Developing
Contributor opinion, not a tested study; the 5% to 30% repeat-purchase range and the Q4 ad-price comment have no sources.
In 60 seconds
- Recent customers (last nine months): always-on email and paid social, with purchase data sent via Meta's Conversions API.
- Drifting customers: five scheduled emails and three holiday paid campaigns of at least a week each.
- Dormant customers: no more than three emails and one multiweek paid campaign from mid-November through Cyber Monday week; keep the deepest discounts for lapsed customers.
- Deloitte forecasts 2026 holiday sales growth of 4.0% to 4.8%, with online up 7.5% to 8.4%; Black Friday is November 27 and Cyber Monday November 30.
Impact Layer
- What changed
- A practitioner offers a simple recency-based plan for holiday CRM campaigns.
- Why it matters
- Recency is easy to compute and can focus limited email and paid media on customers most likely to buy.
- Who is affected
- E-commerce and retail marketers and CRM owners planning holiday campaigns.
- Martech stack area
- CRM, Marketing Automation
- Stack impact
- Build the four recency segments, check list hygiene before emailing dormant contacts, and send before Black Friday in small batches.
- Business impact
- Low A contributed opinion piece on MarTech (owned by Semrush). The author warns emailing dormant lists risks bounces, spam traps and complaints that can hurt deliverability.
- Related technologies
- What to watch
- Your own test results and deliverability after dormant sends.
Ed Poppe, a founder and fractional marketing leader, recommends in a MarTech column published October 20, 2026 that marketers segment CRM data by purchase recency into four tiers to prioritise holiday email and paid media. He states that “Recency is the most important of the three factors” in RFM analysis.
The tactics
- Recent customers (last nine months): always-on email and paid social, with purchase data sent through Meta’s Conversions API.
- Drifting customers: five scheduled emails and three holiday paid campaigns of at least a week each.
- Dormant customers: no more than three emails, plus one multiweek paid campaign from mid-November through Cyber Monday week.
- Reserve the deepest discounts for lapsed customers.
Context cited
Deloitte forecasts 2026 holiday sales growth of 4.0% to 4.8%, with online sales up 7.5% to 8.4%. Black Friday is November 27 and Cyber Monday November 30.
Caveats
- Emailing dormant lists risks bounces, spam traps and complaints that could hurt deliverability to best customers; the author advises checking lists, keeping batches small and sending before Black Friday.
- The claim that repeat purchases account for 5% to 30% of brand sales and the Q4 ad-price comment lack sources.
- It is contributor opinion, not a tested study.
Our read
The ladder is a reasonable starting structure. Test the dormant tier carefully because deliverability damage is hard to undo.
Sources
- MarTech: How to use CRM segmentation to drive holiday repeat purchases (opens in a new tab)
Source for the recommended tactics, the Deloitte figures and the caveats.