Holiday 2025 is a pivotal moment for marketers. The challenge? Maximizing ROI and doing more with less to win over cautious shoppers. This is the ultimate guide to help you and your team win the season.

The busiest shopping weekend of the year has come and gone. Triple Whale tracked $2.9 billion in revenue to bring you the full story of BFCM 2025. In this report, we detail exactly how brands’ data-backed decisions played out.

What’s inside :

• Ad performance metric trends for major platforms like Facebook, Google Ads, Amazon, TikTok, and AppLovin

• Trends in ad spend across 15 industries, and how different industries invested in ad platforms to drive sales

Marketers who plan early, move fast, and stay flexible are the ones who win big, especially when customer expectations are evolving at lightning speed. This year is packed with big opportunities. New seasonal peaks, earlier buying behaviors, enhanced AI-powered personalization, and customers who expect seamless experiences every time they engage with your brand. If you want to be prepared, now is the time to get planning.

Holiday returns now rival major sales events in scale and operational impact. January is effectively a second peak season, driven not by purchases but by the wave of returns that follows the holidays. Many gifts aren’t opened until late December or early January, so issues like sizing mismatches, duplicate gifts and unwanted items surface at the same time.

The  National Retail Federation projects that  17% of all holiday sales will be returned in 2025 , meaning retailers must treat December through February as a defined “returns season” with its own demand curve and system expectations. For IT and operations leaders, this creates sustained pressure across the entire stack: return portals, identity checks, OMS and WMS integrations, refund engines, and carrier-tracking workflows.

The holiday season is make-or-break for email marketers. With inboxes bursting from October through New Year’s, even your most dazzling email content could disappear into spam folders if your deliverability isn’t solid.

Mailbox Providers (MBPs), such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook, receive an overwhelming volume of emails during peak seasons. Their systems work harder to protect their users and reward senders who follow best practices with more reliable inbox placement.

This playbook explores the patterns that make consumer behavior predictable–and how leading retailers are using them to stay ahead.

Retailers are facing a volatile environment shaped by inflation, tariffs, technology shifts and evolving consumer values. Our new playbook helps leaders move from reaction to readiness, identifying consistent behavioral patterns and providing actionable strategies to stay relevant in every season.

The holidays bring a flood of one-time shoppers — and a chance to turn them into long-term customers. Most brands focus on discounts and points, but genuine loyalty comes from connection, not coupons. Here’s how to build relationships that last beyond the holiday rush — using a lesson from an unlikely loyalty experiment.

The postcard experiment that proved people over points

Loyalty grows when your customers feel like you care. Between 2012 and 2014, La Quinta did something most hotel chains would never risk: it let its VP of Loyalty write personal postcards to guests — not to everyone, just to high-value customers or those who seemed ready to drift away.

Validity surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers, revealing what drives them to open, engage with, or unsubscribe from holiday emails. This holiday season, consumers signal that they want transparency, real discounts and thoughtful timing, not inbox overload or misleading subject lines. Retailers that continue to rely on volume over value risk unsubscribes and missed opportunities.

Here’s what consumers told us about what’s working, what’s not, and what brands can do to improve their holiday email performance.