Infrequent Buyers

In about three weeks, a large fraction of your inactive customer file will awaken, briefly. For about 6-7 weeks thereafter, customers who purchase gifts ... customers who like winter-centric merchandise ... they'll awaken after a pummeling of email campaigns over the prior 44 weeks when the gift/winter-centric customer could have cared less.

And then? They'll go quiet again.

In 1999 at Eddie Bauer, our Home customers went dormant as a matter of practice. They bought bedding or pillows or whatever, then their needs were met. We'd waste a fortune mailing catalogs to an audience that was largely dormant. My team got tired of being blamed for low response ... "DON'T YOU KNOW HOW TO TARGET CUSTOMERS??" ... well, yeah, we knew how to target customers, it's just that the customers the company wanted us to target were dormant. So we rented the living daylights out of the Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn file, and those names worked! Those customers had not just purchased our merchandise.

Obviously it's a different world in 2026. Regardless, you have your product listing ads ready for the dormant customers who are ready to bite. You have a fundamentally different email marketing cadence for the portion of your email subscriber file that is dormant for ten+ months then highly active for 6-7 weeks. Your website recognizes the formerly dormant customer and treats that customer differently.

Take advantage of the tools at your disposal for managing infrequent buyers. This is your time to shine ... it's not a Black Friday / Cyber Monday 60% off opportunity, it's an opportunity to enhance the customer relationship with infrequent customers.