The holidays bring a flood of one-time shoppers — and a chance to turn them into long-term customers. Most brands focus on discounts and points, but genuine loyalty comes from connection, not coupons. Here’s how to build relationships that last beyond the holiday rush — using a lesson from an unlikely loyalty experiment.

The postcard experiment that proved people over points

Loyalty grows when your customers feel like you care. Between 2012 and 2014, La Quinta did something most hotel chains would never risk: it let its VP of Loyalty write personal postcards to guests — not to everyone, just to high-value customers or those who seemed ready to drift away.

Validity surveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers, revealing what drives them to open, engage with, or unsubscribe from holiday emails. This holiday season, consumers signal that they want transparency, real discounts and thoughtful timing, not inbox overload or misleading subject lines. Retailers that continue to rely on volume over value risk unsubscribes and missed opportunities.

Here’s what consumers told us about what’s working, what’s not, and what brands can do to improve their holiday email performance.

2025 has been a year of sweeping change — both technologically thanks to AI, and economically as President Trump’s tariffs reshape the landscape of global trade. Not surprisingly, all this change has also shifted consumers’ shopping behaviors, and new research from consulting firm BCG showcases exactly how that’s playing out this holiday season.

The findings underscore the driven, deal-seeking behavior that consumers are bringing to this holiday season, something that has already been widely seen this year, as early as Amazon’s July Prime Day event. But while holiday shopping has been creeping earlier into the year for some time now, what’s becoming clear this year is that consumers are so intent on finding the best deals and saving money that they are willing to wait to buy — in particular for major holiday sales events like Black Friday — and they are drawing on the impressive research and deductive powers of AI to help them find the right time and place.  

Gift subscriptions aren’t just a nice-to-have holiday promo — they can be one of the most efficient ways to drive new readership and recurring revenue. The trick is to stop treating them like a one-off December campaign and start thinking of them as a system: a growth engine that kicks into high gear during the holidays but keeps running all year long.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to segment your audience, build gifter and giftee journeys, and optimize your workflows so every gift subscription has the chance to become a long-term subscriber.

If you’re a retailer just gearing up for the peak holiday shopping season, you’re probably already too late. In fact, the very notion of a big selling period that’s treated as a once-a-year phenomenon is out of date, says Greg Dyer, chief commercial officer of the staffing agency Randstad USA.

“Companies need to always be thinking about peak — constantly involving all areas within the organization,” he says. That means tightly coordinating planning across manufacturing, logistics, marketing and sales on an ongoing basis.

The yearend holiday shopping season may mean half of consumers tapping BNPL for purchases. Half of holiday shoppers plan to use buy now, pay later services to cover their expenses this holiday season, according to a holiday survey of 1,000 U.S. adults from digital payments provider PayPal Holdings. The respondents cited budget control and affordability as the top reasons for using the payment tool.

Those groups are harnessing artificial intelligence for gift ideas and to compare prices this season, a new survey states. While nearly a quarter (23%) of consumers overall are likely to use chatbots and AI tools to shop this holiday season, millennials and Gen Z shoppers are leading the way in using the technology, according to an Epsilon Pulse report. Forty-four percent of millennials and 42% of Gen Z respondents said they are likely to use chatbots and AI tools for holiday purchase inspiration.

From shifting loyalty to year-round gifting, learn what’s driving global purchase behavior in 2025—and how top brands are building smarter, more profitable campaigns in response. Packed with trends and actionable tactics, this report helps brands capture more revenue through smarter segmentation, loyalty, and omnichannel orchestration.