• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, November 27, 2023

Website traffic fell on Black Friday by 1.5% YoY, according to Bluecore’s 2023 Black Friday Benchmarks.  

Retailers were able to identify only 7% of total new shoppers, while 79% remain unidentified. 

Bluecore adds that retailers “have much stronger identity recognition on desktop, identifying 29.69% of shoppers on that channel versus 22.34% on mobile.”

Enterprise retailers -- those with at least 250,000 unique customers on Black Friday -- increased their identification rate by 12% YoY, while mid-market brands saw a 4% decrease.

Order volume rose by14.55% in the health and beauty sector, while luxury & jewelry saw an 1.06% increase. 

In contrast, consumer electronics suffered a 19.51% decline in order volume. But the average Black Friday value in that sector jumped by 30.10%, compared to 10.23% for footwear, 6.99% for health & beauty, 6.63% for home goods and 4.78% for luxury & jewelry. 

The conversion rate for personalized email campaigns were as follows: 

• Lifecycle One-Time Buyers — 2x
• Lifecycle At-Risk — 3X 
• Product Affinity — 3x
• Lifecycle Active Buyers — 4x 
• Lifecycle Lost Customers — 4x
• Replenishment — 4x 
• New Arrivals — 5x 
• Lifecycle Non-Buyers — 6x 
• Wishlist — 44x 

Bluecore based this analysis on data from 68,646,309 first-party cookies, 911,239,468 shopper events, 6,997,566 unique products, 10,014,908 orders and $1,264,344,495 in total sales across 161 retail brands: 57 apparel, 10 consumer electronics, 15 footwear, 12 health and Beauty, 10 home goods, 16 jewelry and luxury, 24 sporting goods and outdoor, and 17 toys and gifts.