Elevated customer engagement at scale: Transforming Black Friday and Cyber Monday with BrazeAIᵀᴹ

Key findings from 2025 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Season:

• Messages sent on Cyber Monday eclipsed Black Friday for the first time in Braze history, with 17 billion messages sent.
• More industries are embracing Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), with financial service brands increasing year-over-year messages by 91%, travel and hospitality by 42%, and QSR/on-demand restaurants by 48%
• Brands leveraged the Braze platform to send 59.9 billion messages from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, a 19% increase over 2024. The channels that saw the highest year-over-year increase were SMS and WhatsApp (90%), Content Cards (55%) and email (32%). When you account for all of Cyber Week (Nov 25th - Dec 1st), Braze sent over 100B messages!

Over the years, the holiday season has grown, expanding beyond traditional shopping days and becoming a significant revenue driver for retailers and numerous other industries. And while the BFCM period remains an essential one for brands, the landscape that surrounds it continues to shift. The holiday season starts earlier every year, with some retailers beginning their campaigns as early as September.

For customers, there are new channels in the mix; for marketers, new tools behind the scenes. Here at Braze, we’ve watched AI go from nice-to-have to an essential element of many brands’ strategies, and you can see this dynamic play out in a big way during BFCM, where marketers are increasingly using AI to accelerate their existing holiday campaigns and elevate their customer engagement programs overall. Let’s take a look at how AI is reshaping BFCM and how brands are using Braze to reach, engage, and monetize their customers more effectively.

Cyber Monday Takes the Lead: How BrazeAI Powered the Biggest Messaging Day Ever

BFCM messaging volumes for brands using Braze increased significantly in 2025. While this expands the number of opportunities for brands to connect with their customers, it also makes it more challenging to capture those customers’ attention and even more critical to cut through the noise with relevant, personalized, value-packed campaigns. Brands that fail to capture interest risk being ignored, unopened, and losing revenue.

One significant change we saw this year involves Cyber Monday. Traditionally, we see the highest amount of traffic on Black Friday. For the first time in Braze history, that was not the case, with marketers sending 17.0 billion messages on Cyber Monday. While that number is only slightly more than the 16.6 billion messages sent on Friday, it represents a 28% increase year-over-year, demonstrating just how important Cyber Monday is for many brands.

Our data shows that brands aren’t only increasing their sending volumes during this year’s BFCM period; they’re also continuing the trend we identified in previous years by expanding the sophistication of their messaging across different channels and strategies. The move away from batch-and-blast campaigns continues, but this BFCM has seen further evolution, moving beyond (now) table-stakes personalization to even more sophisticated approaches, using AI. Some of the signs of this change include:

• More cross-channel campaigns: Revealing that brands are personalizing touchpoints across the digital spectrum.
• Extensive use of AI Item Recommendations: Demonstrating teams are creating more personalized ways to give customers exactly what they want.
• Increased Usage of AI Liquid Assistance: Allowing marketers to be more sophisticated in the logic and automation of copy.

AI and BFCM: Growing usage, deepening sophistication

Brands are continuing to leverage AI to power operational efficiency and personalization at scale. Brands are making extensive use of powerful BrazeAI™ functionality to not only accelerate campaign creation but to improve overall performance.

With BrazeAI™, personalization isn’t curtailed by resource constraints or reliance on external support like developers, analysts, or creatives. Customer engagement professionals can move quickly and confidently, independently crafting individualized experiences for millions of customers.

Our data shows an uptick in AI functionality immediately before BFCM, suggesting that brands are leveraging BrazeAI during busy periods to increase both personalization and campaign creation velocity.

Friction-free coding with Braze Liquid Assistant

More brands adopted BrazeAI™ Liquid Assistant in 2025, reflecting the growing personalization of campaigns and messages. BrazeAI™ Liquid Assistant lets users simply describe what they’re trying to achieve and receive AI-generated Liquid code to insert into their email templates. For example, they might ask Liquid Assistant to provide code to personalize a message to re-engage lapsed users, or prompt it to add a countdown timer (and sense of urgency) to a message.

The retail and consumer goods, as well as restaurants and on-demand food services sectors have seen the most adoption, being the top users of Liquid Assistant. Many brands across these sectors are leveraging it to increase personalization without increasing coding requirements.

Marketing campaigns are growing in complexity, with more personalization and cross-channel campaigns highlighting the reality that brands must do everything possible to attract customer engagement. BrazeAI™ makes even the most complex campaigns easier to achieve.

Dynamic personalization with AI Item Recommendations

Similar to Liquid Assistant, both sectors are also strong users of AI item recommendations.

Braze AI Item Recommendations advances personalization from previously static rules and fixed logic, to dynamic recommendations based on a live understanding of what users engage with. Instead of saying ‘If a user bought X, recommend Y’, AI recommendations can suggest the items users are most likely to purchase, based on their past behavior and predictive models.

This enables brands to serve even more relevant product recommendations at scale, increasing engagement and conversion rates by focusing on what customers want.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Channel by channel

BFCM trends vary by industry. Financial services saw significant growth in their annual sends over BFCM with a 91% year-over-year increase, while travel and hospitality as well as the QSR and on-demand restaurant industry saw 42% and 48% increases respectively. While retailers have long understood the power of BFCM, marketers across the spectrum understand how important this time of year can be for consumers.

Supporting uptime on the biggest days of the year

Everything about BFCM is getting bigger and better. The data shows bigger send volumes and more sophisticated personalization. The last thing you need is for your technology to fail you at one of your busiest and most impactful times of the year. For Braze customers, once again, uptime wasn’t an issue.

During BFCM 2025, Braze maintained 100% uptime, while total messaging volumes increased by 19% compared to the same four-day period last year.

We built the system to withstand massive demand. Here’s how we prepare, ensuring our systems are ready, and your campaigns are safe:

• Months in advance – Forecasting messaging volumes and potential stress points, so we can scale infrastructure and resources
• Weeks in advance – Freezing code to maximize platform stability, fine-tuning deliverability systems, and increasing support staffing
• During BFCM – Monitoring in real time, and providing live support and troubleshooting

This maintains the reliability, deliverability, and performance that Braze is known for.

Elevating BFCM engagement with BrazeAIᵀᴹ

We say it every year, but BFCM isn’t about sending more messages; it’s about sending smarter messages. And this year, AI has been helping Braze customers do exactly that. With BrazeAI™, brands are blasting through technical and time-based barriers to make their personalization ambitions a reality. The result is campaigns that cut through the maelstrom to get noticed, opened, and acted on.

Customer expectations keep rising. Brands need to combine creativity, customer insights, and technology to create millions of messages that feel individually relevant.

Want to learn how to better capitalize on the holidays for long-term success? Check out our BFCM hub for additional insights, best practices, and customer stories.

Forward-looking statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the anticipated performance of and benefits from Braze, its products and integrations, including without limitation the BrazeAI™ product suite. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in Braze’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 5, 2025, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.