The holidays are here — and with them a surge of new buyers. Amperity users typically have between 2x and 7x more new customers over the holiday period than over similar date ranges in October. And this year with COVID accelerating the transition to e-commerce spending (+21% on Thanksgiving and Black Friday and +15% on Cyber Monday), those numbers seem likely to be even higher.

Most brands know that repeat customers are much more valuable than one-time buyers, but there’s a fairly wide variance between those that are able to entice customers back and those that aren’t.

Unfortunately, the majority of first-time buyers at the holiday go on to make second purchases at 30% lower rates than customers acquired outside the holiday season.

But we also see some power users of Amperity converting first-time holiday buyers more effectively than they do during the rest of the year, with rates as much as 50% higher than non-holiday first-time buyers. And that includes gift-heavy categories like makeup and accessories.

So how do they do it?

Here are a few strategies we’ve seen prove most effective:

• Launch a welcome series introducing your broader product portfolio. Regardless of what brought them to you initially, let these new customers know what your brand is about, and what your full product offering looks like.

• Segment, segment, segment. The most effective brands we work with have tailored their communication based on what customers have been buying, so they know what to offer next. Further, understanding what channel brought them in initially helps us understand where to reach them next time.

• Have a loyalty program? Invite your new buyers to join, and introduce them to the benefits of the program. Even if this is part of your checkout flow today, recognize that many customers may have missed the details during frantic checkouts over the holiday weekend.

• Make sure you’re experimenting as you're trying strategies like these — be sure to run controlled experiments with a holdout audience to see what’s working, and what isn’t, both to help evolve these tactics and to give yourself a head start next year.

Altogether, this holiday period presents an opportunity like none we’ve ever encountered. We’re likely in the midst of a historically large influx of new buyers, and there are effective ways to dramatically increase the value of these customers by having them come back again in the new year.

We hope this gives you some good ideas. To learn more about using customer data to bring first-time buyers back, check out the quick-guide we’ve prepared.