Black Friday marketing wins the sale. Your follow-through wins the customer.

So a shopper is standing in a store aisle in late November holding your moisturizer. They found you on TikTok a few days ago and came in looking for your product specifically.

Then they pick up the jar next to yours and take a look at that one too. The two do look comparable after all. That is when the decision actually gets made, standing right there, within a few seconds.

And the challenge is you may never know that it went your way.

So say it does go your way and you get the trial.

What happens next?

Black Friday marketing is built to win the sale, but it often has very weak follow-through.

Trial is hard and often expensive. But the holiday season is different. Deloitte’s 2026 forecast has consumers switching among brands and retailers and using promotions to manage their spending, which is a polite way of saying they are shopping the deal and open to trying something else. And there are more of them out there than at nearly any other point in the year. A record 202.9 million consumers shopped during the five-day Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday period in 2025.

Getting them back is the harder part.

They tried you once. Whether they come back depends in part on whether the product delivered, but if that transaction happened through a third-party retailer, you may not even know who bought it, let alone what happened after.

And that is why the follow-through is so important.

You spend time planning for this comp event every year. You invest your budget to acquire that new customer. You win the trial. But then nothing happens.

It is even harder when you sell through third-party retail because there is seemingly no way to reach that consumer at all. The shopper took the deal and the retailer kept the data.

A full BFCM strategy is not just about the technology you use to get people in. It is how you use it to stay top of mind once the hustle and bustle of the holiday season comes to an end.

So when you are thinking about how to optimize for lifetime value coming out of the holiday season, it is worth thinking through member lifecycle management. Create a compelling value proposition not just to drive trial, but to give the consumer a reason to share that trial with you, so you can capture that purchase data before the ink even dries.

The value proposition gives them a reason to choose you. The welcome is the handshake, and meaningful onboarding is that first valuable conversation.

Get that right and you have created a path to re-trial. Get it wrong and they are off to the next one.

Most BFCM strategies never plan this part at all, which is exactly why planning it puts you ahead.

What is a loyalty program actually for?

A loyalty program is more than most people think it is.

Yes, it is a tool intended to drive that ever-important metric of incrementality. But it is also one of the most powerful tools for gathering data that helps you learn more about your consumers and act smarter as an organization.

That matters even more as product discovery changes.

More consumers are starting product research and purchase decisions with AI-powered answer engines rather than a traditional search bar. In a December 2025 survey of 8,000 consumers, 41% said they had purchased a product AI recommended to them in the previous six months.

For brands, staying relevant in that environment still comes back to understanding what consumers respond to.

A loyalty program gives you a direct way to learn what resonates, heavily personalize communications, enough with batch and blast already, and develop thoughtful business strategies that capture attention and create experiences rather than sending consumers to the hills in search of something else.

It is also your test-and-learn battleground.

How often have you sat in a boardroom trying to defend that next discount?

I know for me, it was too many times to count. Until I had a tool that helped me properly segment audiences based on the data they had provided and test discount sensitivity.

And guess what?

Often, it was not the highest discount that moved behavior.

Research has found similar patterns in multiple contexts. One Journal of Marketing Research study found that customers acquired with a 35% promotional discount produced roughly half the long-term value of customers acquired without that discount. Another found that customers acquired through word of mouth generated substantially more long-term value than customers acquired through marketing activity.

Neither study says discounting is inherently bad. What they do reinforce is that how a customer is acquired can affect the value they create over time.

The 2026 EY Loyalty Market Study points at another part of the problem. Consumers do want savings. What frustrates them is when rewards feel slow, difficult to understand, or disconnected from a meaningful payoff.

A discount buys you a transaction.

It does not buy you a relationship, and it certainly does not buy you a reason to be chosen again in February or March.

All this to say, a loyalty program is a performance tool.

It is not just points and tiers. It is much more than that, and it becomes a real business asset when it is properly scoped and strategized.

Every holiday is a comp event.

Black Friday comes around every twelve months whether you are ready or not, and U.S. holiday retail sales are forecast to reach approximately $1.70 trillion this season.

The brands that get good at this are not simply running a better promotion.

They are running the same playbook for the fourth time, adjusting and evolving it based on what they learned the first three times.

While the holiday season may come and go, those new customers are what remain.

That shopper holding your moisturizer in November is either part of your customer strategy in January, or she is somebody else’s next trial.

Do you have the plan, the strategy, and the tools to bring her back in Q1?

Talk with our team about what happens after the first purchase and whether your loyalty strategy is built to turn holiday trial into the beginning of a customer relationship.

About the author

Amanda Boshell is a Product Marketing Manager at TrueLoyal. She spent twelve years as a loyalty practitioner before moving to the platform side, across agency, tech, and retail, in roles spanning program operations, strategy, and marketing. She has sat on both sides of the table, as the operator running the program and as the buyer evaluating the platforms.

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