments

Getting started: Copy Assistant and Subject Line Assistant are included in AI Essentials on all plans, so you can start drafting high-performing campaigns right away. To add Brand Voice AI, upgrade to AI Pro or AI Journeys by October 15.

Subscribers acquired during Cyber Week give your brand substantial revenue gains. Our data shows that shoppers who signed up during Cyber Week 2024 accounted for 33% of brands’ revenue—despite making up just 1.7% of subscriber lists. So it’s worth optimizing your welcome pop-ups to make the most of your traffic surge.

But optimizing your pop-up’s trigger timing with static rules means every site visitor sees the pop-up at the same time—which may be the right timing for a portion of your audience, but not necessarily the ideal timing for them.

AI Grow learns how each visitor shops—whether they’re browsing deeply, returning to your site, or showing signs of purchase intent—and times your pop-up to show when they’re most likely to say yes.

On average, brands see 25% more sign-ups and a 35% lift in welcome series revenue from the same traffic when using AI Grow.

If you already use AI Grow, you can continue relying on it during BFCM. One leading beauty brand doubled its SMS list (+96% YoY) and grew its email list by nearly 70% during BFCM last year—all with AI Grow.

To maximize list growth during Cyber Week, we recommend:

• Keeping it on for 100% of traffic during BFCM to maximize list growth
• Pausing A/B tests by November 21 unless you’re planning a specific Cyber Week test

Last day to start an AI Grow trial: October 15 is the last date to start an AI Grow trial before BFCM. Check if you’re eligible for AI Grow in your portal and sign up for a free trial today.

AI Pro is Attentive’s suite of advanced AI tools that works in harmony to recognize more shoppers, refine your targeting, maintain your brand voice, and optimize send times.

What’s included in AI Pro:

• Identity AI: Recognize more shoppers to power better personalization
• Audiences AI: Automatically refine your targeting by identifying high-intent subscribers
• Send Time AI: Personalize delivery timing when each subscriber is most likely to engage
• Brand Voice AI: Enhance text message and subject line creation with your unique brand tone

When these tools work together, the results compound.

Last day to start an AI Pro trial: October 15 is the last date before Black Friday to start an AI Pro trial. Request a demo or get in touch with your Attentive CSM to get started.

Before you can personalize your email and SMS campaigns, you need to be able to recognize site visitors so you can tie their behavior to their customer profiles.

The challenge: Signal loss limits your ability to recognize shoppers and personalize your marketing campaigns for them. Evolving browser privacy controls have shortened cookie lifespans, ad-blockers restrict data capture, and consumers are increasingly using tools like email proxies and VPNs that make it harder to identify them.

Even though 64% of consumers are taking action to protect their privacy, 71% want brands to learn from their shopping habits over time (and that’s no different for privacy-conscious consumers). They just want transparency and control around how their data is being used. When consumers choose to subscribe to email and SMS communications, they’re indicating that they want that personalized relationship with your brand.

Identity AI solves signal loss by more accurately recognizing subscribers across devices and sessions thanks to more persistent cookies and advanced server-side tagging. This gives you the data foundation to deliver the personalized experiences consumers want.

“We’re so excited about AI Pro and the results so far. This ability to better identify and communicate with our audience will be our key to driving success in the upcoming holiday season.”

Megan Edwards, Senior Manager-CRM, Tecovas

This enhanced recognition powers better segmentation, smarter personalization, and more opportunities to send triggered messages, resulting in:

• 20% journey revenue lift 
• 15%+ more subscribers identified 

To maximize Identity AI performance, ensure you have the Enhanced Attentive Tag installed. This advanced tracking enables Identity AI to capture more behavioral data and recognize subscribers with maximum accuracy across sessions.

When traffic spikes during Cyber Week, Identity AI maintains near real-time event enrichment so you can send shoppers relevant, personalized messages as they engage with your brand.

81% of consumers ignore irrelevant messages, so when inboxes are busiest, precision targeting helps you cut through the noise. In the current economic climate, 90% of marketers are using segmentation to drive sales. Plus, our data shows that brands using segmentation see a 29% higher average conversion rate.

Manual segmentation is a solid foundation, but it has blind spots. You might miss high-intent subscribers who don’t fit your criteria, or include subscribers unlikely to convert.

“Seeing the Audiences AI tool add in and remove subscribers based on which ones were interacting with a specific topic really helped open our eyes to how we could better segment our customers.”

Monica Gorycki, E-Commerce Platform Manager, Stonewall Kitchen

Audiences AI identifies patterns in customer behavior that would be impossible to spot manually, then optimizes your campaign’s segment by adding in customers who are likely to buy and excluding those who aren’t.

Brands using Audiences AI see:

• 40% average increase in multi-channel campaign revenue
• 30% lift in unique open rates

During Cyber Week, you can rest assured that Audiences AI will adjust your segments daily as usual as customer behavior shifts throughout your sale.

From November 13 through December 3, Audiences AI will exclude fewer subscribers to maximize your BFCM revenue potential. We know engagement rises during this period, so subscribers who might normally be excluded could still convert during your biggest sales.

You can always turn off exclusions entirely if you prefer to send to your full segment during specific campaigns, and Audiences AI will still add in high-intent shoppers.

Discover the five BFCM segments that consistently drive results in Segmentation: How to Cut Through the Noise.

Send Time AI delivers messages when each individual subscriber is most likely to engage with your message, improving CTR and CVR for 75%+ of SMS campaigns and boosting email conversions by 17% on average.

But during BFCM, you’ll want to be selective about when to use it.

Send Time AI will be disabled by default for campaigns being sent from November 27 to December 2.

Since Send Time AI delivers messages throughout the day based on individual engagement patterns, subscribers could miss your sale if it’s only available for a limited time or if you have fast-moving inventory.

We recommend using manual send timing for time-sensitive messages, including:

• Sales with specific start and end times
• Flash sales and limited-time offers
• Products that may sell out quickly
• Important updates subscribers need to receive immediately

You can use Send Time AI leading up to Black Friday for campaigns that aren’t time-sensitive and after Black Friday to support continued end-of-year shopping.

This approach gives you the best of both worlds—personalized timing when you have flexibility and immediate delivery when every minute counts.

If you have a reason to personalize send time between November 27 and December 2, such as a longer sales period to encourage slow shopping, you can turn Send Time AI back on.

Behavioral flows are critical for engaging and converting shoppers during Cyber Week.

In 2024, Attentive customers recovered $16.2 million in 1-day click revenue from automated abandoned cart messages alone on Black Friday and Cyber Monday—and an additional $19.3 million beyond the day they were sent. And new subscribers generated much higher revenue from welcome messages than usual—accounting for over $141 million in revenue.

But traditional triggered journeys send the same one-size-fits-all template to everyone, making your messages easier to ignore.

AI Journeys takes a different approach, analyzing your brand data, product catalog, and customer behavior to create 1:1 personalized text messages that match subscriber intent.

Brands using AI Journeys see:

• 200% more revenue on triggered messages
• 20x ROI lift on cart abandonment flows

AI Journeys can even incorporate your sitewide sales into all your triggered messages. For example, when someone abandons their cart during Black Friday, the message will reference your current promotion to create urgency around what’s in their cart.

Adding sitewide sales to AI Journeys works best with clear offers that can be applied to your whole site, though you can include qualifying text for small inclusions like “excludes clearance items” if relevant.

Last day to start an AI Journeys trial: November 3 is the last day to start an AI Journeys trial before Black Friday. Get in touch with your Attentive CSM to get started.

You now have the tools to provide the personalized experiences that magnify Black Friday success.

Mark your calendar with these key dates:

• October 15: Last day to start AI Grow or AI Pro trials before Black Friday.
• November 3: Last day to request AI Journeys trial before Black Friday.
• November 13–December 3: Audiences AI will exclude fewer subscribers to maximize your BFCM revenue potential.
• November 21: Pause any active AI Grow tests to maximize performance, unless you intend to run a Cyber Week-specific test.
• November 27–December 2: Send Time AI is disabled by default—use manual send times for flash sales and limited inventory.

With Attentive AI™ handling precision personalization, you can approach BFCM with clarity and confidence.

Request a demo to get started with Attentive AI™.