In this article…
As marketers gear up for the 2025 holiday season, economic turbulence, tariffs, and shifting digital habits are changing how and where consumers shop. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are still set to be the crown jewels of retail, but winning this year means leaning into data, omnichannel activation, and tools that help you do more with less as you start your Black Friday planning.
Let’s explore this year’s Black Friday trends in relation to last year’s and how to make the most of every opportunity in the 2025 holiday season.
Spending trends we saw in 2024
After years of economic uncertainty, Black Friday 2024 marked a return to retail “normalcy” with record-setting online and in-store shopping that reflected growing optimism and smarter behaviors:
- Online Black Friday sales increased by 10.2% from 2023, largely due to better-timed deals and earlier shopping.
- Mobile shopping made up 69% of global purchases.
- In-store traffic rebounded, surpassing online during Cyber Week for the first time in years.
- Buy now, pay later (BNPL) added $686 million to online sales — an 8.8% YoY increase — as consumers spread out their holiday spending.
- Retailers using AI tools (like chatbots and shopping assistants) saw up to 15% more conversions.
Ultimately, last year’s Black Friday e-commerce trends showed that shoppers prioritized flexible payments, value, and easy, personalized buying experiences.
Key products and categories in 2024
After years of favoring lower-cost essentials, consumers returned to higher-ticket purchases during Cyber Week. The share of expensive goods sold online rose over 15% compared to pre-season figures, with AI-powered product recommendations leading consumers to top-selling products like:
- AirPods Pro
- Ninja Creami
- Our Place Always Pan
- Vitamix blenders
- Oura Ring
The highest-performing gift categories included electronics, apparel, furniture and bedding, groceries, and cosmetics.
2024 Black Friday trends we expect to continue in 2025
As we reflect on a record-breaking 2024 holiday season, we predict many of the key Cyber Monday trends and Black Friday strategies for retailers in 2024 will carry over and intensify in 2025:
- Mobile will remain the primary shopping channel.
- The shift to early shopping will persist.
- AI-driven efficiencies will play an increasing role.
- Retailers that focus on the customer experience will capture the most wallet share.
As a marketer, you can use these insights to plan your Black Friday e-commerce strategy and meet audiences where and when they scroll and shop.
Projected growth YoY
While 2025 holiday retail shopping may not match the explosive growth of 2023 to 2024, consumers are still expected to show up in force for Black Friday in 2025. The National Retail Federation projects that overall U.S. holiday sales will rise between 2.7% and 3.7% compared to last year.
Experian’s 2025 Q1 consumer data paints a more nuanced picture:
- Mass retail transactions remain above 2024 levels, but YoY growth is slowing, from +8% in January to +4% in May.
- Department stores, which grew 10% YoY in January, have since declined to -3% by May.
- Apparel saw a similar trajectory, slipping from +7% growth in Q1 to slightly negative growth leading up to the summer months.
This slowdown suggests early signs of consumer fatigue, especially in discretionary categories, as inflation and tariffs continue to erode the spending power of price-sensitive consumers and small brands that rely heavily on imports.
Emerging trends and behaviors to expect in 2025
With inflation still weighing on household budgets and new tariffs potentially reducing consumer spending power by up to $78 billion, brands and shoppers are entering the holiday season with uncertainty. Roughly 91% of consumers may adjust their buying habits in response to tariff-driven price increases and inflation.
Consumers are still motivated by value, but they’ll expect more for their money and may start deal-hunting even earlier this season. You’ll need to be agile with your messaging, inventory, and budget allocation, as shoppers will still spend when the experience is seamless, personalized, and smart.
Let’s explore the key trends shaping the 2025 holiday season and how you can build them into your omnichannel marketing plan before the rush hits.
Omnichannel campaigns
In 2025, holiday shoppers will be more intentional than impulsive, which means they may zigzag between channels —browsing products on TikTok, watching TV ads, researching on Google, and checking out in-store or online before purchasing. They’ll want consistent, personalized experiences no matter where they engage.
This means you can’t rely on a single sales touchpoint anymore and must deliver a seamless experience wherever your audience spends time. Forrester shows 21% of global B2C leaders are already prioritizing omnichannel, which makes it a competitive necessity.
Fortunately, these efforts pay off. Omnichannel shoppers spend 1.5x more per month than those who shop on a single channel.
How Experian helps
Experian simplifies omnichannel marketing. Our identity graph connects hashed emails, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), connected TV (CTV) IDs, and more so you can define your audience once and reach them consistently across every major channel.
With unified data, identity, and activation, we help you cut through platform silos and deliver coordinated, cross-device campaigns that actually feel connected.
Mobile first
In 2024, over 70% of orders and $195 billion in sales happened on mobile devices, according to Salesforce. As more consumers browse holiday deals from the couch, car, or checkout line, mobile-first shopping is among the top Cyber Monday retail trends and the main channel for on-the-go purchases.
For marketers, this means your mobile experience can make or break your Black Friday results. Responsive design, fast load times, and smooth checkout flows are the new expectations. Brands that invest in sleek mobile sites, intuitive apps, and frictionless buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) options will better meet and convert customers where they are at key moments.
How Experian helps
With Experian, you can reach mobile-first shoppers precisely at scale. Our identity graph connects MAIDs to individuals, so you can activate campaigns across mobile apps, SMS, and social with confidence. Define your audience once and deliver consistently personalized offers wherever they scroll, search, or shop.
CTV
On Black Friday 2025, shoppers won’t just be scrolling — they’ll be streaming, too. CTV continues to surge as a key channel for holiday shoppers, with viewership far outpacing ad spend. In 2024, CTV drove 31% of digital audience activation revenue. With nearly half of U.S. viewers expected to tune into free ad-supported TV (FAST) in 2025, CTV is becoming a core part of the Black Friday media mix.
Still, many marketers underestimate the channel, assuming it’s strictly an upper-funnel awareness channel rather than a direct driver of conversions. In reality, CTV can influence high-intent holiday shoppers closer to purchase than many assume.
With more consumers engaging with FAST during the holidays, CTV offers scalable, measurable reach and can fuel conversions across the entire funnel. And when paired with identity resolution and cross-device targeting, it becomes a powerful full-funnel tool.
How Experian helps
Experian gives marketers the household-level insights and activation capabilities to reach the right shoppers at the right frequency across platforms — a must for a high-volume weekend like Black Friday. Our identity graph connects devices within a household to manage frequency, unify messaging, and eliminate waste.
Plus, with support for Universal IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2), you can activate audiences across CTV environments — including FAST — using login-based, privacy-compliant signals for a campaign that connects, converts, and performs on the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
Signal loss
Although Google has reversed its plan to phase out third-party cookies, 40% of browser traffic no longer supports them. You now need various identifiers across devices and platforms to get a complete customer view, especially during Black Friday when reach and precision are key.
That’s why marketers are shifting to alternative IDs like UID2, ID5, and Hadron ID to maintain reach. In 2024, we saw a 50% increase in Experian clients using alternative IDs and a 30% jump in the number resolved to individuals in our Digital Graph. These IDs are unlocking up to 60% incremental reach in campaigns compared to cookies.
Preparing a multi-ID approach and incorporating privacy-first strategies, such as contextual targeting, can give you a competitive edge this holiday season.
How Experian helps
Experian’s identity solutions connect all your digital and offline identifiers into a single, privacy-forward customer profile. This lets you recognize and reach your audiences no matter what device or platform they’re using.
Plus, with Contextually-Indexed Audiences, you can activate high-performing segments instantly in major demand-side platforms (DSPs) without cookies to maintain and improve addressability during the holidays.
RMNs
Retail media networks (RMNs) are set to capture 20% of digital ad spend in 2025. In particular, off-site retail media is expected to surge 42.1% this year, driving more Black Friday campaigns into channels like CTV, programmatic, and social.
This shift reflects a growing demand for full-funnel strategies, broader reach, and cross-channel measurement. RMNs that extend their first-party data beyond owned platforms will be best positioned to deliver results during peak shopping periods like Cyber Week.
However, off-site success hinges on clean, connected data. Many RMNs still face fragmented views of their customers, making it harder to scale audiences and measure performance.
How Experian helps
Experian helps RMNs scale off-site by resolving fragmented identities, enriching first-party data, and enabling seamless activation across channels. Our identity graph connects key digital identifiers to unify customer profiles, while our audience insights add depth with demographic, behavioral, and purchase data.
Curation
Curation is quickly becoming a go-to Black Friday marketing strategy, helping advertisers connect with high-value audiences by blending inventory with audience and contextual data. In fact, by 2026, private marketplace ad spending is projected to grow by $31 billion.
Instead of choosing between wide-open auctions or direct publisher deals, curation offers a powerful middle ground through curated private marketplaces (PMPs) built on first-party publisher data, contextual signals, and alternative IDs.
How Experian helps
Now unified with Audigent, Experian is setting a new standard for curated media buying. Our Curated Deals combine Experian’s powerful identity and data capabilities with Audigent’s flexible activation and audience customization.
You can activate high-performing audiences across DSPs or directly through Audigent’s PMPs to maximize precision, privacy, and scale ahead of the biggest shopping week of the year.
AI-powered shopping experiences
AI is becoming a co-pilot for holiday shoppers and reshaping the customer journey. From researching gift ideas and comparing prices to relying on personalized product recommendations and AI chatbots for faster service, consumers are using AI to shop smarter.
Salesforce reports that AI influenced 19% of holiday purchases in 2024 — a 6% increase from the previous year. In an Experian survey, shoppers shared they’re also using AI to help with BOPIS logistics and even choosing which BNPL option to use at checkout. Influencer content powered by AI and social algorithms is also guiding purchases in real time.
This holiday season, brands that weave AI into their digital storefronts, payment options, and social strategies will drive conversion.
How Experian helps
Experian uses AI and machine learning to help marketers deliver faster, smarter Black Friday campaigns. Our Digital Graph improves targeting with advanced household connections, while machine learning models fill in data gaps and identify high-intent shoppers. We also offer AI-powered audience recommendations and real-time contextual signals, enabling you to quickly build and activate the right segments at scale.
How to prepare for Black Friday 2025
Now that we’ve covered Black Friday trends for this year, it’s time to talk about how you can build them into a data-powered marketing strategy. Here’s where we suggest you focus your Black Friday planning for Cyber Week 2025.
Understand and segment your audience
Winning Black Friday 2025 starts with knowing your audience and how they shop so you can reach them at optimal times with messaging that resonates. Whether you’re targeting early-bird deal hunters or last-minute gifters, audience precision is the foundation for success this holiday season — and Experian can help.
Purchase intent
Drive performance by identifying consumers actively in the market for holiday purchases. With Experian’s holiday shopping audiences (available across major DSPs and platforms like Audigent, The Trade Desk, and DirectTV), you can reach:
- Last-Minute Shoppers
- One-Stop Holiday Shoppers
- Post-Holiday Shoppers
- Heavy Gift Givers
These intent-rich segments can help you capture demand at every phase of the season.
Spending behavior
While some consumers may splurge this year, others are tightening their belts due to economic turbulence. Experian’s pre-built holiday audiences help you target accordingly, with segments like:
- Holiday High Spenders and Moderate Spenders
- Big Box/Club Stores
- Discount Holiday Shoppers, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday Shoppers
These segments can help you optimize campaign spend based on wallet size.
Channel preferences
Knowing where your audience shops is just as important as how much they spend or what they buy. Experian offers audiences like:
- eCommerce Diehards
- Brick-and-Mortar Diehards
- Impulse Buyers
- BOPIS Shoppers
Tailor your media mix and creative strategy to align with their channel behavior, whether they’re browsing in-store, online, or on social.
Demographic, lifestyle, and behavioral data
Experian helps you tap into rich demographic and lifestyle data to better understand and engage high-value segments, whether that’s suburban deal hunters, Gen Z beauty buyers, or luxury holiday splurgers.
And by layering in Experian Marketing Attributes — 5,000+ attributes that include financial behaviors, interests, shopping patterns, car ownership, media consumption, and more — you can gain a clearer picture of age, gender, purchase behaviors, and content habits for refined holiday targeting.
With our data marketplace, audiences are more accessible and actionable than ever. We offer:
- Diverse, high-fidelity partner audiences
- Easily activate audiences from 31+ premium data providers, including:
- Attain: Real-time, permissioned transaction data from 8 million U.S. consumers
- Alliant: Predictive audiences built from billions of consumer transactions across key verticals
- Circana: Loyalty-based CPG and general merchandise audiences
- Dun & Bradstreet: Privacy-compliant B2B audiences based on firmographic and professional attributes
- Easily activate audiences from 31+ premium data providers, including:
- Flexible activation across top platforms
- Our identity graph powers our data marketplace, enabling audiences to be easily activated and highly addressable across display, mobile, and CTV with 10+ activation platforms, including Madhive, Open AP, Optimum, and Yieldmo.
- Privacy-first audience planning
- All data in our marketplace meets strict privacy and compliance standards, helping brands scale campaigns confidently.
- Custom and pre-built audience options
- Mix and match from 2,400+ Experian Audiences and Partner Audiences to find the right shoppers and meet your campaign goals.
Our data marketplace delivers the people you want to reach, where you need to reach them, with the insights to optimize in real time.
Personalize promotions
One-size-fits-all promotions won’t cut it in 2025. Consumers expect relevance at every touchpoint and ignore what feels generic or off-base. With the abundance of Black Friday offers, shoppers are filtering fast and prioritizing brands that understand their needs, preferences, and timing.
Here’s how you can deliver on these demands:
- Deliver targeted product recommendations: Whether through chatbots or personalized emails, consumers want help quickly finding what they need. Brands that invest in smart recommendation engines position themselves to drive cart additions and increase average order value (AOV).
- Customize promo codes by segment: Everyone loves discounts, but not all shoppers should get the same one. Use customer segments like high-spenders, last-minute shoppers, or deal-hunters from Experian’s syndicated holiday audiences to offer custom promo codes, boost conversions, and avoid over-discounting with those who would buy regardless.
- Optimize the timing of offers: Timing is everything during Cyber Week when inboxes and feeds are flooded. Use our behavioral and lifestyle data to determine when your segments are most active and likely to buy, and schedule your best offers for maximum impact.
- Use Experian Activity Feed: Black Friday 2025 will span devices, stores, and channels. Activity Feed connects the dots between online ad exposures and offline sales, helping you measure the impact of your campaigns and identify what drives conversions.
Case study: How Cuebiq increased match rates with Activity Feed
Using Activity Feed, Cuebiq, resolved digital ad exposures to MAIDs so they could know the impact of their campaigns on in-store visits and purchases.
Within three weeks, they resolved 85% of ad events to households across web, mobile, and CTV, giving their clients a clearer view of what drove store traffic and sales.
“In just a few weeks, they were able to maximize the match rate across the fragmented digital inventory, solving a huge problem when it comes to cross-channel attribution.”
Luca Bocchiardi,Director of Product, Cuebiq
Experian can help you win big this holiday season
Marketers are entering this season with more pressure, more complexity, and more opportunity than ever before. Whether you’re grappling with signal loss, evolving your omnichannel mix, or launching your first curated PMP, Experian has the data, identity infrastructure, and activation tools to help you win. Download our 2025 Holiday spending trends and insights report, in collaboration with GroundTruth, to access our predictions for this year’s holiday season.
Want help building your Black Friday marketing strategy? Let’s talk.
Latest posts
Email hashing was originally intended to be used as an email security feature that has ended up being a very powerful marketing tool. A hashed email is a cryptographic function that changes an email address to a random code which can be used as an anonymous customer identifier. This code is privacy-safe and cannot be traced back to the customer’s email address. However, this hashed email can function like a digital passport that traces every behavior and action a customer takes when logged into an account that is authenticated with an email, making hashed emails a goldmine for customer data. Today emails are used across traditional publishers and within the CTV ecosystem; tying them to more consumer touch points than ever before. Why the emphasis now? Cookies are on their way out the door and have been the primary way that many marketers have tracked their existing and potential customers. In order to replace this granular level of data, marketers are likely going to need multiple solutions. With so many cookieless solutions and IDs appearing in the marketplace, the mapping of the customer journey is bound to be fragmented. Relying on first-party data, such as hashed email, is just one way to reduce that fragmentation; as it can serve as an authenticated starting point for cross-device identity resolution that can be leveraged for targeting, personalization and measurement. How can Tapad + Experian help? Tapad + Experian's Hashed Email Onboarding is a privacy-safe way to connect consumer email addresses to their related digital devices and other digital identifiers through high precision probabilistic identity. By onboarding hashed emails and incorporating them within your Tapad Graph file you can: Build a more holistic view of individuals and households and their relationship to email addresses in your first-party data set Leverage these relationships for increased cross-device scale for targeting Employ personalization tactics at the household or individual level across devices Create new audience segments and look-alike models for cross-channel activation Design more inclusive measurement and attribution for customer journey mapping Tapad, a part of Experian has built a hashed email onboarding product feature that works with the existing flexibility of The Tapad Graph to deliver the most holistic consumer view, combined with the attributes you need, in the structure that works best for your business objectives. Get in touch
The result of epic shifts from traditional cable to streaming television, the CTV ecosystem is experiencing compounded fragmentation, making it challenging for marketers to leverage in the most effective way for both activation and measurement. Heralded as the hot new household level device for highly engaged viewers, CTV brings massive opportunities for brands to move users down the funnel and incorporate CTV into their attribution modeling post-campaign. Leveraging CTV IDs within a cross-device identity resolution strategy can yield big benefits if you know how to do it right. Check out our breakdown of today’s CTV landscape to help you better understand how and what you can leverage for activation and measurement in the streaming-verse today. CTV Ecosystems as identifiers (for illustrative purposes only) This is just a small peak at the players and complexities of CTV IDs available for marketers today, but it illustrates the need to understand what IDs can benefit your strategies and where you can use them. Addressability and attribution Not all CTV devices and IDs are addressable; or have ad slots for biddable inventory for advertisers. For example, Apple TV devices and Apple TV + are not ad supported, but could still appear within an identity graph for measurement purposes; helping understand customer behavior and habits, which can inform marketing strategies. Having a household to individual view that's as inclusive as possible can provide valuable insights. CTV identity strategy Whether or not CTV devices or apps are addressable for advertisers, they can bring immense value when leveraged as part of a holistic identity resolution strategy. As a household level device with user authentication it can provide marketers a top-down view; unlocking household:individual targeting opportunities and unification of IDs at both levels for frequency management and customer journey mapping Get started with us Tapad, part of Experian, offers CTV ID onboarding and extension to our CTV ID Universe as a part of The Tapad Graph suite of products.
Third-party data has become the cornerstone to improve marketing effectiveness across all types of online and offline media. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing faces a challenge when utilizing this data, as sales are often made through distributors such as grocery stores or mass merchandisers rather than directly to consumers. Without customer data files that can be enriched for insight, CPG companies often base marketing decisions on custom market positioning studies, surveys and generic consumer personas. These solutions can be quite expensive and prove difficult to develop a targeted marketing program. Optimize your CPG marketing strategy We have a team of experts that leverage the wealth of our database of thousands of attributes covering more than 300 million U.S. consumers and 130 million U.S. households—to identify the demographics and attitudes of a CPG target consumer using syndicated, mobile location, social media, and online behavioral data. We help connect various data points to provide CPG marketers with the ability to identify likely consumers, generate actionable marketing insight, and enable targeted advertising to these consumers that increases brand awareness and drives purchase behavior. Identifying likely consumers for consumer packaged goods To gain marketing insight about your customers, you need to identify consumers who are actively engaged with your brand, and compare them against non-engaged consumers, or consumers engaged with rival brands. Experian uses syndicated and digital actions data to identify these consumers and understand their characteristics. With digital actions data, we leverage search terms and landing pages relevant to your brand. We use our linking capabilities to identify the perfect target audience for your marketing initiatives. For example, we leveraged syndicated data that showed consumer preference for frozen meals based on household characteristics. This enabled our client to better understand the market size and attributes of its active consumers. Actionable CPG marketing insight Once marketers identify who their optimal target consumer is, they can begin to understand their ideal audience and compare it to consumers of competitive brands. This helps identify key demographics and psychographics that over-index to users of the brands compared to the population. As a result, you can gain a much better understanding of the demographics, life stage and lifestyle of your target consumer. We also help you to better inform your marketing communication and media and distribution strategies by identifying the channels your ideal audience is most likely to be found. Getting back to our example, consumers of frozen foods were found more likely to be females between the ages of 35-54 with busy families. They had multiple children in the home and participated in family activities, like zoos and fast-food dining. We were then able to identify the digital channels they were more actively engaged with and determine factors that influence their decision-making, such as product quality or consumer testimonials. By gaining insight into your target audience, you can create digital communication focused on specifics, like an active family looking for a quality meal. Turning insights into action by enabling targeted advertising With a better understanding of your target consumer, and the insight needed to catch their attention, you can unify your ideal target audience and serve advertising that builds brand awareness and increases conversion. Our Custom Analytics team uses advanced analytical techniques to create custom consumer personas. Our database of 130 million U.S. households is scored with a proprietary algorithm created specifically for your organization and creates audiences that are pushed to the preferred marketing channel of your target consumers. Leveraging our ConsumerView database, we can easily enable direct communication to your targeted consumers (such as our example that identified consumers of frozen food and their preferred channels) through direct mail, email, digital display, social media and mobile channels. We work directly with agencies to deploy an audience to a destination and can manage a campaign for our CPG clients. We can even help you determine campaign success by measuring campaign performance versus a relevant control, and profiles converters to help you see gains made in brand awareness to target consumers. These services give you the ability to test an advertisement directly to targeted consumers, measure the effectiveness of the advertisement, then plow back the learnings into future campaigns, enabling greater consumer brand awareness and conversion while managing marketing effectiveness. Experian is here to help We have worked extensively with a variety of CPG companies to improve marketing effectiveness and drive brand awareness. We can help your organization take your marketing campaigns to the next level. Our data assets and advanced analytics generate actionable insights that enable you to identify and communicate with consumers more effectively. For more information about how we can help your organization gain valuable insights to identify your ideal customers and the best channels to reach them, contact us. Get in touch