Iterable Releases Black Friday Insights Report: AI Adoption and Multichannel Engagement Hit Record Highs

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 transforms how consumers browse, compare, and buy, marketing leaders are rapidly updating their engagement playbooks to meet shifting customer behaviors — especially during high-stakes moments like Black Friday. This season, Iterable saw a surge in AI adoption, with more than 90% of marketers leveraging Iterable AI agents to fuel smarter, higher-value, and more performance-driven engagement.

“Black Friday has always been a leading indicator of the marketing trends that shape the year ahead — and this year, AI and coordinated multi-channel engagement are clearly central to next year’s customer engagement strategies,” said Priya Gill, Chief Marketing Officer at Iterable. “Over the holiday weekend, we saw more customers than ever leverage our AI agents to make smarter decisions earlier in the season, sharpen personalization, and coordinate mobile-first journeys with incredible precision. It’s an early look at how new technology and shifting consumer behavior will reshape engagement in the year ahead, and why AI will become a baseline capability for every high-performing customer-first marketing team.”

Key Insights from Iterable’s Black Friday Report:

AI Emerged as a Critical Driver of Black Friday Performance

• 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.

Looking Ahead: AI, Multichannel, and 360 Degree Engagement Will Define 2026

This year’s Black Friday weekend platform data underscores a decisive shift in how high-performing brands compete: AI-driven decisioning, mobile-first engagement, and fully coordinated, multichannel communication are now the operating standard for modern customer experience. Under increasing pressure to prove revenue impact and efficiency, Chief Marketing Officers are accelerating their adoption of AI-native platforms that unify data, automate decisions, and orchestrate 360-degree journeys in real time — enabling their teams to engage customers with precision at the moments that drive the most value.

To explore these insights further and benchmark your own strategy, review the full 2025 Black Friday Insights Report.

About Iterable

Iterable is the AI-native customer engagement platform that organizations trust to build deeper customer relationships through personalized, real-time engagement. With Iterable, leading brands like Priceline, Fabletics, Blockchain, and Box deliver seamless cross-channel experiences by turning data into action and continuously optimizing for maximum impact. Because the future of marketing isn’t about sending more campaigns—it’s about creating moments that matter. Learn more at www.iterable.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251203821878/en/

New data drop: Iterable’s 2025 Black Friday Insights Report is here — AI adoption hit record highs, early-season marketing surged, and multichannel engagement skyrocketed.