Black Friday this year broke records in almost every measurable way, $10.8 billion in US online sales on the day alone, with mobile accounting for more than half of transactions for the first time (ALM Corp, 2025). But the most important statistic was quieter: brands using segmentation dramatically outperformed those who sent bulk promotional blasts to their entire list.
TikTok Shop posted a 45% year-on-year sales increase over the Black Friday weekend (CORQ, 2025), driven by creator-led live commerce and hyper-targeted product discovery. Social media has now become a transaction channel, not just a discovery one. For email marketers, this raises the standard considerably. If a consumer can discover and buy something on TikTok in 30 seconds, a generic 'UP TO 50% OFF or SHOP NOW' email has very little to offer in comparison.
The brands cutting through in email during Black Friday 2025 shared a common approach. Rather than batch campaigns sent to full subscriber lists, they used behavioural and predictive data to segment with precision, identifying repeat buyers, lapsed customers, cart abandoners, and high-value prospects, and delivered distinct messaging to each group (Klaviyo, 2025). Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick (2023) identify this as the core logic of direct digital marketing, which is that relevance increases engagement, and engagement determines revenue. The relationship is not incidental.
Patrick Ta Beauty, using this approach in a prior BFCM season, increased Klaviyo-attributed revenue by 8x year-on-year, with email accounting for 30% of ecommerce revenue, triple its prior contribution (Shopify, 2025). Brands integrating SMS alongside email saw a 20% uplift in BFCM revenue (Shopify, 2025). The difference between brands that win at email during Black Friday and those that don't is rarely the discount. It's the targeting, the timing, and the sequence.
Adobe reported AI-driven traffic to US retail sites increasing by 670% on Cyber Monday 2025 (Brij, 2025). Consumers are using AI tools to find the best deals before they visit a single inbox. This means the brand’s email is no longer the first touchpoint in the discovery journey; it's the confirmation moment. The job of a brand’s Black Friday email is not to sell. It is too close. That changes everything about how it’s written.
The smartest Black Friday email campaigns of 2025 were built with a 30-day runway - teaser, early-access, drop, extension, and post-sale retention. Each sent served a specific function.
Brij (2025) Black Friday 2025 Results Recap: AI, Social, and the Identity Advantage. Available at: https://brij.it/blog/bfcm-2025-recap-brij (Accessed: 15 December 2025).
Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2023) Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. 8th edn. Harlow: Pearson Education.
