How Leading Brands Are Turning One-Time Buyers Into Repeat Customers

In an era of endless choice and one-click price comparisons, even satisfied shoppers may slip away unless you give them a compelling reason to stay.

A single sale keeps the lights on; repeat sales keep the business growing. By reframing retention as a growth opportunity, marketers can unlock long-term loyalty.

Brands that achieve high customer lifetime value succeed not by chasing constant acquisition, but by investing in deliberate retention strategies that blend data-driven insights with authentic, human connections.

The economics of customer retention have never been more compelling, or more critical. While most brands obsess over acquisition metrics, the real profit lives in what happens after that first sale.

Existing buyers are your most reliable source of growth. Lose them, and the impact ripples through every part of your business:

• Lower margins. New-customer promos, ad bids, and marketplace fees erode profit when every order is a “first-time” purchase.
• Volatile forecasting. Without a core of predictable spenders, stock planning and cash-flow projections become guesswork.
• Stagnant advocacy. Shoppers who never return rarely leave reviews or referrals, starving your funnel of low-cost acquisition.

We partnered with Deloitte for the 2025 Global Consumer Products Engagement Report, surveying 14,000 shoppers and 750 senior marketers worldwide. What we found revealed a massive disconnect between customer expectations and brand delivery.

What shoppers demand:

• 42% want personalized deals and offers.
• 30% crave new loyalty rewards and schemes.
• 27% expect help discovering products they’ll love.
• 25% want more transparent brand communication.

How marketers are responding:

• 45% are focused on boosting engagement across current channels.
• 41% list loyalty and retention as a top priority.
• 41% are racing to automate campaigns for scale.
• 38% aim to create new experiences, often powered by AI.

Get the full report: Global Consumer Products Engagement Report 2025

Leading brands combine technology and empathy to craft compelling, repeatable customer experiences. Here’s how to apply these strategies effectively.

1. Integrate omnichannel engagement

When customers glide from Instagram to mobile checkout to in-store pickup, they expect your brand to keep pace. The first step is stitching together every behavioral, transactional, and preference signal into a single record.

A solution like SAP Emarsys cross-channel automation consolidates those signals in real time. This enables marketers to orchestrate email, SMS, push notifications, web overlays, and POS prompts from a single command center.

With unified data, you can trigger a back-in-stock text the moment an item resurfaces and pause promotional emails when a service ticket is open. Loyalty point balances can display automatically at checkout.

This seamless hand-off removes friction, fosters trust, and makes it easy for first-time shoppers to come back, no matter which channel they choose.

2. Automate personalization with AI-driven segmentation

Generic “Thanks for your order” emails rarely spark a second purchase. Machine learning models segment customers by likelihood to reorder, discount sensitivity, content affinity, and more. These scores are continuously updated to reflect changing behavior.

With the SAP Emarsys Personalisation Engine, marketers can fine-tune subject lines, product grids, and send times for each individual without manual effort.

The result is twofold: customers feel understood instead of spammed, and marketing teams save hours previously spent slicing lists and scheduling batch sends.

Over time, predictive personalization boosts click-through rates, increases order value, and lifts lifetime value.

3. Reactivate high-value dormant customers

Every customer base includes previously high-value buyers who have since gone quiet. Instead of relying on blanket win-back discounts, focus on those with the greatest potential for future value.

Predictive customer lifetime value (CLV) models like Smart Insight analyze margin, order cadence, and return behavior to rank lapsed profiles. Marketers can create finely tuned journeys using email journey automation. These campaigns rekindle interest with reminders of past favorites, new arrivals, and limited-time incentives.

Focusing efforts where revenue potential is highest helps avoid discount fatigue, protect margins, and reignite valuable relationships.

4. Collect and respond to real-time customer feedback

Retention improves when shoppers know their voice matters. Embed micro-surveys, star ratings, or post-purchase NPS prompts across touchpoints and then route responses into a tool like SAP Emarsys reporting and analytics.

Negative sentiment can trigger service-recovery workflows; recurring complaints can inform your roadmap.

Equally important is closing the feedback loop. When customers are informed that their input led to meaningful changes, it reinforces trust and reduces the risk of churn.

Real-time feedback also sharpens segmentation logic, ensuring future communications are relevant and respectful.

5. Drive referrals through customer advocacy

Customers who refer others tend to be more loyal — and those they refer are more likely to become long-term buyers. But they need clear pathways and recognition to share.

Embed referral CTAs in order confirmations, loyalty dashboards, and post-purchase flows. Tools make it easy to track referrals, reward both parties, and spotlight top advocates for VIP treatment.

A well-run advocacy loop pulls double duty: it keeps existing customers engaged with perks and recognition while also generating high-quality, retention-ready prospects.

By combining these five strategies — grounded in a robust, privacy-safe data foundation — marketers can transform single orders into lasting, profitable relationships.

Learn more: 5 Reasons Customer Advocacy Should Be Your Next Growth Strategy

Let’s explore how leading brands are successfully implementing retention strategies.

Estée Lauder: Emotional engagement through immersive experiences

Estée Lauder, a global prestige beauty brand, needed to stand out in a saturated market by deepening emotional connections to drive repeat purchases.

Solution:

• Maintained exceptional standards for product and packaging quality.
• Invested in personalized in-store experiences led by consultants and makeup artists.
• Launched immersive activations, including mobile skin clinics and fragrance consultations.

By making each interaction feel tailored and human, Estée Lauder builds loyalty through emotional resonance — not just product excellence.

Watch: Estée Lauder’s Approach to Data Privacy and Personalization

FASHIONPHILE: Predictive CLV to reactivate high-value buyers

As a luxury resale marketplace, FASHIONPHILE faced a long purchase cycle and high product value. They needed to pinpoint and re-engage high-value dormant buyers.

Solution:

• Built a predictive CLV model using over 20 years of data.
• Identified valuable lapsed segments.
• Ran AI-powered tests for personalized messaging and ads.

Instead of casting a wide net, FASHIONPHILE launched focused, personalized campaigns that reignited interest and boosted repeat purchases. The result: stronger engagement, higher ROI, and a smarter, more efficient path to long-term customer loyalty.

Huel: Driving profitable growth through customer advocacy

Huel, a DTC nutrition brand, aimed to retain and grow high-value customers by tapping into organic referral behaviors that weren’t reflected in traditional metrics.

Solution:

• Partnered with SAP Emarsys and Mention Me to scale referrals.
• Enabled digital and offline sharing, like name-share.
• Tracked Extended Customer Revenue (ECR) to segment top advocates.
• Rewarded referrers with early access, gifting campaigns, and VIP launches.

Within a year, referral-driven acquisition nearly doubled — from 10% to almost 20% of all new customers — while 22% of existing customers referred friends. Those referrals were then 3.5 times more likely to refer others in turn.

Social sharing rose by 150% through targeted gifting campaigns, and advocate cohorts generated a 280% increase in positive customer service messages, demonstrating that empowered customers not only return but actively promote the brand.

Turning one-time buyers into repeat customers requires more than discounts or clever ads. Loyalty is earned through consistent, relevant, and helpful interactions. With AI-powered insights and unified data, marketers can anticipate needs, recognize loyalty, and respond in real time.

SAP Emarsys unites every moving part: real-time identity resolution, predictive segmentation, omnichannel orchestration, and revenue-focused reporting.

The result? A self-sustaining retention engine that drives growth from first purchase to advocacy, allowing your team to concentrate on strategy instead of routine execution.

Ready to see it for yourself?

Book a demo and discover how SAP Emarsys helps leading brands turn one-time shoppers into lifelong, high-value customers.