The 2025 holiday season came in fast and more competitive than ever. We know your inboxes are filled up with brands fighting for your attention. The brands that win aren’t the ones who emailed the most but the ones who emailed the smartest.
Here’s some things this year’s holiday email performance revealed and what marketers need to take with them into 2026.
This holiday season made one thing clear: batch-and-blast isn’t always the way to go. Brands that personalized their emails based on behavior, preferences, and engagement saw significantly higher conversion rates than those who just tweaked subject lines to the masses.
What worked:
Dynamic product recommendations
Personalizing based on purchase behavior/preferences
Takeaway for 2026:
Start building stronger data connections now! Your personalization capabilities for next holiday season will be stronger because of the data foundation you are starting to create today.
Shoppers started buying earlier than ever with many brands seeing strong engagement as early as the first week of November.
What worked:
Early “gift guide” emails
Pre-Black Friday offers
Loyalty-member early access email campaigns
Takeaway for 2026:
Don’t wait for Thanksgiving week to ramp up volume. Build a runway that starts earlier and warms your audience before peak days hit.
Discount fatigue was real this year. Brands that balanced offers with high-value content stood out.
Some email formats included:
Short video blocks embedded in email
“Top 3 gifts for X type of shopper”
User-generate content inside emails
Takeaway for 2026:
Promotions matter but storytelling builds trust. Plan your content-led campaigns early.
With increased sending across the industry, inbox competition surged, meaning deliverability issues popped up fast for brands with weak list hygiene.
Most common issues:
High bounce rates from old email lists
Low engagement segments still being emailed to
Too big of a list for a Black Friday email blast
Takeaway for 2026:
Run monthly email list cleaning and implement engagement-based suppression rules well before November. Working with a team like us at Connext can make that task easy as we are working behind the scenes to make sure your data is accurate and compliant.
A/B testing (subject lines, send-time, content variants) helped brands squeeze any extra revenue out of every campaign.
Takeaway for 2026:
If you haven’t incorporated some A/B testing into your email testing process you may already be behind.
The 2025 holiday season highlighted that modern email marketing success requires:
Preparing for 2026 starts now! Brands that invest early in optimized lists and personalization will be the ones who dominate next holiday season.
