SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Iterable, the AI-native customer engagement platform, today released its 2025 Black Friday Insights Report, revealing record-breaking messaging volume surges and unprecedented early-season marketing activity across its platform. This year, multichannel engagement surged to all-time highs — driven by brands pairing the power of email with mobile channels like SMS, Embedded Messaging, and WhatsApp to deliver 360-degree experiences that feel connected, consistent, and tailored across every step of the customer journey.
As AI changes the way people shop, compare, and buy, marketing professionals are quickly upgrading their engagement plans to keep up with how customers are changing, especially during important times like Black Friday. This season, more than 90% of marketers used Iterable AI agents to promote smarter, higher-value, and more performance-driven engagement.
Priya Gill, Chief Marketing Officer at Iterable, stated, “Black Friday has always been a leading indicator of the marketing trends that shape the year ahead. This year, AI and coordinated multi-channel engagement are clearly central to next year’s customer engagement strategies.” “During the holiday weekend, more customers than ever used our AI agents to make better decisions earlier in the season, improve personalization, and plan mobile-first journeys with amazing accuracy. It’s a first look at how new technology and changing consumer behavior will change how people interact with brands in the coming year. It also explains why AI will become a standard tool for all high-performing customer-first marketing teams.
Important Information from Iterable’s Black Friday Report:
AI Became a Key Factor in Black Friday Success
- If 2024 was the year of AI experimentation, 2025 was the year marketers made AI a core part of their Black Friday workflows. Over 90% of Iterable customers used AI agents in their holiday programs, leveraging Iterable’s Governance, Scheduling, Delivery, Customer Journey, and Responsible Activation agents to power faster content creation, smarter journey routing, and pinpoint-accurate send timing — all at the scale the holiday shopping season demands. When AI handles the operational complexity of the season, teams can respond to consumer intent faster, execute with more precision, and unlock performance that manual workflows simply can’t match.
Early-Season Sends Hit Historic Highs
- More than half of US consumers began their holiday shopping in early October this year, setting off one of the earliest starts to the season on record. In response, Iterable customers accelerated their early-season activation strategies, tapping into shopper intent sooner and driving significant increases in pre–Black Friday messaging volume. From early October through Thanksgiving, brands on Iterable launched 30% more campaigns year over year, ensuring they were present the moment consumers entered the market. That early momentum only intensified in the days leading up to Black Friday.
360 Degree Engagement Took Center Stage
- This Black Friday, marketers on the Iterable platform focused on orchestrating coordinated, 360-degree experiences for customers — ensuring every touchpoint felt connected, contextual, and naturally embedded into the customer journey. Embedded Campaigns surged 294% year over year, reflecting a clear shift toward delivering more messages natively within the customer experience.
Iterable Journeys showed a similar trajectory: triggered campaigns grew 10% year over year, representing millions of campaigns, and contributed to an equivalent reduction in batch-and-blast volume. Taken together, the rise of real-time, behavior-driven workflows and in-experience communication illustrates how 360-degree engagement is becoming the strategy of the future — dynamic, responsive, and entirely customer-centered.
Mobile and Multichannel Engagement Surged
- Marketers continued their shift toward multichannel engagement this Black Friday, pairing the power and scale of email with the immediacy of mobile channels like SMS, Push, and WhatsApp. This approach ensured messages reached consumers exactly where—and how—they prefer to engage. SMS saw the most dramatic increase, surging nearly 60% year over year as brands relied on the channel’s speed and its ability to reach high intent shoppers during peak shopping moments. WhatsApp also crossed six-figure volume, reflecting growing demand for global, conversational communication. Together, these trends signal a decisive move away from single-channel thinking and toward coordinated engagement that follows consumers across every step of their journey.
AI, multichannel, and 360-degree engagement will be the most important things in 2026.
The platform data from Black Friday weekend this year shows that high-performing brands are now competing in a very different way. AI-driven decision-making, mobile-first engagement, and fully coordinated, multichannel communication are now the norm for modern customer experience. Chief Marketing Officers are under more and more pressure to show how AI-native platforms that bring together data, make decisions automatically, and plan 360-degree journeys in real time can help their teams engage customers at the right times to get the most value.
Read the complete 2025 Black Friday Insights Report to learn more about these ideas and see how your own plan stacks up.
About Iterable
Iterable is the AI-native customer engagement platform that businesses use to connect with customers in a more personal way and build stronger relationships with them. With Iterable, top businesses like Priceline, Fabletics, Blockchain, and Box make cross-channel interactions smooth by putting data into action and always looking for ways to make them better. The future of marketing isn’t about sending out more ads; it’s about making moments that matter.