Black Friday 2026: Key trends, predictions, and marketing strategies

Not long ago, Black Friday success meant offering the best discounts on the biggest shopping day of the year. Today, that’s only part of the equation.

Consumers are now discovering products through AI, researching purchases weeks earlier, bouncing between mobile devices and physical stores, and expecting every interaction to feel personalized. By the time Black Friday arrives, many shoppers have already decided what they want to buy, and often, where they’ll buy it.

For brands, that raises the stakes. Winning Black Friday isn’t as simple as planning for a single weekend anymore. You’ll need to understand how shoppers think, plan, compare, and purchase throughout the entire holiday buying journey — and the opportunity is enormous.

Deloitte projects holiday ecommerce sales will grow 7% to 9% year over year in 2026, reaching between $305 billion and $310.7 billion. For marketers, capturing even a small share of that demand starts with understanding the trends shaping consumer behavior before the holiday rush begins.

In this guide, we’ll break down what happened during the 2025 holiday shopping season, the trends for Black Friday 2026, and how you can use data, identity, and audience insights to develop campaigns that connect with holiday shoppers before your competition does.

Lessons from Black Friday 2025

Before looking ahead to the 2026 holidays, it’s worth understanding what happened during Black Friday 2025. From AI-assisted shopping to longer buying cycles and more value-conscious consumers, here’s what stood out and what it means heading into 2026.

Holiday shopping started earlier and lasted longer

Holiday shopping hit another milestone in 2025. According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), 202.9 million consumers shopped over the Thanksgiving weekend, up from 197 million in 2024 — the highest total on record.

They also got a jumpstart on the shopping season and continued to shop well past Black Friday, with data from the NRF and Experian’s 2025 Holiday spending trends and insights report showing that:

• 45% planned to start before November
• 84% had already started holiday shopping by Thanksgiving weekend
• 62% expected to continue shopping into December

Black Friday is still a major opportunity, but today, it’s no longer the start or end point for shoppers. It’s only one moment in a much longer retail season.

Key takeaway: Plan for a longer shopping season

Instead of concentrating your marketing budget around one weekend, build campaigns that engage shoppers throughout the season.

Our holiday audiences, audience segmentation, and identity resolution help you identify and activate high-intent shoppers well before peak shopping days.

Consumers shopped everywhere

In 2025, consumers preferred a mix of both brick-and-mortar and digital shopping experiences. The NRF found that, during Thanksgiving weekend:

• 134.9 million people shopped online
• 129.5 million people visited physical stores

Black Friday was still the biggest shopping day of the weekend for both physical and digital sales, but shopping activity stayed strong throughout the weekend, with Sunday setting a new record for in-store traffic.

Key takeaway: Create one connected shopping experience

Consumers move seamlessly between online research, mobile browsing, and in-store purchases. Our Digital Graph and Offline Graph help connect those interactions into a unified customer view, so it’s easier to deliver consistent messaging and measure performance across every channel.

AI and mobile became everyday shopping tools

Arguably, one of the biggest changes in 2025 wasn’t what consumers bought but how they decided what to buy. Last year’s data trends point toward a shopping journey that’s becoming faster, more personalized, and increasingly assisted by technology and artificial intelligence (AI):

• 89% used AI in some way during the holidays (Talkdesk)
• 42% of consumers used AI to help shop for gifts, with traffic from AI sources rising nearly 700% from the 2024 holidays (Mastercard, Adobe)
• AI-generated traffic converted 31% better than traditional traffic (Adobe)
• Mobile generated a record 56.4% of online holiday revenue (Adobe)

Consumers shopped faster, compared more options, and increasingly relied on AI and mobile to make purchase decisions.

Key takeaway: AI is changing the path to purchase

AI is reshaping how consumers discover and evaluate products. Brands that combine AI with trusted customer data will be better positioned to deliver relevant recommendations, personalized offers, and seamless shopping experiences throughout the holiday season.

Shoppers prioritized value over discounts

Although consumers showed up in full force for holiday shopping, they were still deliberate about how they spent their money. Transaction growth was strongest at value-focused retailers, as shoppers prioritized affordability and convenience over impulse purchases.

Industry data tells a similar story:

• Basket sizes grew 5%
• The amount spent per item fell from $47 to $45
• Holiday Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) spending reached $20 billion
• More than one-quarter of shoppers planned to use BNPL

Shoppers increasingly looked for the right combination of price, convenience, financing options, and confidence before making a purchase.

Key takeaway: Treat BNPL as part of your marketing strategy

Flexible payment options now influence purchase decisions earlier in the customer journey, especially for higher-ticket purchases. We help you identify audiences more likely to respond to BNPL offers, so campaigns can be tailored before shoppers ever reach the cart.

Practical gifts won the season

The season’s biggest winners were the ones shoppers felt confident buying. Instead of one breakout product, shoppers gravitated toward categories they knew would deliver value.

The NRF found clothing and accessories were the most popular gift category, while books and other media jumped ahead of gift cards for the first time. Adobe and Mastercard also reported strong demand for electronics, toys, and jewelry.

Key takeaways: Let purchase intent shape your promotions

The strongest-performing categories reflected what shoppers were actively looking for, not just what retailers wanted to sell. Our purchase-based audiences and behavioral insights help you identify high-intent shoppers and tailor messaging around the products they’re most likely to buy.

Experian’s Black Friday 2026 predictions

While it might seem like Black Friday has lost significance as a retail holiday, the opposite is true — it’s gotten longer, more connected, and more personalized.

As shoppers become more selective and informed, we expect these behaviors to continue influencing holiday marketing strategies this upcoming holiday season.

AI-powered personalization will become a requirement

Knowing that 48% of consumers said they had used or planned to use generative AI to help with holiday shopping last year, we expect AI-powered personalization to become a competitive requirement in 2026.

Static promotions and generic landing pages will likely give way to:

• Dynamic content
• Individualized shopping experiences
• Predictive purchasing signals that adapt to each shopper’s behavior and intent

As AI becomes a larger part of the path to purchase, brands need accurate, connected consumer data to ensure those experiences feel relevant — part of the new reality of digital marketing. At Experian, AI has long been at the core of how we help you better understand and engage consumers.

Our predictive models help you forecast demand, fill data gaps with inferred attributes, and identify next-best audiences, so you can anticipate consumer needs ahead of Black Friday. Meanwhile, real-time signals like bidstream data, device activity, and behavioral trends help you optimize campaigns as shoppers move through the buying journey and ensure relevance, not just reach, during the busiest shopping days of the year.

Underpinning it all is our privacy-first identity foundation that connects household, individual, and behavioral signals into a unified customer view — even when some identifiers are missing — to help you personalize without compromising consumer trust. As AI continues to reshape marketing, we remain focused on helping you operationalize trusted data across the broader ecosystem with neutrality, flexibility, and interoperability at the center of our approach.

Value-driven shoppers will be even more selective

Consumers entered the 2025 holiday season looking for value, and the economic environment heading into Black Friday 2026 suggests that mindset is only becoming more pronounced.

Persistent inflation, higher energy costs, softer real disposable income, and declining household savings have continued to put pressure on discretionary spending. We anticipate that instead of eliminating holiday purchases altogether, many shoppers will:

• Compare prices more carefully
• Wait for offers that feel worthwhile
• Prioritize items that fit their budget and purchase intent

This ultimately means that broad, one-size-fits-all promotions are likely to be less effective than campaigns tailored to specific customer segments. Our audience segmentation, income insights, and financial behavior data help you identify which consumers are most likely to respond to premium offers, value bundles, financing options, or savings-focused messaging and deliver the right offer to the right audience.

Loyalty programs will reduce reliance on blanket discounts

As retailers look to protect margins while still attracting budget-conscious shoppers, we expect loyalty programs to play a bigger role in Black Friday 2026. Brands will increasingly use early-access shopping windows, member-exclusive pricing, and loyalty rewards to encourage purchases before peak shopping days.

This approach strengthens customer relationships while helping retailers spread demand across the holiday season and create more predictable traffic patterns that support better inventory, margin planning, staffing, and promotional efficiency.

We help brands get more value from their loyalty programs by enriching first-party customer data with identity resolution and audience insights. With more complete member profiles, you can better understand existing customers, identify high-value segments, and build more accurate lookalike audiences to acquire new shoppers with similar characteristics.

BNPL will move earlier in the purchase journey

BNPL is quickly becoming part of how shoppers decide what they can afford to buy. As household budgets face continued pressure, we anticipate that more retailers will introduce BNPL options earlier in the shopping journey instead of waiting until checkout.

Highlighting flexible payment options in digital ads, email campaigns, product pages, and promotional messaging can help reduce purchase hesitation — particularly for higher-ticket items like electronics, furniture, and home goods — and convert shoppers more effectively while they’re still comparing products and evaluating their budgets.

Our audience segmentation and financial behavior insights help you identify consumers who are more likely to respond to financing offers, making it easier to introduce BNPL messaging at the moments it’s most likely to influence consideration and conversion.

How to prepare for Black Friday 2026

Whether or not these predictions come true, preparation will matter more than ever this year. From building stronger audiences to measuring business impact, these best practices can help you create more effective holiday campaigns from start to finish.

Start campaign planning in September

By the time Black Friday arrives, many consumers have already decided where they’ll shop — which means you’ll want to launch your seasonal promotions six to eight weeks before Black Friday.

Search interest for terms like “best Black Friday sales” begins to climb steadily from late summer into fall, which makes September the ideal time to build audiences, finalize creative, and begin testing campaigns. You’ll be able to capture early demand and stay top of mind throughout the shopping season if you have your audience segmentation, campaign planning, and activation strategies in place by September.

Enrich your customer data before building audiences

Your first-party CRM data doesn’t tell the whole story. Without additional context, it’s difficult to understand factors like household income, financial behaviors, life stage, or purchase intent that influence holiday buying decisions.

Data enrichment helps you fill those gaps with third-party data and create a more complete picture of each customer before campaign budgets are spent. For example, adding income and financial attributes can distinguish shoppers looking for premium products from those primarily motivated by value, allowing you to tailor offers, messaging, and creative accordingly.

In the end, you’ll enjoy more accurate audience targeting, stronger match rates, and less wasted media spend.

Connect customer identities across channels

Holiday shoppers rarely follow a straight path to purchase. They might discover a product on social media, compare prices on their phone, open an email later that evening, and ultimately complete the purchase in-store.

Without identity resolution, those interactions often appear to come from different customers, leading to inconsistent messaging, duplicate impressions, and missed opportunities.

Our identity graph connects fragmented customer records into a persistent, privacy-first identity, giving you a unified view of each shopper across devices and channels. That foundation supports more accurate personalization, frequency capping, audience suppression, and campaign sequencing throughout the holiday season.

Measure business impact

Black Friday campaigns tend to generate impressive traffic, clicks, and revenue, but those metrics don’t always tell you whether or not your marketing influenced the purchase. Strong sales can sometimes mask poor targeting efficiency if many of those shoppers would’ve converted anyway.

Instead of focusing solely on gross sales or return on ad spend, evaluate incremental lift. Did your campaign create additional conversions, or would those customers have purchased regardless?

Our privacy-safe measurement and analytics solutions help you understand what worked, why it worked, and what to do next. By connecting identity, campaign exposure, consumer behavior, and real-world outcomes, you can better understand which audiences, channels, and strategies drove incremental holiday performance and make more informed decisions for future campaigns.

How Experian helps brands maximize Black Friday performance

Black Friday has turned into a months-long shopping journey that’s more connected, personalized, and competitive than ever before — and it’s no longer enough to have the biggest discounts. You need a complete picture of who your customers are, how they shop, and when they’re most likely to buy.

We make that possible by bringing together audience data, identity resolution, activation, and measurement in one connected ecosystem:

• Build better audiences. Reach high-intent shoppers using 3,500+ syndicated audiences built on signals like income, household structure, financial attitudes, purchase behavior, and life stage. You can also create custom audiences through our data marketplace using trusted providers like Alliant, Attain, and Kontext.
• Connect customer identities. Identity resolution links customer activity across devices and channels into a single, privacy-first profile, helping you deliver more consistent experiences from the first impression through conversion.
• Activate confidently. Launch campaigns across more than 200 programmatic, social, connected TV (CTV), and other activation platforms using our syndicated audiences, or pair those audiences with premium inventory through Curated Deals to reach shoppers wherever they’re most engaged.
• Measure campaign impact. Connect audience insights to business outcomes with privacy-safe measurement. Layer engagement, purchase environment, and behavioral signals to build campaigns grounded in how consumers shop, then measure performance as the season unfolds.

Whether you’re planning your first Black Friday campaign or refining an established strategy, we give you the data and insights to reach the right shoppers earlier, personalize every interaction, and maximize marketing performance throughout the holiday season.

Our solutions are built for an interoperable marketing ecosystem, so you can activate our trusted audience data with the flexibility to work across the platforms and partners that you choose.

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