Black Friday trends 2026: What 2,501 shoppers want from customer communications

September 15, 2026

Back in the day, Black Friday meant going head-to-head with other shoppers out on the high street. It wasn’t for the faint-hearted. But where grit and some brute force was once required to bag the best bargains, now all you need is a couple of thumbs, a phone, and a comfy seat for scrolling. In 2025, Adobe found that online holiday sales in the US hit a record-breaking $257.8 billion with $145.2 billion coming from mobile devices.

Retailers now have so many ways to reach their customers that it’s a little overwhelming to know where to start. How much information do shoppers want, and where do they want it? What kind of role should AI play?

Ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey asked 2,501 shoppers across eight countries what kind of digital communication they want from brands.

Here are the biggest trends to be aware of for BFCM 2026.

Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey asked 2,501 shoppers across Europe, North America, LATAM, and APAC what’s most important to them when it comes to BFCM brand messaging.

Here are the top Black Friday insights for 2026:

• Shoppers want Black Friday promotions a month ahead. 58% of consumers want promotional messages at least one month before Black Friday 2026.

• Budgets are tighter in 2026. 25% plan to spend more during BFCM 2026, down seven points from 2025.

• Multichannel preference is falling. 67% of consumers want promotional messages across more than one channel in 2026, down from 78% in 2024.

• Email is number one for promotions, but not everywhere. 55% of consumers say email is their preferred promotional channel in 2026.

• Speed of response matters. 75% of shoppers expect confirmation within five minutes.

• Conversational messaging is now an expectation. 93% say the ability to interact with post-purchase messages is important.

• Shoppers want more personalized messages in 2026. 77% want personalized messages, up four points from 2025.

• AI optimism is down in 2026, but shoppers aren’t rejecting it. 43% said AI will make their Black Friday 2026 shopping easier, down five points from 2025, but AI chatbots are welcome in specific situations.

• Data privacy is still the number one AI concern. 43% of shoppers say privacy or data use is their top AI concern in 2026.

In Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey, 34% of shoppers said they plan to spend less during the holiday season and the number of people who plan to spend more is down seven points from 2025, to 25%.

Just as shoppers are considering every purchase a bit more carefully, they’re also getting more specific about what they’ll accept when it comes to brand messaging.

Consumers don’t want more messages, on more channels, with more AI automations in 2026. But they’re also not asking for less. They want customer communications that are right for them.

Here are the biggest year-over-year shifts we identified in our 2026 research that reflect the end of “more”, and the time for “right”.

Multichannel preference has declined two years in a row.

In Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey, 67% of shoppers said they want to receive promotional messages from brands across more than one channel, down from 72% in 2025, and 78% in 2024. The single-channel group has gone up 11 points, a 51% increase in two years.

For transactional messages, the shift is similar with multichannel preference dipping to under half, from 52% in 2025 to 49% in 2026.

One third of consumers said they want to receive promotions through just one channel, according to Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey. And while email remains, as in previous years, the leader overall, only 37% of single-channel respondents picked the email inbox as their preferred place to receive holiday offers. The remaining 63% were spread across nine alternatives, none reaching 15%.

For brands, it’s not as simple as choosing one or two ways to connect with their customers. Two thirds still want promotions on more than one channel, and the “right” mix varies by region, generation, and individual. The same shopper who wants their Black Friday promotions by email might want all their order updates by text, and all their support queries answered in real-time over WhatsApp.

Nailing the optimal mix for each customer means letting the customer choose and respecting that choice with every message you send. It means gathering context like shopping history and individual preferences and carrying this context seamlessly across channels without forgetting.

Conversational messaging used to be something that set a retailer apart, but now it’s expected. In Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey, 93% of shoppers said it was important to be able to respond or interact with post-purchase messages from brands. Shoppers don’t want brands to send them more one-way messages. What they want is a conversation.

52% of shoppers said they have noticed an increase in two-way messaging from brands on their phone this past year. That includes things like promotional messages you can interact with, order updates you can respond to, or back-and-forth chats with customer service over RCS or WhatsApp.

52% of shoppers also say they’d engage with an interactive promotional message, up five points from 2025. And this same shift can be seen from the other side too, with preference for plain text messages falling from 16% in 2025 to 11% in 2026.

Conversational messaging is transforming the customer experience in retail, and brands that fail to offer it will end up having no customers left to talk to.

43% of all shoppers said AI will make their Black Friday 2026 shopping easier, down five points from 2025. 31% actually said it won’t, and 26% weren’t sure. That means over half of consumers are struggling to see the value AI can bring to their holiday shopping. AI skepticism is highest in the US where just 26% say AI will make their shopping easier.

Sinch research found that 63% of retailers have already gone live with AI customer communications agents. And in 2025, Salesforce found that AI agents influenced 20% of global holiday sales through personalized recommendations and deeper customer engagement. A portion of shoppers are prepared to use AI this Black Friday, but the majority are not there yet. Our data points at distrust being a considerable threat to AI commerce.

According to Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey, 53% say they’d trust advice from a real person more than AI, up from 51% in 2025.

Similarly, 48% say they’d trust a human over a voice AI agent for resolving issues during the 2026 holiday shopping season, although 52% are open to interacting with it provided there’s an effective transfer over to a human if needed.

All of this points to a growing concern over how brands are using AI. When consumers were asked to name their single biggest concern about AI during shopping events like Black Friday, privacy or data use was the top answer for the second year in a row at 43% in 2026. In fact, only 7% of shoppers said they have no concerns at all, down from 9% in 2025.

Rising AI skepticism doesn’t indicate a final verdict on AI. When asked about AI in general, people are skeptical, but show them the value and they’re much more open. Out of the 2,501 people in Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey, only one said they didn’t want to interact with AI under any circumstances, and over 60% are confident AI can handle any task we asked about from pre-purchase questions to order tracking, and account or billing changes.

In 2026, the conversation isn’t about whether to use AI. It’s about using it transparently, recognizing customers’ concerns, and making sure it’s doing the jobs they actually want it to.

To learn what’s important to consumers this BFCM, retailers need to consider everything from pre-purchase recommendations, and promotional messaging through to order updates and post-purchase customer support.

The insights from the 2026 BFCM consumer survey reveal how shoppers really want to engage with brands, how they feel about the likes of AI, and where they want to have their conversations. Retailers should use this data to build insight-driven marketing campaigns around the biggest shopping event of the year.

According to Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey, shoppers most like to hear from brands a whole month before Black Friday (November 27), and 58% want BFCM messaging to start at least one month before. As many as 82% expect it to start at least two weeks out.

Planning is everything when launching your BFCM marketing campaigns. Start too early and your messages get left unread, start too late and your competitors have already swiped all your customers.

If omnichannel is down and optimal channel is up, the question is, what channel should brands focus on?

Email is still the number one channel globally for promotional messages with 55% saying it’s their preferred channel. This is followed by social media ads (40%) and websites (36%).

But a closer look reveals significant variation across the population. Social media ads are the preferred channel for Gen Zs at 58%, with email ranking second at 49%. In Mexico, email comes in joint third position with websites at 32%, following social media ads at 58%, and WhatsApp at 47%. What’s important to consumers is that brands reach them on the channel that works for them.

Between the time shoppers complete their order and the time they receive it, they need reassurance. Reassurance that the payment went through, that the order is on its way, and that it’ll make it to them on time. When asked how important messages containing shipping updates are, 93% of consumers said important and 64% said very important.

How shoppers want to receive these updates varies by individual. When asked how they prefer to receive transactional messages, email leads at 72%, followed by 39% for SMS and 28% for WhatsApp.

Speed matters too. 75% expect order confirmation within five minutes and 48% expect it immediately after purchase, according to Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey. Millennials are the most impatient group with 53% expecting immediate confirmation, compared to 39% of Baby Boomers.

When order volumes spike in November, and retailers are faced with sending more order confirmations, more shipping updates, and more delivery notifications to their customers, the same speed is expected. Customers still expect to be reassured on their preferred channel and won’t wait for your platform to catch up. Getting it right doesn’t mean fewer updates, it means partnering with a provider that offers scale and reliability to handle this change in volume.

Shoppers want more interactive messages from brands this holiday season, with 93% now calling it important to be able to respond to or interact with post-purchase messages like order confirmation or shipping updates (Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey). 61% of shoppers call it very important and only 7% say it’s not important.

Once a customer has made a purchase decision, they want a simple path for tracking and resolving post-purchase issues, ideally through two-way messaging.

In Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey, 77% of shoppers value personalization, 42% say they do as long as it’s relevant, and only 14% now say it feels invasive. That’s a change in direction from 2025 when overall appreciation for personalization was down year-on-year. As conversational messaging has picked up over the past year, so has the appetite for personalization.

Interestingly, the consumers who noticed significantly more conversational-style messaging from brands over the past year are also the ones placing most value on personalization. 91% of this group say they value personalized messages compared to 51% among those who didn’t notice any conversational messaging. The two go hand in hand.

In the same way that consumers are letting AI into more areas of their personal life, the retail industry is increasingly using AI agents to transform how it does business. And despite – or perhaps because of – this, AI skepticism is up in 2026, and it’s particularly high in the US where just 26% think AI will make their shopping easier, 17 points below the global average.

Sinch’s survey found that consumers are less skeptical when presented with specific high-value use cases for AI chatbots. 48% say they’d like to use AI chatbots for order tracking, and 47% say they’d like to use them to learn more about a product before they purchase.

When asked how confident consumers are in using AI in each case, the selective approach shoppers are taking to AI is even clearer. 81% are confident that AI can handle order tracking, and 74% are confident in using it to learn more about a product. But that confidence drops to 66% when the use case involves account changes, and 62% for payment and billing.

Sinch’s 2026 BFCM consumer survey highlighted some important geographic differences that should be factored into your regional marketing strategies for Black Friday.

While Black Friday has its roots in the US, it’s now a huge global phenomenon. Different regions of course have different spending habits, communications preferences, and expectations from brands.

Here are the top insights for each region: North America, APAC, Europe, and LATAM.

Consumers have shown us that the way to their hearts (and wallets) isn’t through giving them more. More messages, more channels, and more automations all create clutter and during a season that’s already overstimulating, clutter doesn’t convert.

But that doesn’t mean the answer is less. Messaging volumes will inevitably spike on specific channels and specific moments, especially as consumers engage with more continuous, conversational messaging. Brands just need to know how to handle it.

What’s important to consumers is “right”. Right message, right moment, right channel for them.

Sinch can help with cutting through the noise. As the enterprise communications infrastructure for the AI era, Sinch powers over a trillion customer interactions annually for more than 200,000 customers globally. During Black Friday week 2025 alone, Sinch’s network delivered 20.4 billion emails and 3.4 billion SMS messages (Sinch data, 2025).

Discover more about our scalable communications infrastructure and how it can support your digital communications through the peak holiday period and beyond, or get in touch to discuss your 2026 BFCM strategy.