Every January there's a meeting I can picture without even trying. The holiday numbers are up on the screen, the new customer count looks great, and then someone pulls up how many of those new buyers came back, and it's a small number. Before anyone has had a chance to dig into it, someone in the room says, "They're price shoppers. They went to the next sale."

I've been in that room more than once, and more often than not that was the first explanation we reached for. It's an easy answer, because it puts the problem on the shopper. If they only came for the deal, there was never much we could have done about it.

That answer is only partly right, though, which is exactly why it's a problem. It ends the conversation at the moment it should be starting. Some of your new holiday buyers came for the deal and won't be back. We all know that. However, there’s a good chance that others would have come back if you had given them a reason at the right time. And I think it’s the right time we give this more attention and stop writing off the whole group, or only putting in partial effort to try to retain those new shoppers.

I wrote about why Black Friday's follow-through matters, and this post picks up from there. It covers how to plan the second purchase itself, and how to know whether your plan worked.

The research backs up the price shopper theory… to a point

Let's start with what the price shopper explanation gets right. Optimove looked at holiday shoppers across more than 180 brands and found that first-time holiday customers turned into repeat customers 19% less often than first-time customers who bought at any other time of year [1]. And Mailchimp found that only 16.6% of shoppers who made their first purchase during last year's peak season bought again in the first quarter of 2026 [2].

So the holiday rush does bring in some people who are, naturally, mostly there for the deal. But a set of field experiments run with a catalog retailer found something that complicates the story. When first-time customers were offered deeper discounts, they bought more from the company in the roughly two years that followed, while deeper discounts made established customers buy less later [3]. That one surprised me, and I had to read it twice.

The researchers are careful to say they can't fully separate a bigger first order from what happened after it, but the later purchases kept coming well past the first year [3]. That study is about twenty years old and comes from a very different business, so I wouldn't lean on it alone, but put together with the holiday numbers, it tells me the discount doesn't decide on its own whether a new buyer comes back. What the brand does after the first purchase matters too.

And even with agentic commerce and new ways people discover brands, people are still people, and follow-through still matters.

Store brands are making the second purchase harder to win

This is also happening in a tougher aisle than it used to be. Store brands reached a record 23.8% of grocery unit sales in the first half of 2026, while national brand units fell 0.5% from the year before, according to PLMA's midyear report using Circana data [4].

Think about what that means for the shopper who tried your product in November. When they run back out in January, the store brand is sitting right next to you on the shelf, usually for less and maybe even in a more prime shelf spot. They don't have to go looking for another sale to leave your brand, because the cheaper option is already either in their line of sight or in their hands.

Start with your buying cycle

Before you plan any offer, you need to know when a new buyer would naturally need your product again. That's your buying cycle, meaning the typical time between one purchase and the next for a product or category. A bottle of shampoo, a bag of dog food, vitamins, and a set of kitchen knives all have very different buying cycles.

This sounds basic, I know, but a lot of follow-up gets timed around the brand's email calendar instead of the customer experience. A two-week welcome series doesn't do much if the product lasts for eight weeks. And a "we miss you" email at day 90 is late if most repeat buyers in that category come back by day 45. We’re all guilty of it at some point in our career. The point is we need to learn from it and stop relying on default templates because not all products, or customers, are the same.

So use that data, look at the customers who did come back in past years and find when that second purchase happened. Then define the period where you want to move their behavior. That window is where your effort and your budget should go.

Give them a reason to come back inside that window

Once you know the window, you can make the second purchase easier to say yes to while it still matters. At one brand I worked with, we offered select bundles at a better price than buying the items at full price, but only if the customer came back within the buying window we expected for those product categories.

That offer did a few things at once. It gave a new customer a reason to come back at the moment they were likely to need us anyway (there’s that buying cycle again). It moved them into a second product, which we knew from the data was often an indicator that they would continue to purchase. And because the offer ran on a clock, we accomplished a few other things as well.

• Urgency. Putting a timebox around an event is an age-old principle in consumer psychology to drive desired activity within a specific window of time. The key is to make it feel urgent while also accommodating the need and not risking a stockpiling dilemma.
• Scarcity. Retail people know the out of stock problem all too well. The last thing you want is to run a promotion in a window that leads to that nasty OOS notification. So plan your inventory around the window, and only use “while supplies last” messaging when supply really is limited. When it’s true, it pairs well with urgency.
• Exclusive. The offer is intended to be a bounce back to improve re-trial, or repeat purchase, so keep it away from people who would have bought anyway. By now you know I am a huge fan of testing, so always consider testing when developing these tactics within your program. I walked through why standing discounts backfire in the post on holiday discount codes.

And I know what you’re thinking. It doesn't have to be a price offer, either. Bonus points on a second purchase, early access to a restock, or a sample of something that pairs well with what they bought can all work extremely well.

Something to consider is matching the offer to what you know about why they bought the product in the first place. Philip Shelper separates repeat purchase that comes from habit from repeat purchase that comes from an emotional connection [5]. With a brand new customer, you're mostly trying to build the habit, which is why getting the timing right and making the second purchase easy matter so much early on.

You can't bring back buyers if you never knew who they were in the first place

All of this assumes you know who your new buyers are. For a lot of consumer brands, that's the hard part.

If you sell in stores, point-of-sale data is a finicky thing, to put it lightly. And we know that whatever the retailer is showing you is only part of the story. And even in your own stores, capture depends on the system being integrated properly and on the staff being bought into the mission of asking customers to opt in.

I've seen programs where the technology worked and sign-ups still stalled, because the people at the register had a line to get through and loyalty wasn't part of how their day was measured, or worse, they couldn't cleanly and clearly articulate the value proposition.

Fixing that takes more than training. If the operations and store teams don't share the loyalty goals that marketing and the rest of the business has, they won't support the program, and to be honest, I can't blame them. The second purchase is a business goal, and it needs shared goals across marketing, ecommerce, operations, IT, and the stores to get any traction.

For purchases at retailers, receipts are one way in. If you add receipt scanning to your program, a shopper can join and earn after the purchase at their convenience within a timeboxed window, so you can identify and start building your strategy on how to reach the person who bought your product in a store you don't own. I covered how that works in this post on receipt scanning, and our CPG page shows how it fits into a program.

Measure whether they bought again

Opens, clicks and sign-ups are easy to report, and it's tempting to call a campaign a success because people engaged with it. But engagement is a fluffy metric. It doesn't tell you whether someone took a specific action because of what you put in front of them. So if you judge a campaign on engagement alone, you'll never really know whether it influenced the desired action.

When we set up a test properly, we learned a lot, and that meant defining three periods before anything went out. The pre-period tells you how the group behaved before the campaign. The campaign period is sized to the buying window you determined. And the post-period shows you whether the new behavior stuck or whether you just pulled a purchase forward.

Then, yep, you guessed it, hold a small group back on your normal follow-up and compare the share of each group that bought again, and what each group spent after the cost of the offer. I walked through the setup in how to prove your loyalty program is working.

This is also how you settle the price shopper question for your own brand. If the holdout comes back at about the same rate as the group that got the offer, the offer isn't doing much. If the offer group comes back at a clearly higher rate, a good share of those "price shoppers" were likely waiting for a reason. Either way, you'll know what's happening with your own buyers before the next January meeting.

What I'd do with this year's holiday buyers

If I were back in the seat this January, I'd start by pulling every first-time buyer from November and December, this year and last, into one group and look at what they bought. I'd find the common buying window for each of those categories from past repeat customers, and plan one clear reason to come back inside each window, priced so it still makes sense even if a lot of them would have bought anyway. I'd hold back a small group, write down the pre, campaign and post periods before anything goes out, and decide ahead of time what result would make me change the plan. And I'd get operations and the store teams in the room early, because the second purchase depends on them as much as it depends on marketing.

If you'd like help planning the second purchase for your holiday buyers, our team can walk through it with you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a second purchase rate?

A second purchase rate is the share of first-time buyers who buy again within a set period. It's one of the clearest early signs of whether new customers are turning into repeat customers.

Why don't new holiday customers come back?

Some came only for the deal, and research has found that first-time holiday buyers come back less often than new customers from the rest of the year. Others would come back with a reason at the right time, but many brands time their follow-up around their own calendar instead of the customer's buying cycle.

What is a buying cycle?

A buying cycle is the typical time between one purchase and the next for a product or category. Knowing it tells you when a new customer is most likely to need you again, which is when a reason to come back matters most.

How do you measure whether a second purchase campaign worked?

Hold back a small group of new buyers from the offer, then compare the share of each group that bought again and what each group spent after the cost of the offer. Set a pre-period, a campaign period sized to the buying window, and a post-period before you start.

How can brands that sell through retailers reach first-time buyers?

Receipt scanning lets a shopper join a program and earn after buying in a store the brand doesn't own. That gives the brand a way to know who bought and to reach them before their next purchase.

Sources

1. Optimove, "During the Holidays, Existing Customers are More Valuable than New Ones."
2. Intuit Mailchimp, peak season marketing insights, based on 2025 peak season data, 2026.
3. Anderson and Simester, "Long-Run Effects of Promotion Depth on New Versus Established Customers: Three Field Studies," Marketing Science, 2004.
4. BakeryAndSnacks, on PLMA's 2026 midyear report with Circana data, July 9, 2026.
5. Shelper, Loyalty Programs: The Complete Guide, 3rd edition, glossary, p. xxv.