Black Friday Retention: 3 Offers That Bring First-Time Buyers Back

Summarize with AI:

You can 15X your sales over Black Friday and still fail Black Friday. The real problem starts once the weekend is over.

Across 8K+ first-time Black Friday buyers in 2025, only 11.5% placed another order within 90 days. In other words, 88.5% still hadn't made a second purchase three months later.

The brands that turn that sales spike into customers who actually come back have one thing in common. They still run promotions, but they also add an offer designed specifically to trigger purchase #2: a retention offer. Below are three of them, the brands that use them, and how to copy each one.

Key takeaways

Only 11.5% of first-time Black Friday buyers in 2025 placed another order within 90 days.
Put your Black Friday discount on a product with a refill behind it, and sell the refill as a subscription at checkout (Jolie).
Replace the discount with store credit: a paid sample set whose price comes back as credit on a full-size purchase, valid 60 days (Amouage).
Make your Black Friday hero a 3 or 4-pack of your best repeat products, not your single best seller (Fishwife).

What is a retention offer?

A classic Black Friday discount is built to win the first order. A retention offer is built so that the first order leads to a second one. The three brands below do it in three different ways: a refill subscription, store credit, and a variety pack.

1. Discount the product that needs refills

Jolie: 100K+ subscribers and 80% on subscription

Jolie filtered showerhead being installed on an outdoor shower — Jolie's filtered showerhead, the entry product behind the filter subscription.

Jolie sells a filtered showerhead. It went from zero to more than 100K subscribers and now sits in Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's and Erewhon.

The showerhead is the entry product. The filter behind it needs changing every 90 days, and 80% of Jolie's buyers subscribe to it. The device sells once. The filter sells four times a year at $38, without a single campaign behind it.

The November discount belongs on the showerhead, because every filter that ships after it reaches a customer who is already paying. Each delivery is an excuse to upsell.

How to apply it

Put your Black Friday discount on the products that have a refill behind them and sell that refill as a subscription at checkout, not in a follow-up email.
Each refill delivery then carries your next offer. Print the replacement date on the product so the reminder does not depend on email deliverability.

2. Replace your discount with store credit

Amouage: $430M in 2025, up 66%

Amouage perfume bottle on a red stone background — Amouage, the perfume house from Oman.

Amouage is a perfume house in Oman. It sold $430M in 2025, up 66%, and its Exceptional Extraits go for $550 a bottle.

Two of its best sellers are sampler sets. The $50 set comes with $50 to spend on a full bottle, so the samples end up free. The code arrives by email, so buyers have to join the list, and it expires after 60 days.

A discount costs money the day the order comes in. Amouage's $50 only costs it anything once a full bottle sells, and the customer paid for the samples upfront.

How to apply it

Sell a paid sample of your hero product and give that money back as credit on the next order.
Put a 60-day expiry on that credit and make the email opt-in the only way to collect it.

⚡ Bigblue Hack

Credit beats a refund on returns too. In Bigblue's return portal, 45% of buyers take store credit instead of their money back, and they spend €39 more on their next order. You can add a bonus on top to push them there. See the return portal

3. Make your best sellers a variety pack

Fishwife: $6M a year and 1,800 retail doors

Fishwife tinned fish boxes, including smoked salmon and smoked rainbow trout — Fishwife's tinned fish range.

Fishwife sells tinned fish: $6M a year, 1,800 retail doors by April 2024, and a nationwide Costco rollout in July 2026 built around an exclusive trio pack.

Almost nothing in its shop is sold on its own. The Spicy Trio is $35, the Albacore Tuna Variety 4-Pack $40, the Starter Pack $88, and most flavours only exist as a three-pack.

77% of second orders are the same product as the first (study on 7,454 repeat purchases). A customer who buys one discounted tin reorders that tin. A customer who buys the four-pack reorders whichever of the four they liked, at full price. Fishwife also learns which flavour won before it buys stock for next year.

How to apply it

Make your Black Friday hero a 3 or 4-pack of your best repeat products, not your single best seller.
Rank your products by 60-day reorder rate before building the pack, and keep it to three or four.

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Conclusion

Black Friday discounts bring in first-time buyers. A retention offer decides whether they come back. Pick the one that matches your catalogue: a product with a refill behind it (Jolie), a premium product buyers want to try before committing (Amouage), or a range of flavours or variants that customers reorder (Fishwife).

Sources

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This article first appeared in D2C Academy, the newsletter by Bigblue, Europe’s #1 3PL. We’re at the heart of operations for 600+ brands, which lets us spot the best e-com trends out there. Every two weeks, we break one down.

I’m Evan. Before Bigblue, I built DOSE TUE: 244M organic views, 300K+ cans sold, 3K+ supermarkets, zero ad spend, all in one year. Now I break down what other great brands do so you can steal it, too.