Case Study: Cordial achieves 80% request offload and 35% lower API latency for Black Friday with Cloudflare Workers and Argo Smart Routing

How Cordial Tapped Cloudflare Workers to Power Through Black Friday

Cordial is a marketing automation platform that delivers highly personalized messages (email, SMS, in-app) for major retail brands and needed to reliably handle massive, latency-sensitive traffic spikes around Black Friday. The challenge was to maintain fast, stable delivery at scale, reduce API latency and bandwidth costs, and support custom, on-demand features without spawning and managing more backend servers.

Cordial moved onto Cloudflare’s network and enabled Argo Smart Routing—routing 80% of requests through Cloudflare and cutting API latency from ~650 ms to ~403 ms (over 35% improvement) on day one. The team also deployed a “stable” of Cloudflare Workers to shed junk traffic, route loads in real time, and run microservices (e.g., on-the-fly barcode generation via Rust→WASM), allowing them to send millions of messages over Black Friday with major cost, performance, and maintenance savings.

Cordial

Daniel Smith

Platform Architect