Black Friday 2025 is shaping up to be massive. Black Friday 2024 in the U.S. set a new all-time record with $10.8 billion in online sales, marking a $1 billion increase from 2023, and this year's expected to be even bigger. But here's the thing, everyone knows that. Your customers' inboxes are about to become battlefields. The real question isn't whether you should send Black Friday emails (you absolutely should), but how to make yours the ones people actually open, read, and act?.
The holiday shopping season is your biggest opportunity to connect with customers and drive sales. But with inboxes more crowded than Black Friday checkout lines, how do you make sure your emails actually get opened, read, and acted upon? Here's the reality: holiday email marketing generates up to 26% of annual revenue for many businesses. That's not just a nice bonus-it can make or break your entire year. The catch? Everyone knows this, so competition for attention is fierce.
I've been thinking about how web apps nowadays seem to pack many features-from dark mode to animations, rich client-side interactions, offline support and more. All of this is great, but I keep wondering: at what point do these extras hurt performance or the user experience? A few things I'm curious about: Do developers here ever delay implementing a "nice extra" because it slows down load time? What metrics or tools do you use to measure whether a feature is "too expensive" in terms of performance (mobile especially)? Are there features you've removed / scaled back after noticing performance issues? How do you decide which features are "must-have" and which are "nice-to-have" when building something new?
When designing for mobile, it's crucial to examine your CSS styles closely. Extensive margins or paddings can create unintentional whitespace, making the page look unprofessional. As a best practice, consider using percentage-based values or media queries to adjust the layout dynamically based on screen size. This way, you can ensure that your site maintains a balanced look across different devices without the unnecessary empty space.