2025 in Review: The Year of AI-Powered Innovations for SAP Emarsys

Imagine a customer opening an email on their phone during a work break. Later that night, they scroll past a brand’s ad on a tablet. The next morning, they check loyalty points in an app. By the weekend, they’re shopping in-store.

To the customer, it all feels like one continuous relationship with a brand.

To the marketer, it’s dozens of invisible systems working in perfect alignment.

In 2025, SAP Emarsys focused on strengthening those invisible connections by making personalization smarter, engagement broader, and orchestration truly omnichannel.

For many marketers, the last few years have felt like controlled chaos. More channels. More data. More customer expectations. More pressure to personalize, but with less margin for error.

This past year, SAP Emarsys focused on turning that chaos into control. Across four major product releases, we delivered a wave of innovations grounded in real-time data, AI-driven automation, deeper channel integration, and increased platform flexibility.

Numbers don’t always tell the whole story, but they do reveal the scope of what our customers and teams achieved together in 2025. From AI-powered personalization to omnichannel engagement at peak holiday scale, this year was defined by both velocity and impact:

• 4 major quarterly product releases delivered across Q1–Q4
• 85+ net-new features and enhancements shipped across the platform

The year began with foundational upgrades that set the stage for everything that followed. In Q1, we rolled out the Batch Sales Data API to make it easier to load large sales datasets with self-service configuration and data-quality monitoring. Engagement Events enables brands to connect external events from any data source to power segmentation, personalization, and real-time marketing activations.

These enhancements transformed SAP Emarsys from a campaign manager into a real-time, data-driven engagement engine: data from anywhere → unified model → segmentation or automation triggers across channels. That scalability and flexibility paid off through the rest of 2025.

We continued broadening our channel support and campaign flexibility with multiple Q3 and Q4 releases:

• Digital Ads via Microsoft Ads: Enable targeted audiences based on SAP Emarsys contact and behavioral data across the Microsoft Search Network, including Bing and Yahoo.
• Enhanced Email Bounce Management: Built on scalable cloud infrastructure with a refreshed UI, giving marketers the ability to reactivate soft-bounced contacts (individually or in bulk), helping protect sender reputation and maintain list hygiene.
• Expanded Use of Mobile Wallets in Interactions: Starting as a pilot in Q3 and maturing in Q4, wallet passes can now be updated or triggered via real-time events (e.g., loyalty-tier upgrade, purchase confirmation), unlocking a powerful new channel for transactional or loyalty communications.
• Conversational Channel Growth: In Q3, we introduced LINE as our second Conversational Channel, delivered through our partner Sinch. This opens the door to personalized messages, automated journeys, and campaign-level analytics for users — especially in regions such as APAC, where LINE is a major channel.
  • In Q4, we added message deletion functionality and Conversational Channel data views to Open Data, giving users more visibility into WhatsApp and LINE performance and the ability to remove underperforming or aged-out content. Plus, early adopters can now create card messages with interactive buttons—perfect for surveys or guided experiences.
• Omnichannel Content Blocks: In Q4, we enhanced the Prebuilt, reusable assets tailored for web-channel campaigns. These make content creation faster and more consistent, enabling marketers to launch campaigns efficiently without sacrificing brand cohesion.

With these additions, brands are no longer limited to email, SMS, or push. They can reach customers across the web, ads, mobile wallet, conversational apps, and more by using unified data and automation to enable true omnichannel experiences.

AI-driven features were a major theme across 2025. Some of the standout innovations:

• AI-assisted Product Finder — Now generally available to all customers, helps marketers build product-driven campaigns by enabling natural-language catalog search (e.g. “women’s shoes under $100”), automatically pulling in relevant SKUs with support for dynamic pricing, localization, and full catalog updates. The perfect way to personalize e-commerce campaigns at scale.
• AI-assisted Campaign Translator (Pilot) — Within the visual content editor, this tool helps translate campaigns into multiple languages while preserving dynamic elements and personalization tokens — a powerful feature for global brands or multilingual markets.
• AI-assisted Segment Description Generator (Part of New Segment Editor) — Automatically converts complex segment definitions into easy-to-consume descriptions so marketers can quickly understand who they’re targeting. This reduces cognitive load for complex segment logic.
• AI-driven analytics & reporting: AI Report Builder & AI-based segments for Mobile Push (pilot) — Launched in Q4 to help marketers generate custom reports with natural-language queries and predict mobile-push engagement — enabling data-driven strategies, faster insight generation, and better timing for push messages.

These tools make marketing smarter while automating repetitive tasks, surfacing insights, making recommendations, and scaling campaign strategies backed by data.

We also invested heavily in tools and updates that make marketers’ lives easier — less manual work, more speed, and better execution:

• The redesigned Segment Editor introduced in Q3 offers a modern UI and greater transparency, making even complex segments easier to build and manage (behavior, geolocation, contact data, etc.)
• Email campaign workflow improvements: in Q4, the Email Campaign List page got a Campaign Launch Monitoring tab, and the Results Summary page was redesigned — offering better visibility and faster iteration for campaign performance.
• Platform language support and collaboration enhancements: In Q4, we added Italian language support and introduced Asset Tagging in segmentation (pilot), which helps organize and navigate segments across teams.

These updates matter because they reduce friction in day-to-day operations so that marketers can spend more time on strategy and less time wrestling with tools.

During Black Friday Cyber Week 2025 (November 28–December 1), customers using SAP Emarsys experienced a significant increase in engagement across all channels. Highlights from our 2025 holiday season include:

• Omnichannel engagements rose by nearly 20% YoY.
• Massive growth in mobile and emerging channels: Inbox +91%, In-App +61%, SMS +32%, Push +27%, Web +22%, and Email +17%.
• Recommendations powered by real-time AI surfaced relevant products at the exact moment users engaged — whether opening an email, browsing onsite, or using an app.

This holiday performance confirms that our 2025 innovations helped our customers deliver a meaningful business impact when it counted the most.

With this year’s advances, SAP Emarsys has proven to be a real-time engagement engine. Marketers now have the tools to:

• Build rich segments and target audiences precisely
• Automate cross-channel engagement — email, wallet, ads, conversational, web
• Leverage AI to recommend, translate, predict, and report at scale
• Ingest data from anywhere (sales, events, behavior)

As brands face an environment where consumer loyalty depends less on brand name and more on relevance and timing, 2025’s innovations give them a major advantage. The stage is set for 2026 to be even bigger as we introduce even more innovations at NRF 2026. You don’t want to miss it. We hope to see you there!

For a more detailed review of our innovations in 2025, read the featured blog posts here:

• SAP Emarsys Q1 2025 Product Release
• SAP Emarsys Q2 2025 Product Release
• SAP Emarsys Q3 2025 Product Release
• SAP Emarsys Q4 2025 Product Release