Marketing is no longer about isolated campaigns or single-channel performance. It has become a continuous engagement discipline where relevance, timing and trust determine success. Customers expect brands to recognise them, understand their intent and respond in real time across every touchpoint. At the same time, marketing teams face increasing pressure to deliver measurable results with fewer resources and higher expectations.
This shift is not theoretical. It is already well underway. According to the AI in Retail Global Report 2025, 92% of marketers are already using AI in their daily work, and 64% plan to increase their investment in AI to boost customer engagement (source: AI in Retail Global Report 2025, p22 &p29). The reason is clear. AI is proving its value both in operational efficiency and in customer experience outcomes.
SAP Emarsys sits at the centre of this evolution. Built as an AI-powered customer engagement platform within SAP Customer Experience, it enables organisations to unify customer data, automate omnichannel journeys and personalise interactions at scale. As we move into 2026, the platform continues to evolve rapidly, with the Q4 2025 product release introducing meaningful improvements across content, mobile engagement, analytics, AI-driven decision making and extensibility.
This blog explores why these changes matter, how they connect to broader industry trends, and what marketing leaders should expect next.
The engagement era is here, and customers are setting the rules
The AI in Retail Global Report makes one thing very clear. Consumers are more informed, more selective and less patient than ever. They want speed, relevance and convenience. 55% of consumers say AI makes shopping easier, and 53% say it makes shopping faster (Source: AI in Retail Global Report 2025, p17). Importantly, these expectations are not limited to digital native brands or online channels. Customers expect the same level of intelligence and continuity whether they engage via email, mobile, web, in-store or customer service.
Personalisation plays a critical role in meeting these expectations. 69% of consumers say they are satisfied with AI-powered product recommendations, and 65% are satisfied with personalised offers and marketing messages (Source: AI in Retail Global Report 2025, p24). These numbers confirm that customers respond positively when brands use data intelligently and responsibly. Yet despite this, a significant gap remains between what customers expect and what brands deliver. 40% of consumers feel that brands do not understand them as individuals, and 33% say content does not meet their needs (Source: AI in Retail Global Report 2025, p12). This is what SAP Emarsys refers to as the personalisation gap.
The root cause is rarely a lack of ambition. It is fragmented data, disconnected systems and manual processes that prevent marketers from acting in real time. Closing this gap requires a unified engagement platform that connects customer insight with execution.
SAP Emarsys: Where AI, Data and Customer Loyalty Come Together
SAP Emarsys is designed specifically to address these challenges. It combines customer data activation, AI-driven decisioning and omnichannel orchestration in a single platform that integrates natively with the wider SAP ecosystem.
From a business perspective, this approach changes how marketing teams operate. By reducing complexity and automating key decisions, SAP Emarsys enables faster campaign execution and allows teams to spend more time on strategy, creativity and optimisation. Instead of managing channels in isolation, marketers can focus on shaping consistent experiences that adapt to customer behaviour as it happens.
SAP Emarsys translates this productivity into customer impact through lifecycle automation, predictive segmentation and real-time activation across channels such as email, mobile, web, digital ads and conversational messaging. The result is a more connected journey from initial engagement through conversion and long-term loyalty.
What the Latest SAP Emarsys Updates Mean for Marketing Teams
What is changing and why it matters
The SAP Emarsys Q4 2025 product release represents a significant step forward in making intelligent engagement more accessible and scalable. Rather than introducing isolated features, the release focuses on improving how marketers create, activate and measure engagement across the full lifecycle.
Omnichannel content that supports speed and consistency
One of the most practical updates is the expansion of prebuilt Omnichannel Content Blocks for web channel campaigns. These reusable assets allow teams to maintain brand consistency while reducing time to launch. For organisations operating across multiple markets and channels, this directly addresses one of the most common execution challenges.
Email campaign management has also been streamlined. The updated Email Campaign List page and refreshed Results summary view make it easier to monitor performance and optimise campaigns without switching contexts. These improvements reinforce a core theme of the release: reducing friction in daily marketing work.
The impact of this approach is already visible in customer results. Cupshe reports that since implementing SAP Emarsys, email has become one of its key revenue channels, contributing to a 46% increase in revenue.
Intelligent mobile engagement through Wallet passes and event-driven automation
Mobile continues to grow as a primary engagement channel, and SAP Emarsys is investing heavily in this area. Mobile Wallet passes for event-based automations are now fully live. This allows marketers to trigger real-time notifications for events such as loyalty tier upgrades or purchase confirmations.
This matters because timing drives relevance. The AI in Retail Global Report shows that consumers increasingly value immediacy and contextual engagement. By responding instantly to customer behaviour, brands can increase engagement without increasing message volume.
The CHRIST customer story illustrates this well. By consolidating data from multiple systems and adopting an omnichannel approach with SAP Emarsys, the brand was able to improve communication efficiency and increase repurchase rates.
Conversational messaging with better control and insight
Conversational channels such as WhatsApp and LINE are becoming an integral part of customer engagement. The Q4 2025 release introduces improved visibility and control through new Open Data views for conversational performance. Marketers can now delete underperforming or outdated messages and better analyse results. Early adopters also gain access to interactive card messages with buttons, opening the door to surveys and guided experiences within conversational flows. This reflects a broader trend highlighted in the AI in Retail Global Report, where 51% of consumers report positive experiences with chatbots for customer support.
AI that supports decision making, not just automation
AI is most valuable when it enhances human decision-making rather than replacing it. SAP Emarsys continues to invest in this philosophy.
The AI-assisted Report Builder is now generally available, enabling marketers to generate custom reports quickly and explore insights without technical expertise. Campaign Analytics has also been enhanced with a redesigned interface and a 13-month comparison range, making trend analysis more accessible.
For product-focused campaigns, the AI-assisted Product Finder now supports API loaded product data. Marketers can use natural language queries to surface information such as top sellers or price drops and insert this content dynamically into campaigns. This directly supports the growing demand for relevant product discovery identified in the AI in Retail Global Report, where 34% of consumers use AI to search for products and 33% use it to compare products.
Predictive segmentation is also expanding. A new Mobile Push engagement template allows teams to target contacts most likely to engage on specific channels. Additional channels are planned, reinforcing SAP Emarsys' commitment to predictive, AI-driven orchestration.
Extensibility and integration as a foundation for scale
Unified data remains the foundation of effective personalisation. The Q4 2025 release introduces several important enhancements in this area.
The Standard Sales Data API is now generally available, allowing organisations to onboard online and offline sales data for activation and measurement. This enables more precise segmentation based on factors such as refunds or transaction currency. Importantly, this data can also be used within the AI-assisted Product Finder to support more accurate recommendations.
Engagement Events are now accessible to all customers through both API and self-service interfaces. These events enable real-time recognition of customer behaviour and can be used across automation, segmentation, personalisation and analytics. Improved versioning logic allows events to be edited and tested even after activation, increasing flexibility.
Integration with SAP Commerce Cloud further strengthens the ability to act on behavioural data such as cart updates or purchases in near real time. This supports seamless customer journeys and faster response times across channels.
The impact of this approach is clear in the Fressnapf customer story. More than 15% of communication driven e-commerce revenue in Europe is directly attributed to automated campaigns implemented with SAP Emarsys, with automated journeys achieving more than double the click rates of manual campaigns.
Platform enhancements and readiness for peak periods
In addition to new features, SAP Emarsys has focused heavily on performance, reliability and usability. The introduction of Italian language support and asset tagging in segmentation improves collaboration for global teams. Equally important is the emphasis on holiday readiness. Enhancements to email execution, deliverability, monitoring and mobile performance ensure that brands can confidently deliver high-volume campaigns during peak periods. These improvements are not cosmetic. They directly support the reliability and trust required when engagement volumes are highest.
Looking ahead to 2026: What marketing leaders should expect
As we move into 2026, the direction is clear. AI-driven engagement will continue to expand, not as a standalone capability but as an embedded part of everyday marketing work. SAP Emarsys is aligning its roadmap with this reality by focusing on practical intelligence, real-time activation and extensibility. Rather than adding complexity, the platform is reducing it, allowing teams to do more with less while delivering experiences customers actually value.
How Langia Helps You Activate Real Value with SAP Emarsys
Technology alone does not deliver outcomes. Success depends on how well platforms are implemented, integrated and adopted. This is where Langia plays a critical role. Langia helps organisations design and activate SAP Emarsys in a way that aligns marketing, sales and service around a shared engagement strategy. From data foundations and integration to lifecycle design and AI-driven use cases, Langia ensures that the capabilities described in this article translate into measurable business value.
As customer expectations continue to rise in 2026, organisations that invest in intelligent, connected engagement will be best positioned to grow loyalty, efficiency and revenue. SAP Emarsys provides the platform. Langia helps you make it work in practice. Contact us today to get started.