The Connected Advantage: 2025 Holiday CRM Trends

The holiday shopping season has transformed from a predictable four-week sprint into a sprawling, fragmented journey stretching from October through January. In this extended landscape, winning brands won’t be the ones running most campaigns; they'll be the ones that identify and activate pivotal moments that influence customer decisions at every touchpoint.

CRM is no longer just a channel or a tech stack. It's the connective tissue that unifies customer data, decisioning, and design to deliver personalized, trusted, and adaptive experiences at scale. As the holiday season grows more complex and consumer behavior more unpredictable, connected CRM becomes the system that powers relationships and fuels growth.

Here's what brands need to know to turn Holiday 2025 into a competitive advantage.

The Season Is Longer, But the Window Is Tighter

Though Thanksgiving to Christmas spans only 28 days in 2025, holiday shopping behavior now stretches across four full months. A quarter of consumers begin shopping before November, influenced by retail mega-events like Amazon's October Prime Big Deals Day—which generated $24.1 billion in U.S. online sales this year, up 30% year-over-year.

Yet even with a longer season, Cyber 5 still accounts for just 16% share of total holiday ecommerce. The demand curve has flattened, with shoppers activating at different moments throughout the season based on their individual needs, budgets, and discovery patterns.

What this means for connected CRM: Traditional campaign calendars built around a handful of tentpole moments are no longer enough. Brands must architect a unified customer journey that anticipates when individual customers are ready to engage—whether that's early October or late December—and ensure consistent, seamless experiences across all owned channels throughout the entire season.

This requires moving from fragmented campaigns to connected experiences, using unified data to understand where each customer is in their journey, what they've engaged with across channels, and what action will move them closer to conversion.

Economic Headwinds Demand Smarter, Not Louder

U.S. household debt hit $18.2 trillion in Q1 2025, while personal savings rates fell to 4.5% (nearly half the 10-year average), and credit card debt has doubled since 2015. With less financial cushion and tariff uncertainty looming over pricing, consumers are more price-sensitive and selective than ever.

Holiday ecommerce growth is projected at just 3-4.5% YoY in 2025, compared to 8.7% in 2024. The season remains active, but brands should expect selective spending, channel fragmentation, and increased pressure to prove value early.

Volume won’t win. Relevance does. Yet customers are increasingly signaling their fatigue: 66% say they want fewer messages, and 79% report unsubscribing from a retail brand in the last three months. During the holidays, shoppers receive an average of 120 emails per day, creating a signal-to-noise problem that traditional campaign approaches can't solve.

What this means for connected CRM: Brands must shift from campaign volume to pivotal moment identification. Rather than adding more messages to the noise, connected CRM uses unified customer data and AI-driven decisioning to identify brief, predictable windows when a personalized action can create a disproportionate impact.

These pivotal moments might include: When a browsed product goes on sale, when inventory runs low on a viewed item, when a customer's preferred payment method (like BNPL) becomes available, or when competitive pricing shifts. By connecting data across channels and activating in real-time, brands can deliver fewer, more impactful touchpoints that respect customer preferences while driving conversion.

AI Is Rewriting Discovery—and CRM Must Connect to It

Brand-specific AI search traffic is up 1,300% YoY. Fifty-three percent of U.S. consumers plan to use generative AI when shopping online in 2025, using it for product recommendations (47%), deal hunting (43%), and gift inspiration (35%). According to Salesforce, 19% of 2024 holiday purchases were influenced by AI-powered interactions.

At the same time, social commerce continues to blur the lines between discovery and conversion, with 20% of global holiday sales in 2024 coming via social platforms and 14% of ecommerce traffic originating from social referrals.

What this means for connected CRM: Customer journeys no longer start in owned channels—they start in AI prompts and social feeds. Connected CRM bridges these discovery moments to conversion.

This means integrating social engagement data with first-party data to enable intelligent retargeting. When a customer likes, comments, or engages with content on Instagram, connected CRM should recognize that signal and deliver personalized follow-up via email, push, or SMS that reflects that interest.

It also means bringing AI-style interactions into owned channels. Transform SMS into two-way conversational experiences. Deploy AI agents and natural language search on websites. Use AI decisioning to craft subject lines that align with predicted customer intent. CRM must feel as intuitive and responsive as the AI tools customers are already using.

Personalization Is Core Infrastructure, Not a Feature

Eighty percent of customers are more likely to interact with personalized content. Seventy-three percent of shoppers expect brands to understand their unique needs and expectations. And 45% of Gen Z are likely to leave a website if it doesn't predict what they want.

But true personalization extends far beyond dynamic content blocks and merge tags. In a connected CRM system, personalization becomes the infrastructure that determines which product to feature, what channel to use, when to send, and how to design the experience.

What this means for connected CRM: Personalization must operate at four levels simultaneously:

• Product: Leverage recent transactions, search history, and propensity models to identify the next best product or action. Feature it in email heroes, showcase it in push notifications, and pre-populate preferences on web experiences to reduce friction.
• Timing: Send outbound messages at the optimal moment for each customer—whether that's their preferred time of day, immediately after cart abandonment, or when a previously viewed product goes on sale or reaches low inventory.
• Channel: Select the most effective channel by balancing customer preference with the role of the channel. Use push for timely alerts, email for detailed storytelling, SMS for urgent updates, and let predictive modeling guide the decision.
• Audience: Segment and target based on behaviors, preferences, lifecycle stage, and predictive indicators to ensure the right people receive the right message.

This level of personalization requires connected CRM—a unified system that brings together customer data, decisioning engines, and design systems to orchestrate journeys in real-time across every touchpoint.

Interactive Features Make Experiences “Unscrollable”

With hundreds of marketing messages hitting customers daily, static communications simply disappear into the noise. The brands that break through will be those that create interactive, engaging experiences that demand attention.

What this means for connected CRM: Leverage interactive capabilities within owned channels to create micro-experiences that drive engagement:

• Email: Incorporate carousels, embedded video or audio, progress bars, countdown timers, and polls. Deploy AMP for email to build micro-site-like experiences directly in the inbox, allowing customers to browse, interact, and take action without leaving the channel.
• Push: Use rich push notifications featuring photos and audio to capture attention and deliver context-rich messaging.
• SMS: Transform SMS from one-way broadcast into two-way interactive dialogue, enabling customers to respond, ask questions, and engage in real-time while incorporating images for richer mobile experiences.
• RCS (Rich Communication Services): Leverage this emerging channel’s native capabilities—including carousels, suggested actions, rich media, and read receipts—to create app-like experiences within messaging that drive higher engagement than traditional SMS.

These interactive elements should be powered by the same unified data and decisioning that drives product personalization—ensuring that the what is as relevant as the how.

The Path Forward: From Campaigns to Connected Experiences

Many brands will approach Holiday 2025 the way they always have: isolated campaigns optimized by individual KPIs. The brands that win will think in customer journeys, where every interaction moves shoppers closer to conversion, or risks losing them to a competitor.

Connected CRM is what makes this possible. It's the discipline and ecosystem that unifies customer data, decisioning, and design to deliver personalized, trusted, and adaptive experiences at scale. It's the connective tissue that links email to push to SMS to web to e-commerce to loyalty to social to addressable media, ensuring that every touchpoint builds on the last.

In a season defined by economic uncertainty, AI-driven discovery, and overwhelming message volume, connected CRM isn't just a competitive advantage—it's the difference between winning and being ignored.

The question isn't whether to invest in CRM this holiday season. It's whether your CRM is truly connected.