Every year, Black Friday exposes the same truth about retail apps which is that relevance isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. In fact, it can be the difference between a user who converts and a user who churns. And this distinction is important, given that Black Friday 2024 set a record with $10.8B in online spending in the U.S alone. Consumers aren’t just overwhelmed by choices; they’re overwhelmed by noise with notifications, promo blasts, app banners, inbox floods, recycled offers. The volume is rising, but attention is shrinking.
Given that 52% of consumers abandon retailers after a single irrelevant message during peak shopping periods (Salesforce), more relevant messaging is critical. And Black Friday is the clearest annual stress test for this. As customers expect more from retailers and mobile apps, retailers push even harder. With app teams preparing for the traffic spike by tuning their systems to deliver quickly, experiment rapidly, and squeeze every bit of performance out of their surfaces, the real challenge is having systems learn what each user wants. Not only that, these systems must know how individual preferences change hour by hour, especially in high-volatility periods like Black Friday.
And what we see today is teams falling back on the familiar: segments, rules, and a few different variations that aren’t necessarily intelligent, they’re just pre-labeled. However, this is exactly when users most need relevance because Black Friday shoppers aren’t just browsing; they’re signaling intent constantly. The question is whether or not your app can understand those signals quickly enough to respond.
The way this is handled today is through a traditional personalization playbook that wasn’t built for these types of moments. This is because:
Segments collapse under pressure. Everyone is technically “high intent,” so these classifications are too broad. As an example, you’ll see “Shoes browsers” and “Deal seekers” suddenly behaving identically.
Rules lag behind behavior. Someone who browsed a TV two hours ago might be deep into home goods now, and a rule-based system has no chance of keeping up.
Variations stay static. If your app tests five promo messages on Monday, those messages won't be the right ones by Friday morning because user preferences shift rapidly.
Finally, teams get stuck executing, not learning. Marketers and product teams spend Black Friday making manual decisions instead of letting systems adapt in real time.
But an even bigger mistake than relying on a traditional personalization playbook is treating Black Friday as an isolated event rather than a signal of where the entire retail experience is headed. As one industry leader put it: “Retailers who remain focused on delivering value throughout the season have a prime opportunity to drive growth during what continues to be a critical time for their businesses.”
In other words, organizations should look to redefine relevance itself and move from static personalization to adaptive, learning-driven engagement that updates continuously with each user. A solution like Aampe helps retailers do this by delivering moment-level relevance because it doesn’t operate on journeys or segments. Instead, it assigns an AI agent to every single user so that every interaction and non-interaction shapes the agent’s understanding. In addition, agents test new timing, channels and content combinations even during peak periods. In short, Aampe makes personalization relevant not because it predicts, but because it actually learns from consumer behavior.
Below is a chart that shows Aampe’s effect on time, resource, and impact. With Aampe, while the complexity of personalization increases where agents learn for every eligible user, effort goes down while impact increases.
And this has translated into tangible results for customers, such as:
Increase of 13 minutes per user per month added engagement time without extra content or spend
136k dormant users reactivated in 14 days through adaptive messaging
70% content reuse achieved through learning- based personalization, not manual duplication
While Black Friday is a good test for retailers to know how well they are doing personalization, they must still deliver relevance with a continuous, adaptive system throughout the year, not just during peak season
