Customer Service

Why most brands lose their best BFCM customers and how to fix it in 2026

Your best customers from 2025? They’re already out there. You just need to make sure they’re not invisible the next time they show up.

Photo: Adobe Stock

January 16, 2026 by Kait Stephens — CEO & Co-Founder, Brij

Black Friday through Cyber Monday (BFCM) is the most explosive sales window of the year, and increasingly, one of the most expensive missed opportunities. Sales soar across DTC, retail, Amazon, Walmart, and more. But now that the dust has settled, many brands find themselves asking the same question: where did all the customer data go?

Despite volume highs, most brands still walked away with shockingly little visibility into who bought what, where, and why. And that's a problem. If you can't see your best customers, you can't retain them, and if you can't activate their data, you're leaving millions in LTV on the table.

Now that Cyber Five is behind us, it's time to face reality. The biggest missed opportunity of BFCM 2025 wasn't a botched campaign or a bad discount strategy: it was the data that never got captured, and the relationships that never had a chance to grow.

Let's talk about what this year's data taught us, and how smart brands will use it to drive real growth throughout 2026.

2025 was the year visibility got exposed

In the holiday season, three patterns became impossible to ignore:

1. BFCM is a black box: Many of the highest-value customers come from gifting, retail, or one-time retail buys. When those moments don't lead to first-party data capture, brands can't re-engage them after the holidays.
2. Offline and marketplace buyers stayed invisible: Brands are deploying QR codes, loyalty offers, and retail incentives, but those signals rarely sync back to core platforms like Shopify, Klaviyo, or Meta. It's a visibility issue that's costing teams big when it comes to 2026 planning.
3. Slow activation equals lost loyalty: The critical onboarding, education, or loyalty prompts that could have turned a holiday buyer into a repeat customer? Often delayed, disconnected, or never sent. Without that, most never make a second purchase — especially in gifting-heavy categories.

Together, these issues represent a dangerous trend: the more channels you grow, the less clear your post-purchase journey becomes, unless you actively close the gaps.

This isn't just a holiday problem

Yes, Cyber Five concentrates volume. But this data challenge is year-round.

Every in-store trial, Amazon gift order or QR code scan is a potential customer that may never reach your lifecycle engine if systems aren't connected.

That means brands are constantly leaking value, not just in November, but every month of the year.

The stakes are higher than they seem

Every unactivated offline profile leaves between $20–$100 in LTV on the table. Multiply that across 50,000-plus QR scans, rebate submissions, or product registrations and a single BFCM period could result in the loss of $1M–$5M in value.

In today's economy, that's not just a data loss; it's a margin killer. This is a critical signal loss for AI tools that power retargeting, recommendations and loyalty, putting growing pressure on CX, lifecycle and digital teams to prove payback, fast.

How smart bands will win in 2026

The most forward-thinking teams are using their 2025 performance audit to restructure for next year — BFCM and beyond. Here's how:

Start treating every channel as a data channel
From product packaging to retail displays, brands are turning physical touch points into digital entry points to collect first and zero-party data, and feeding scan data into Klaviyo, Shopify, and Meta to power retention flows and optimize ad spend.

Bridge the AI fluency gap
AI can't act on what it can't see. When you feed it clean, timely, omnichannel data, your loyalty, win-back, and re-engagement flows become radically more effective. The best brands are fixing upstream visibility issues, connecting scan events and retail activations into their CDP or ESP to unlock personalization across channels.

Rethink the "post-purchase journey"
The journey doesn't start on your site. It starts wherever customers discover your brand. That could be on a shelf, in a retail box, or via a friend's holiday gift. Smart brands are building from that moment forward.

Use Q1 to fix fragmentation
Now is the time to reroute broken flows, unify QR systems, and pilot smarter experiences ahead of peak seasons. Don't wait til it's already crunch time in 2026. Lightweight experiences (like QR flows or digital rebates) can be live in days and deliver impact in weeks.

Real-world proof points

These brands didn't just run better BFCM playbooks. They built systems that capture, activate, and retain value year-round.

• Skullcandy unified scattered QR flows and surfaced 60,000-plus previously invisible customers, converting 20% into known profiles within six months.
• Quip captured marketplace buyers during Cyber Five by rerouting product packaging to landing pages with a clear discount offer that fed directly into their CRM path.
• Cann, a beverage brand heavily reliant on retail trial, used digital rebates at shelf to convert holiday retail buyers into first-party data, funneling them into post-holiday journeys.

Looking ahead: 2026 is already in motion

The biggest takeaway from 2025? Growth isn't just about driving more sales. It's about turning every customer, wherever they come from, into a relationship you can build on.

That requires visibility. That requires activation. That requires infrastructure that works outside of your owned channels.

In 2026, the brands that win won't just be the ones who discount well; they'll be the ones who turned their biggest spikes into ongoing signals, powering retention, reorders, and loyalty automatically.

Your best customers from 2025? They're already out there. You just need to make sure they're not invisible the next time they show up.

About Kait Stephens

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Kait Stephens is the CEO & Co-founder of Brij, an AI-powered software platform that bridges the gap between offline and online channels for omnichannel brands. Brij partners with hundreds of leading brands—including Feastables, Skullcandy, Black Diamond, Sapporo, Gozney, Momofuku, and Health-Ade—helping them deliver seamless, connected customer experiences. With over 12 years of expertise in retail and commerce, Kait brings a rich background as an investor focused on omnichannel strategies and the evolving future of retail.

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