What 600 shoppers say about loyalty (and what it means for your brand)

Hope March is treating you well.

A report caught my attention recently. It was on loyalty & retention - the bread and butter for the Retention Edge - with some stats that I think are super relevant for DTC brands today.

If you’re not on board with the importance of retention yet, you should be.

It’s the unlock for everything - profit, ROAS, growth… everything works better when you have customers coming back and buying multiple times.

Someone on my team sent me Attentive's 2026 State of Loyalty & Retention report this week, and it got me thinking, not just about the importance of retention, but also the “how” - how to bring customers back, get them spending more, how to build a loyal base of VIPs who power your store’s growth.

There were a few specific things I picked out. Let’s get into them now.

1. 88% of consumers tried a new brand in the last 3 months. Only 18% plan to repurchase from most of them.

Shoppers aren’t shy about trying new brands.

Getting someone to try your products isn’t the hard part. With enough money and marketing, you can capture one sale.

The hard part is getting them to come back.

This is where you can stand out - and get ahead.

It’s the biggest avenue for growth for most brands. Not hollow growth but real growth. Profit and cashflow, not empty revenue.

Your move: Look at your first-to-second purchase conversion rate. If it's below 30%, that's your single biggest growth lever. Focus on getting the people who already said yes to say yes again.

2. 52% of consumers shop regularly with just 3-5 brands. Only 5% go above 10.

This chart that looks like a middle finger sums up consumers’ brand loyalty quite nicely.

One massive bar at 3-5 brands. Everything else is tiny.

That means more than half of all consumers have an "inner circle" of about 3-5 brands they buy from repeatedly. And once you add in the 26% who shop with just 1-2 brands, you're looking at 78% of consumers who have room for five brands or less in their routine.

The inner circle is real, it's small, and it's hard to break into.

But it’s the most valuable place to be, when you do break through and earn a customer’s loyalty.

Your move: Stop thinking about retention as "getting people to buy again" and start thinking about it as "becoming a default." That means every touchpoint after the first purchase is an audition for their inner circle. Post-purchase experience, product quality, how you communicate - it all either moves you closer to "default brand" status or keeps you in the "bought once, forgot about" pile.

3. 52% say deals drive their second purchase. 45% say product quality does. Together, that's almost the whole playbook.

It’s easy to overcomplicate this.

The two biggest drivers of a second purchase are a good deal (52%) and a good product (45%). Stack those two and you've covered the vast majority of what gets someone to come back.

Deals work. A well-timed offer after the first purchase is one of the most reliable tools you have.

Product quality is the other half. It makes sense. This is the buyer-seller contract. They give you money, you give them a good product. You keep up your end, they’ll keep up theirs.

There are more things that matter, and can move the needle, but the core of it is often simpler than you imagine.

Your move: If your second-purchase rate is low, ask two questions before you do anything else. First: is the product actually delivering? (Check reviews, returns, NPS.) Second: are you giving people a timely nudge to come back? A strong product plus a well-placed offer after the first order isn't a sophisticated strategy. It's almost the whole game. Everything else is about staying available and getting in front of them.

4. 69% say post-purchase content increases their confidence in a purchase.

This is the most underinvested moment in the customer journey.

Seven out of ten customers feel better about their purchase when you follow up with useful content.

Why? Because this is a key window that shapes the customer’s lasting impression of the product (and the brand).

The moment after someone buys, there's a window of doubt. "Did I need this? Is it worth it? Should I have gone with the other brand?"

You can make the most of this window by reinforcing their decision, clearing up any doubts or objections, and helping them get real value from their purchase.

Your move: Map out your first 7 days post-purchase. How many touches does a customer get? What do they say? If the answer is "a shipping confirmation and then nothing until a review request," you're leaving retention on the table. Build a 3-touch post-purchase sequence: day 1 (order excitement + what to expect), day 3-4 (usage tips or brand story), day 7 (check-in + community invite).

5. Shoppers on 2-3 channels are 2x more likely to repurchase from a new brand.

This is the strongest case for channel stacking I've seen in a single stat.

A customer who gets your emails AND your texts is twice as likely to buy again as someone who only gets one.

It’s about being everywhere.

Related, here’s another key stat:

43% of people unsubscribe from a brand because they receive too many messages. But 60% are fine seeing the same promo across channels.

The finding is pretty clear. Blasting someone with email after email, or text after text annoys them. The impact is a lot different if your brand just shows up everywhere.

They get an email, an SMS, a push notification. They see your brand on Instagram or TikTok too.

More touchpoints, more coverage, but it doesn’t feel as overbearing as a string of messages on one channel.

Your move: Increase channel coverage. You should be sending emails, using SMS, on social, active through your app, if you have one. Realize that attribution data can lie to you. Just because an email or a push was the last thing they saw before the sale, doesn’t mean there weren’t other channels working to drive this sale.

6. The strongest loyalty driver: exclusivity

This one ties back to stat #3.

We said deals work. But the report goes deeper: it's not just any deal. When asked what type of offer is most likely to bring someone back, the #1 result (41% of people) is exclusive VIP discounts.

The discount part of it is honestly secondary. What people really love is getting something that’s not available to everyone.

It makes you feel special, and it makes you feel part of a tribe. You’re part of an elite group. It’s basic human psychology. We’re wired to seek this kind of thing.

Your move: Build an exclusive, VIP “inner circle”. This could be a specific tier in your loyalty program, your app users, or people with multiple orders. Then treat them like VIPs - and give them “just for you” offers that make it clear they’re part of your top customer segment.

7. 71% of shoppers stay subscribed for sales

For nearly three quarters of shoppers, the reason to stay subscribed to a brand’s marketing messages is for sale/promo notifications.

That’s not to say it’s the only way to get them to come back. But it’s the most common subscriber retention driver.

It’s what creates FOMO when someone thinks about hitting “unsubscribe”. That they might miss out on a great deal because they didn’t get the email or the push notification.

You can still leverage that attention to drive full-price sales in between, though. That’s the key - not all discounts; but promos talk.

Your move: Discount smartly. Run a few well-timed promos (and throw in exclusive subscriber promos) to keep the FOMO high. This holds your customer’s attention - use that attention to drive sales between promos too.

The Thread That Connects Everything

If I had to summarize this entire report in one sentence, it'd be this:

Customers are easier to acquire and harder to keep than ever before.

Yet the basics are still nothing ground-breaking.

• Post-purchase content that reinforces the buying decision

• Channel stacking that meets customers where they are

• Fewer messages, but across more surfaces

• Segmented retention that respects generational differences

• Loyalty mechanics that create momentum, not just status

None of this requires a massive tech investment or high-end expertise. Most of it requires paying attention to the moments you're currently ignoring.

The Channel You’re Missing

Speaking of channel stacking, one of the highest-impact "channels" most ecommerce brands still haven't activated is their own mobile app.

Mobile apps are the ultimate VIP channel. Always on, your brand’s logo showing up on the customer’s home screen, push notifications landing on their lock screen.

These are all the things that turn a "bought once" customer into a repeat buyer. MobiLoud makes it easy to launch - no $200K build, no separate system to manage. It’s your store, directly converted into an app, with everything done for you.

Get a free preview of what your store would look like as an app, or DM me on LinkedIn to chat about how to launch your app.

Quick Hits

Amazon passes Walmart in annual revenue for the first time $716.9B vs $713.2B. After 13 years of Walmart holding the #1 spot, Amazon takes the crown. Worth noting: AWS alone did $128.7B, so it's not an apples-to-apples retail comparison. But the signal is clear. The biggest company in the world, by revenue, is now a tech-first commerce company.

Ecommerce hits 16.6% of total US retail sales Q4 2025 ecommerce sales hit $316.1B, growing 5.3% year-over-year while overall retail grew just 2.7%. Online is eating share faster than ever. Check out the full data from the Census Bureau here.

Amazon expands Shop Direct: buy from other retailers without leaving Amazon Over 100 million products from 400,000+ merchants, now with third-party feed support from Feedonomics, Salsify, and CedCommerce. Amazon's AI assistant Rufus can complete purchases on your site on a customer's behalf. Free access to 200M+ Prime members without marketplace fees. Sounds great until you realize Amazon now sits between you and your customer in a whole new way.

Customer reviews are the new SEO as AI reshapes product discovery ChatGPT users run 84 million shopping queries per week in the US. AI engines pull from reviews to make product recommendations, so brands are getting aggressive about soliciting them. One brand is offering $25 for five-star reviews. Another delays review requests until customers see real product results. Feels like SEO circa 2010, but for AI.

Shopify captures nearly half of all new online stores in Europe Out of 324,000 new European stores, Shopify grabbed 148,044. That's 54% in the Netherlands, 49% in France, 41% in Spain. WooCommerce came in second with 99K. New DTC brands are overwhelmingly choosing Shopify. The moat keeps getting wider.

Amazon requires senior engineer sign-off on AI-assisted code after outages A six-hour outage on Amazon's main ecommerce site was linked to AI-generated code. Internal docs cited a "trend of incidents" with "high blast radius" from "Gen-AI assisted changes." Now junior and mid-level engineers need senior approval before deploying AI-written code. A cautionary tale for anyone rushing to automate everything.

That’s all for now.

I’ll be back in touch next week, with more on how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.

If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.

Until next time,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.

See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.