Every year, holiday promotions seem to start earlier: Black Friday deals, which traditionally mark the start of the holiday shopping season, tend to appear before Halloween, and the grumbling about Christmas creep follows. Yet most shoppers want brands to start communicating about deals early.
According to Sinch's 2026 Black Friday and Cyber Monday consumer survey of 2,501 shoppers across eight countries, 58% want to start hearing about promotions at least a month before Black Friday, which falls on November 27 this year. That puts the ideal start of holiday campaigns in late October at the latest. Retail giants didn't wait: This year, Amazon billed its early-October sale as the kickoff of holiday shopping, and Walmart and Target ran similar sales the same week.
As Sinch explains below, the survey describes holiday shoppers who welcome early promotional messages but are getting choosier about where and how they want to hear from brands.
Consumers are watching their budgets and planning their holiday shopping ahead
This year's shoppers are heading into the season cautiously with their budgets. Deloitte's 2026 holiday forecast expects U.S. holiday retail sales to reach $1.70 trillion to $1.71 trillion between November and January. But it also reports shoppers at every income level hunting for value, switching brands and stores, and leaning on promotions to stretch their budgets.
According to the Sinch survey, only 25% globally plan to spend more during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, down seven points from last year, and 34% plan to spend less. U.S. shoppers are steadier but aren’t splurging: Just 18% plan to spend more, and 42% expect to spend about the same as last year.
Spending plans aside, the survey found that 58% of shoppers want to hear about deals at least a month ahead. The most popular time is a whole month before Black Friday, chosen by 36% of shoppers, and 22% want those messages even sooner.
Sinch
An early start gives shoppers time to compare offers and plan purchases, instead of rushing everything in a single weekend. In a PayPal survey of 2,005 U.S. adults, 29% said they planned to begin holiday shopping earlier than last year.
While most shoppers are open to an early start, that doesn't mean they're open to being contacted everywhere. They have clear preferences about which channels they want holiday promotions on.
Channel preferences for holiday deals are narrowing, but there’s no consensus
The Sinch survey found that shoppers’ appetite for receiving holiday promotions on multiple channels has dropped since 2024: 67% want them on more than one channel, down from 72% in 2025 and 78% in 2024. That leaves one-third of this year’s shoppers wanting promotions through a single channel, up 11 points in two years. Shoppers still want to hear from brands, but the terms are changing.
Email, the long-standing default for brand deals, is still the number one channel for holiday offers at 55%, ahead of social media ads at 40% and websites at 36%. But it’s not everyone’s first choice.
Sinch
Among shoppers who want holiday promotions through just one channel, email is the top pick, but only 37% chose it. The other 63% are split among nine other channels, each chosen by fewer than 15%. This means there's no default channel to please all shoppers, and what they want depends a lot on who they are.
Shoppers in France favor email more than in any other country surveyed: 64% want promotions by email, nine points above the global average. The U.S. is close behind at 63%. But this popularity doesn’t hold everywhere: In Mexico, social media ads (58%) and WhatsApp (47%) both rank above email, which ties with websites for third place at 32%.
Age changes the picture, too. Younger generations are the least attached to email. Gen Z shoppers prefer social media ads (58%) over their inboxes (49%), making their feeds the more popular place for holiday deals. Millennials are almost evenly divided: 53% picked email for holiday promotions, and 50% prefer social media ads. Older shoppers lean more clearly back toward email: 58% of Gen X and 61% of Boomers prefer it.
But even on the right channel, an offer still has to earn attention.
Personalization is more than welcome, on one condition
Most shoppers are comfortable being known by the brands they buy from. The Sinch survey found that 77% want personalized messages and only 14% say personalization feels invasive.
Sinch
This marks a shift from 2025, when appreciation for personalization dipped: Last year's survey found that 72.7% of shoppers valued personalized offers, down 7% from the year before, and 17% said personalization felt invasive.
For many shoppers, however, it comes with a condition: 42% value personalization as long as it’s relevant. Personalization is a trade: Brands use shoppers’ browsing and purchase data, and shoppers expect to receive offers worth their attention in return. That’s the unspoken deal, and in a context of growing privacy concerns, showing shoppers what they’re getting for their data matters even more.
In Deloitte's 2025 Connected Consumer survey of 3,524 U.S. adults, 70% said privacy and security are a concern when using digital services, and only 48% felt the benefits of these services were worth the privacy trade-off, down from 58% in 2024.
Getting personalization wrong has a cost. In Sinch's 2025 State of Customer Communications report, a third of consumers cited irrelevant messages as one of their frustrations with brand promotions. Personalized gift ideas based on what a shopper has been browsing for the people on their list are useful. Recommending something they just purchased is noise that might make them tune out for good.
Consumers have a say in their holiday shopping experience
For a shopper with a gifting list to check off and a budget to stick to, a deal that arrives too late, lands in the wrong place or isn’t relevant isn’t much of a deal. But consumers have the power to shape their shopping experience.
If you’re an early planner, loyalty programs and early-access lists are often where deals appear first. When signing up to receive communications from a brand, set your preferences: Choose the channels you actually want promotions on and how often you want to hear from the brand, and update these settings whenever your needs change. And if a retailer offers a virtual assistant, put it to work: Tell it what you’re shopping for and how much you’re ready to spend, and let it point you to deals on products that matter to you. Your shopping, your terms.
Methodology
Sinch’s 2026 Black Friday and Cyber Monday consumer survey polled 2,501 consumers across eight countries in July 2026. Respondents were aged 18 and over. Country samples: the United States (698), Australia (351), Brazil (350), the United Kingdom (252), France (225), Germany (225), Mexico (200) and Spain (200). Regional groupings in this report are North America (United States), Europe (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain), LATAM (Brazil, Mexico) and APAC (Australia). Year-over-year comparisons are against Sinch’s 2025 Black Friday and Cyber Monday consumer survey, which also included India and Canada; those two markets were not surveyed in 2026.
This story was produced by Sinch and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/cmg/LH3JSJEF3VBLRJLJQESEAG34AM.png)
