In eCommerce, the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) offers a glimpse on the industry’s sanity, the state of the industry and marketers’ priorities. On the sanity, some brands hit their meme game:

Out-of-your-mind creatives like this, paired with what feels like a recovering consumer sentiment, led to an overall solid season. Shopify merchants logged in staggering $9.3 billion revenues which is an increase of +20% vs. last year. This surge defied macro headwinds, signaling a positive trajectory for e-commerce after a very difficult period. As for ad spending, marketers funneled over 90% of their budgets into legacy platforms like Meta and Google. However, TikTok continued to rise in importance as an efficient ad platform not only for awareness but also conversions, with conversions rates jumping to 7.2% from 4.7% likely due to TikTok’s discount subsidies.

Drilling further down, Costs per Acquisition remain elevated but somewhat stable at around 25€ on Meta for both in US and EU. But marketers had to fight to keep their marketing efficiency under control, heavily pushing bundles and shifting their leads capturing and nurturing campaigns to the days and weeks leading up to BFCM. The Q4 2023 craze underscores the key challenge for D2C marketers, now more than ever: how to profitably acquire new customers in a tough macro environment, higher competition and in a privacy-centric world?

In this article, we want to lay out how acquiring new customers has changed since 2021, how marketers are dealing with these new challenges, through in some AI (obviously) and explain how we think marketers can improve their marketing efficiency through investing in landing experiences.