January email marketing ideas: what to send after BFCM to turn holiday buyers into repeat customers

What should you send in January?

Here's the short list I'd start from:

1. Second-order emails to holiday first-time buyers. Through flows, not one-off blasts.
2. Reorder reminders timed to when holiday orders run out.
3. Winback for customers who bought earlier in the year and haven't come back.
4. A list cleanup and sunset for holiday signups who never engaged.
5. New-year routine campaigns for wellness, supplement, food and skincare brands.
6. Your own news. A restock of something that sold out in December, or a launch.

The first four are mostly flows. That's the point. January is a good month to let your flows carry the weight while you plan the year.

How do you turn holiday first-time buyers into repeat customers?

Every first-time buyer from BFCM is a test of your flows. The order happened. Now your post-purchase and reorder emails decide whether there's a second one.

Here's where I'd look first:

• Post-purchase for first-time buyers. In the Flow System I install, post-purchase splits by how many orders someone has placed, all within 30 days. A first order gets 6 emails over about 24 days: welcome, brand story, mission and benefits, how to use the product, support and community, then a soft nudge to buy again. A second order gets 5 emails, a third gets 4 (including a review invitation that goes to everyone who reaches a third order), and a fourth-plus gets 3. Holiday first-time buyers land in the 6-email branch, and they re-enter the flow each time they order. More in the post-purchase email flow.
• Reorder reminder timing. Work out when holiday orders run out. Say someone bought a 30-day supply on Black Friday. They'll be running low around the end of December or early January. If your reorder reminder isn't live by then, you miss the window. Replenishment email timing walks through picking the window for each product.
• The reorder flow itself. If your product runs out, build the reorder flow before anything else. Across 4 consumable brands, replenishment flows earned about $2.23 per person, about 28x the best campaign. Only 2 of the 4 had one built. A skincare brand I work with saw its reorder reminder flow grow 496% in one month as new customers hit their reorder window. That's exactly what a post-holiday wave looks like.

The reorder reminder isn't one of the 8 core flows I install for every brand. It goes on top of them. But for a consumable brand coming out of BFCM, it's the first one I'd add.

What about people who bought gifts?

Some of your holiday orders weren't for the buyer. Someone bought your product for their sister, and their sister is the one using it.

That changes the reorder reminder. The buyer may not reorder at all, and the person using the product isn't on your list. A few ideas I'd try:

• If your store lets people mark an order as a gift, keep those buyers out of the standard reorder reminder.
• Put a signup offer on a card in the box or on the packaging so the person using it can join your list.
• Send gift buyers a "did they love it?" email in January with an easy way to buy it for themselves.

Should you clean your email list in January?

Yes. BFCM brings in a wave of signups, and a lot of them only wanted the discount. By January, you can see who's engaging and who isn't.

This matters for your bill too. Klaviyo's help center says your email plan has to match or exceed your active profile count. If you go over, your plan upgrades to the next tier automatically at the start of the next billing cycle. If you suppress or delete enough profiles before the cycle ends to get back under the limit, you stay on your current plan.

Klaviyo's own advice is to try to re-engage inactive contacts first, with re-engagement campaigns or sunset flows, before suppressing or deleting them. That's how I'd do it:

1. Pull holiday signups who haven't opened or clicked since they joined.
2. Send them a short sunset series: a reason to stay, then a last chance.
3. Suppress the people who still don't engage.

The full setup is in how to build a Klaviyo sunset flow, and the billing side is in why did my Klaviyo bill go up.

When does winback kick in for holiday buyers?

In the Flow System I install, winback waits 45 days after someone's last order, then sends 5 emails between day 45 and day 60. Anyone who orders again exits. Only people who've been opening (not counting Apple's automatic opens) get it, so you're not emailing dormant contacts and hurting deliverability.

Do the math for holiday buyers. Someone who bought on Black Friday, Nov 27, and hasn't reordered enters winback around Jan 11 and gets the last email around Jan 26. So mid-to-late January is when your winback flow is busiest.

The order matters too. It opens with a restock reminder, then product benefits and use cases. The offer only shows up at email 4. In my four-brand data, winback email #3 earned about 2x what email #1 earned ($0.23 vs $0.11 per person), so a one-email winback stops right before the part that pays. More in how long should a winback flow be.

What new-year angles work for wellness and consumable brands?

January is when people reset routines. That's a real reason to buy for a lot of consumable brands:

• Wellness and supplements: building a daily habit, and stocking up so they don't run out mid-month.
• Food and snacks: better-for-you swaps, lunches, stocking the pantry after the holidays.
• Skincare: a simpler routine for winter, or a refill of what they got as a gift.
• Subscriptions: the start of a new routine is a good time to ask for the commitment.

Skip the generic "New year, new you" line. Lead with the routine your product fits into.

And remember that content alone won't do it. A wellness brand I work with sent a month of all-educational emails with no offer. Campaign revenue went from $3,146 to $110, down 96.5%. Educational January emails are fine. Pair each one with a reason to buy.

Why email matters more when January gets slow

January sales often dip after the holidays, and ads can feel expensive. Ads are rented, your list is owned.

A subscription wellness brand I work with had a month where store revenue fell 37% and new customers dropped from 1,657 to 223. Email's share of revenue went from 41% to 53%. Its "your order is coming up" subscription reminder made $47,321 that month, 74% of all flow revenue. When new customers slow down, the people already on your list keep the lights on.

Where these numbers come from

The pooled numbers come from 4 consumable brands I work with: 2,897 campaigns and $17.7M in email revenue. It's a small sample, so read it as directional. Single-brand numbers come from individual client accounts, described by category instead of name.

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WRITTEN BY Jack White

Founder of Bardown Digital, a Chicago-based Klaviyo email and retention agency for Shopify brands. He's worked with brands doing $500K to $100M a year, with $100M+ in email-attributed revenue across them.

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