by Jess Nelson , December 5, 2017

Cyber Monday was the largest online sales day in history, according to Adobe — and email played a pivotal role in driving purchases.

Online sales on Cyber Monday rose 16.8% year-over-year to $6.59 billion in revenue, according to data from Adobe Analytics, and email accounted for just under a quarter of purchases. Email drove 24.9% of online sales last Monday, generating approximately $1.6 billion in revenue.

Email was the second-best retail promoter on Cyber Monday, but search was crowned the overall winner of the shopping bonanza with 41.7% of online sales. Paid search accounted for 22.9% of those sales, while organic search resulted in 18.8% of sales. Paid search saw the strongest growth year-over-year, rising 8.3%.

Email barely hedged out direct traffic, which generated 24.8% of online sales on Cyber Monday.

Mobile continues to grow as an integral component of retail marketing, as revenue driven by smartphones reached a record $1.59 billion on Cyber Monday. Mobile transactions have also grown year-over-year, with purchases closing at a 12% higher rate compared to Cyber Monday in 2016.

Interestingly, smaller retailers (under $10 million in annual revenue) saw a 30% higher conversion rate on smartphones when compared to large retailers (over $100 million in annual revenue). Overall, mobile accounted for 47.4% of retail visits and 33.1% of revenue, according to Adobe.

Adobe has been tracking holiday shopping this season by leveraging Adobe Sensei, its artificial intelligence framework, to identify retail insights from the data flowing into Adobe Analytics. Adobe Analytics and the Adobe Analytics Cloud are solutions offered within the company’s Adobe Experience Cloud, which Adobe claims processes $7.50 of every $10 spent by consumers online with the top 500 U.S. retailers.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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