Recap of Postie’s BFCM 2026 webinar, hosted by Amanda Boughey with Dr. Nicholas Tyris, SVP of Strategy & Head of Data Science
Last holiday season, U.S. shoppers spent a record $257.8 billion online, up 6.8% year-over-year. Cyber Monday alone drove $14.25 billion — the single biggest online shopping day ever recorded. The demand is not the problem brands are solving for this year. Cutting through it is.
That was the starting premise of our BFCM 2026 webinar, and it’s why we skipped the generic “start earlier, spend more” advice most holiday webinars default to. Instead, we walked through three real Postie campaigns from last holiday season — three different brands, three completely different plays — and unpacked exactly what worked, why, and how to measure it.
The season keeps stretching, and it’s not cannibalizing anything
Every year, the holiday shopping window stretches earlier. Last year, shoppers spent $111.4 billion between November 1st and Black Friday alone, up 7.1% year-over-year. The instinct is to assume that’s just budget shifting earlier in the calendar — but Dr. Tyris pushed back on that framing directly: early-season spending is not causally related to what happens later. It’s additive, not a reallocation. Brands that show up earlier aren’t stealing from their own Black Friday and Cyber Monday numbers; they’re capturing a net-new opportunity that doesn’t come at the expense of the peak.
Adding to the noise: retail traffic originating from AI tools and chatbots jumped nearly 700% year-over-year last season. Between a longer season, more competition, and a new, harder-to-measure discovery channel, the question every brand is asking is the same — where do we actually put budget to win?
Play 1: CRM optimization compounds — if you measure it right
The first case study covered a brand where the holiday season drives 5 to 10X their normal purchase volume. Rather than treating the holidays as a first campaign, Postie began testing months earlier, in the summer, and held out a portion of the brand’s CRM as a baseline to measure true incremental lift.
The results compounded year over year: a 6X advantage over baseline in early testing grew to 8X during the first holiday season, and by the second year, that advantage nearly doubled again to 15X — even though the underlying customer base grew only 5-10%. A post-holiday extension send, initially met with skepticism, retained 48% of holiday-level performance even as the brand’s organic baseline dipped below pre-holiday levels.
The takeaway: CRM optimization gets better every year it runs, because the targeting model learns from every prior cycle — but only if you’re measuring against a real baseline, not results in isolation.
Play 2: The best time to prospect is the time everyone tells you not to
The second case study challenged a common assumption: that brands with a strong, loyal following should protect their CRM base in Q4 and avoid the most expensive quarter for new-customer acquisition. One DTC apparel and basics brand did the opposite, running a large prospecting engine in parallel with CRM retention throughout the holidays — and saw incrementality ranging from 75% to 175% versus their typical acquisition performance.
The logic: during the holidays, a brand’s real competition isn’t its category, it’s every gift-worthy product a shopper might consider. That expands the addressable pool of new customers dramatically, even as acquisition costs climb. The right split between acquisition and retention budget comes down to relative market share — smaller players get more upside from acquisition, while category leaders get more value from CRM optimization.
Play 3: “Too late” is a targeting problem, not a calendar problem
The third case study covered a send that shouldn’t have worked: a CRM campaign that dropped December 12-14, about a week before the brand’s ship-by-Christmas cutoff. Conventional wisdom says that’s too late to launch anything new. Instead, it drove an average order value near $300, outperforming the brand’s other channels at capturing larger-basket purchases, with physical mail’s longer “tail” effect keeping the brand top of mind well into the post-holiday period.
The important caveat: this wasn’t a first campaign. It worked because Postie’s model could evaluate what was realistically achievable that specific day, based on a program that was already optimized. It’s a tactic for a mature program, not a starting play.
Where to go from here
All three plays worked for very different brands, for very different reasons — which is the point. There’s no single BFCM playbook; there’s a play that fits where your brand actually is. If you want to walk through which of these fits your situation, get in touch and we’ll help you figure it out.
