Re-engaging lapsed customers is a strategy as old as ecommerce itself. You’d think that such a long-lived tactic would be perfected by every online brand by now, right?
The fact is that ecommerce is an ever-changing ecosystem, and its continuous evolution — new channels, advancing tech, emerging data, and fluctuating consumer trends — means that success hinges on having a bottomless playbook to pull from.
In this playbook, we’ll recap why reaching out to past gift buyers and gift recipients needs to be at the top of your mind in Q4, dig into its value specific to online gifting channels, and how to get it done with Zest before the holidays hit.
Ready to re-engage? Let’s go.
Wanna skip ahead to the how-tos? Click on what you want to tackle first!
Why Re-engagement Is (Still) a Top Strategy
If you’ve been in the world of ecom for any amount of time, you already know that acquiring new customers isn’t cheap, fast, or easy. And while amassing more customers than you know what to do with is a great end goal, successful brands with real sticking power know that their existing customer list is where the real growth lies, especially in Q4. Why is that? Let’s find out.
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) are higher around the holidays.
Every brand on the World Wide Web is after the same shoppers throughout Q4, with many of them branching into new channels for the holiday season. That means your tried-and-true ad channels from the start of the year are suddenly seeing massive influxes of demand and heightened competition.
This fight for ad space, keywords, and visibility all add up to higher prices. In fact, it’s not unusual for brands to see acquisition costs increase 25% or more during the happiest season of all — a price that quickly devours profit margins. Skip skyrocketing CAC altogether and focus on the folks you know will buy from your store instead.
Stop fighting for attention and engage the people who already know you.
Brands are buying more ads, striking more deals with every influencer known to man, and deploying more creative as Q4 inches closer.
TL;DR The battle for attention is officially on. Don’t expend your precious time and resources vying for new eyeballs. Instead, hone in on strategies that speak to your existing audience (and will keep them loyal to your store all season long).
Getting existing customers to buy again is faster.
In a dream world, shoppers who see your ad one time would shop and sprint to the checkout all in a matter of minutes. In reality, that’s not even close to how the average shopper converts. Online brands have to get in front of new audiences multiple times on a variety of channels to even get a shopper to swing by their site. Then comes the plight of on-site optimization, building trust, personalizing with nothing to go on…woof.
When it comes to Q4, getting your existing customers — who already know and trust your brand — to gift is going to lead to less stress and more efficient revenue gain.
✨ The Takeaway ✨
CAC soars during Q4. Turn the focus toward your existing customers for more impact (and lower costs) as you ramp up to the holidays. This audience already knows and trusts your brand, erasing all the legwork it takes to win over new consumers while their attention is spread thinnest.
Who to Focus on in Your Q4 Reactivation Strategy
Your gifting channel should be approached with the same thoughtfulness and care given to any of your other ecommerce channels. In other words, you wouldn’t just casually throw paid ads in front of every shopper on the internet throughout the year, and you shouldn’t simply blast out your gifting channel to everyone and hope a few people convert.
The most impactful gifting campaigns come from researching which customers are actually sending gifts, then earmarking spend for reaching that unique audience in a personalized way.
Your existing audience, especially past gifters, have already proven they’re high-intent, high-AOV customers. Invest your team’s time and budget into breaking through the noise and reaching these people first and foremost.
See how MeatWorks found its audience and grew gift revenue 323% YoY.
Read the case study.
Engage Past Gifters
Of your existing customers, who do you want to reach first or have the highest shot of re-engaging? This is when it becomes important to map out your most valuable gifting customer segments. Here are a few best practices for sorting out segments:
Sort by time of purchase
We recommend re-engaging everyone who’s purchased a gift throughout the past year. Your brand and customer experience will still be fresh in their memory, so your odds of standing out in the inbox are higher than if you were a brand they didn't recognize.
If your focus is purely holiday gifters, we recommend sorting customers by those who purchased during Q4 last year. If you want to get even more detailed in your messaging, distill this group even further into groups of people who purchased on specific high-gifting days, like during BFCM, Super Saturday, or even the week after Christmas. The exact time at which they purchased could mean slight changes in your email content.
Based on the timing of past purchases, you have a small (but very valuable) glimpse into their personal shopping habits, so meeting them with messaging at the unique time each customer is most likely thinking about gifting is key.
Sort by order value
Customers with high AOV are already primed to spend a lot of money on your store. When it comes to gifters, consider sorting them by order value. Even if these customers haven’t sent a gift before, they clearly enjoy your product and trust your brand enough to place a hefty order. High-AOV shoppers are just one small nudge away from sending the products they know they love as gifts to others.
Sort by order frequency
Another fool-proof way to identify your brand's top gifting fans is to see how often they gifted throughout the year or around the holidays. A customer who sent one gift then returned to gift again is someone you need to reach out to again this year. This is a proven repeat gifter who loved what your brand offered and found the experience quick and easy enough to go through it again.
Engage Past Recipients
Historically, gift recipients have been an iron-clad mystery to brands.
The only details of any gifting transaction brands have been privy to is who the customer, or gifter, is — not a whiff of info about anyone who gets the item downstream. Of course, that means no insight into who these recipients are, what they received, why they're being gifted, or any other detail the average marketer covets today.
With Zest's digital gifting capabilities, brands finally have a way to start understanding gift recipients and actually engage them beyond the gifting moment. After all, gift recipients are basically the hottest prospective customers you're ever going to find, so when a recipient opts into receive your marketing, it's a no-brainer to engage by any means possible (email is a great place to start!).
Consider re-engaging gift recipients who've opted into your marketing while they were accepting their e-gift. These are people who know your product first-hand, had the experience of opening your product as a gift (both digitally and IRL), and odds are high they want to pass the experience forward to other people they know during the holidays.
E-gift recipients have the superpower to opt into
brand marketing as part of the gift acceptance flow.
✨ The Takeaway ✨
The reports in your Zest dashboard are extremely flexible tools that can help you sort who you want to reach based on the metrics important to your team. Whether you’re sorting gifters and recipients by timeframe, spend, or product, it’s possible in your reports dashboard.
Where to Re-engage Last Year’s Gifters
Once you identify who you want to reach, the next step is figuring out where you’re going to reach them.
When it comes to re-engaging your existing customers and gifters, the answer is easy: the inbox!
You already have the info you need to craft a personalized message — who gifted, what they gifted, and their recipients. Plus, pulling Zest events into your Klaviyo account, or uploading CSVs of contacts, is one of the simplest steps you can take before the holiday rush.
Psst! Connecting Zest to Klaviyo, or your marketing tool of choice, is great for re-engaging now and after the holidays to help stoke gifting all year long.
Not connected to Klaviyo, yet?
Of course you can use any channel you want when it comes to off-site engagement — LinkedIn posts, social media, paid ads, or any other channel at your disposal — but email empowers a level of personalized and timely engagement that’s hard to match elsewhere.
According to the SAP Customer Loyalty Index, “the vast majority of brands know personalization matters, but very few are doing it well. When 84% of businesses can’t differentiate through personalized experiences, it signals a massive opportunity. The brands that crack personalization by delivering contextually relevant content, offers, and interactions will stand out in a crowded market.”
In short, if you can deliver a timely email that speaks directly to your customer’s unique gifting experience and needs, you’re doing what most brands overlook. In short, here's your shot to crush your competition in the gifting game.
Need some inspiration for what to say or how to say it? Check out these emails sent by other brands using Zest that spread gifting awareness, show people how to gift, and even offer up top gifts to send ASAP.
Wildwood leans into laying out the three easy steps to sending a great gift.
Rishi Tea shares all the ways you can swiftly send a gift to one or tons.
Eastern Standard Provisions shares its bestsellers to sap
all the guesswork from gifting.
Want all-around inspo for messaging your gifting channel?
✨ The Takeaway ✨
It’s time to lock in with email. It’s a scalable way to send messages tailored to your customers’ real-life behaviors. Acknowledging when, why, or what your customer purchased in the email is a fool-proof way to break through the holiday hubbub and draw them back into your brand for gifting.
When to Start Your Re-engagement Campaign
Many brands see Black Friday / Cyber Monday (BFCM) as the official kickoff to the holiday sales surge, but the truth is that consumers are cruising your digital store shelves sooner than you think.
Tapcart’s 2026 BFCM Data Report shows that holiday demand shows up early, and “brands that wait until Black Friday to start communicating are competing for a decision shoppers have already begun making.”
This means your gifting channel needs to be ready to go and well-communicated before Black Friday so you snag a spot on everyone’s “to-shop” list this year. If you wait to re-engage gifters with the deets about your holiday offerings until after Black Friday, odds are good they will have already started the corporate gifting process with someone else (and a single lost gift order could mean watching thousands of bucks walk away).
Your goal this year should be to drive awareness around your gifting capabilities early and often. Remind past gifters of the seamless experience they had with your store and update them with new features that make re-ordering even easier. Then as Black Friday draws near, promote your holiday deals like:
shipping and volume discounts
free private B2B storefront setup
included branded note cards or gift wrap
limited-time BFCM discounts
✨ The Takeaway ✨
When to communicate your gifting capabilities: Always and often! You can never be too early when it comes to making your brand synonymous with “holiday gifting.” Don’t let customers forget your store is the go-to gifting destination — especially with past gifters.
When to communicate your holiday offers: Expose your BFCM- or other holiday-specific discounts, bundles, and beyond roughly 2 weeks ahead of time. For example, Black Friday 2026 is November 27, so your specific promos should start on November 13.
Hype up your gifting capabilities via email, social, etc., to prime your customers,
then send timely emails about your specific BFCM offers.
How to Re-engage Past Gifters and Drive Repeat Orders
Some of your best gifters this year are going to be the ones who gifted last year. They know the quality of your products and trust the experience they had last year, so opting to shop your store again is a no-brainer.
With this fact in mind, Zest made it easy to extract these eager holiday gifters from your data and re-engage with minimal effort. Here’s how you can get started today:
How to Email Past Self-service Gifters
Zest Reports gives you a tidy list of everyone who has ordered from your storefront (and who’s opted-in to your marketing, of course), so you can pull it yourself in about two minutes and email them.
No lengthy engineering asks, no support ticket queue, no waiting on us to get started with your best holiday campaign ever.
Before you start, make sure you have:
Access to the Reports section of your Zest dashboard.
A sense of how far back you want to reach. A good place to start is pulling in everyone who ordered within the past year, or you could target people who ordered last Q4 alone.
Step 1: Build Your List in the Marketing Report
Step 1: Build Your List in the Marketing Report
The Marketing report gives you one row per email address and tells you who has opted into marketing, which is exactly what you need to email people safely.
Tip 🧠 Open this report with the columns and filters already applied, then expand the Last Ordered At window if you want to reach further back.
Click Reports in the left sidebar, then New exploration, and pick Marketing as your data source.
Click Columns and select Name, Company Name, Email, Last Ordered At, First Ordered At, Marketing Last Updated At, and Opted into Marketing. Click Apply.
Click Filters and add Opted into Marketing Is true.
Add a second filter: Last Ordered At is in previous 1 year.
Click Sort and sort by Descending and Last Ordered At, so your most recent gifters sit at the top of this list.
One thing worth knowing is that the default Marketing report combines both customers (people who bought a gift) and e-gift recipients into a single row per email address. Filtering on Last Ordered At keeps your list to people who actually placed an order, rather than recipients who only accepted a gift.
Step 2: Export Your List
Step 2: Export Your List
Click Export, name your export, and click Export again. We also recommend clicking Save as report so this exact configuration is always handy.
You’ll get an email when your export is ready. Head back to Reports and click View exports, then Download to get a ZIP with your CSV inside.
Note: Your export includes everything, even though the preview only shows the first 1,000 rows. For more on exports, see How to Export Reports and Customer Data From Storefronts.
Step 3: Draft Your Email
Step 3: Draft Your Email
These folks already know your products make good gifts. (After all, they’ve already bought them as gifts at least once!) Your goal is no longer to convince them that your products make great gifts — it’s now to remind them that you’re here for them, ready when they are, this holiday season.
In your well-timed nudge, we recommend calling out two new features:
the almighty address book
quick reorder buttons
Both features are ready to use right in their gifting account. When your returning gifter wants to build a new order, they can use the address book to swiftly search everyone they’ve gifted before and pull those people in one-by-one, or they can add a whole recipient list from a past order in one click.
Gifters can quickly toss past recipients into any gift order with the address book.
Or they search their order history and click Buy again to fire up the same gift they sent last year.
Gifters can head to their gifting account, click Buy Again, and get dropped on your storefront with their cart pre-populated with what they gifted in the past.
Most customers have no idea these features exist, but they’re game-changers when it comes to big gift orders and the amount of time they’ll save in the process. Whatever you do, don’t leave this out.
Tip 🧠 In your email, we recommend linking to a specific product rather than your storefront home page. A product permalink opens your storefront with that item already in the cart, so your customer lands just a couple of clicks from done.
To add a permalink to a product, grab a link by clicking Storefronts from the left-hand menu in your Zest account, choosing the storefront you want people to shop from, clicking Products, click the ⋮ in the Actions column on any product row, and choose Copy Product URL.
Snagging a product permalink is a smart way to send people to your top sellers
or gifts you really want to push this year.
Head to the help center to learn more about permalinks!
How to Set Up Product Permalinks and Pre-Selected Gift Links for Storefronts
When drafting your emails to re-engage gifters, it's important to:
remind them that they bought gifts with you last year (people are forgetful!).
mention time-saving features like address book and the Buy again button.
permalink to a key product or bundle you want to sell this season.
sound personable and helpful, especially during this notoriously stressful season.
Step 4: Send Your Email!
Step 4: Send Your Email!
When it comes to emailing your past gifters, you have a couple paths to pick from depending on how many people you’re emailing.
Two ways to send your emails:
Option 1: Upload your list to your email tool
Option 1: Upload your list to your email tool
This option is best for any sends going out to more than a couple dozen people, or when you want to see stats like opens and clicks.
Klaviyo, for example, walks through the upload here: Create and add contacts to a new list. A few things specific to this export:
Put the Email column first, or map it to Email during the import.
Map Name and Company Name to profile properties so you can personalize the send.
Everyone on this list has already opted into marketing, so you can confirm consent during import.
Switch off any flows triggered by the list before you upload, unless you want them firing for everyone.
Other email tools work much the same way: create a list, upload the CSV, map the columns, and send!
Tip 🧠 If you would rather skip the CSV entirely, Zest’s Klaviyo integration can add opted-in gifters to a Klaviyo list automatically as they order.
Option 2: Just BCC in Gmail (or your ESP of choice)
Option 2: Just BCC in Gmail (or your ESP of choice)
For a handful of your best corporate gifters, skip the mass blast in your email marketing tool and simply BCC folks from your usual inbox.
Copy the Email column out of your CSV, paste it into BCC, and send from your own inbox.
This route works well because it’s exactly what it looks like: a note from a real person. Plus, replies will come straight back to you for fast replies. We recommend keeping these emails simple — plain text with a deeply personalized, 1:1 feel — in lieu of highly designed or too many links.
A few things to think about:
Keep it small. Email providers cap recipients per message, and big BCC sends are more likely to land in SPAM.
Use BCC, never CC. CC shows everyone you email the entire list of addresses you send to.
A personal email has no unsubscribe link, so save this for genuinely one-to-one notes to people who have opted in or been in touch.
How to Re-engage Your Concierge Customers
Just like you used Reports in your Zest account to find gifters from the past year, you can follow similar steps to help reactivate your Concierge customers this holiday season.
For this strategy, your Child Orders report is the right source — the Marketing report doesn’t have a Channel column, so you can't isolate concierge contacts there.
The Child Orders report shows whether a gift order was placed through a self-service Storefront or via Concierge.
Step 1: Build Your List in the Child Orders Report
Step 1: Build Your List in the Child Orders Report
In your Zest account, go to Reports > New exploration > Child Orders.
Click Columns and select the following: Customer Name, Customer Email, Customer Company, Concierge Project Name, Order Submitted Date, Total.
Add these Filters: Channel is Concierge and add Order Submitted Date is in previous 1 year if you want a recent window and not concierge orders from all time.
Click Sort and sort by Descending and Order Submitted Date.
Export and download.
Step 2: De-duplicate Gifter Emails
Step 2: De-duplicate Gifter Emails
Your Child Orders report will show you one row per gift recipient — not per order — which means a single 800-recipient concierge gift order will show you 800 identical customer emails because the orders were placed by the same gifter.
Because of this, we want to get rid of all the duplicate emails in this report so you have a tidier (and much shorter) list of email addresses to message.
See how this report gives me multiples of the same email address for each order? I want to de-duplicate this data to just one email address per order.
To de-duplicate gifter emails in this report:
Upload your report CSV to Google Sheets (File > Import > Upload) and de-duplicate by using one of these methods:
Method 1: Create a pivot table (Recommended)
Method 1: Create a pivot table (Recommended)
Make the Pivot Table
Select all your imported data (or click the blank square in the top-left corner where the row and column headers meet).
In the top menu, click Insert > Pivot table.
Choose to insert it into a New sheet and click Create.
Set Up the Pivot Table Fields
On the right side of your screen, you will see the Pivot table editor panel. Configure it using these exact settings:
Rows: Click Add and select Customer Email.
What this does: It lists each unique customer email on its own row, combining duplicates.
Values (First Metric): Click Add and select Total (or your revenue/amount column). Set to Summarize by: SUM.
What this does: It adds up the total money or value associated with that specific customer.
Values (Second Metric): Click Add again and select Customer Email. Set to Summarize by: COUNTA (or COUNT).
What this does: It counts how many times that customer appears in your original report (e.g., how many orders they placed).
Making a pivot table gives you individual customer emails while preserving the total spent on each order so you can better sort by order value.
Method 2: Clean up the Spreadsheet
Method 2: Clean up the Spreadsheet
Remove duplicate emails
Click Data > Data cleanup > Remove duplicates on the email column.
We recommend creating the pivot table because, although it’s a few extra steps, it provides other valuable summaries, like spend per customer, which could be important in deciding who to prioritize in communicating or how to segment this group of gifters.
Tip 🧠 Concierge orders will only land in this report if they've been submitted to Shopify, so anything still in draft status won't appear. If an order is in draft status because a concierge customer refrained from ordering for any reason, it’s still not a bad idea to get back on their radar and email them.
Step 3: Send Your Email!
Step 3: Send Your Email!
Similar to the strategy above, when it comes to emailing top concierge clients, we recommend sending a personalized, one-to-one message. Remind these gifters what they ordered, the deadline to reorder, or even consider offering them a special discount as a gesture of appreciation.
How to Send E-gifts to Your Top Customers
Sending an e-gift to your top gifters feeds two birds with one scone: a thoughtful gift is a genuine gesture of appreciation for your most loyal gifters that won’t go unnoticed, and it’s a nice way to keep your store top of mind as they begin their holiday gifting.
Step 1: Build Your List
Step 1: Build Your List
The Marketing report gives you one row per email address and tells you who has opted into marketing, which is exactly what you need to email people safely.
Click Reports in the left sidebar, then New exploration, and pick Transactions as your data source.
Click Columns and select Customer Name, Customer Email, Customer Company, Transaction Amount, Transaction Type, Transaction Date, and Channel. Click Apply.
Click Filters and add Transaction Date is in previous 1 year. Leave Transaction Type unfiltered.
Click Sort and sort by Descending and Transaction.
Step 2: Export Your List
Step 2: Export Your List
Click Export, name your export, and click Export again. We also recommend clicking Save as report so this exact configuration is always handy.
You’ll get an email when your export is ready. Head back to Reports and click View exports, then Download to get a ZIP with your CSV inside.
Step 3: Create a Pivot Table
Step 3: Create a Pivot Table
Upload your report CSV to Google Sheets (File > Import > Upload)
Then pivot by Customer Email summing Transaction Amount. Sort descending, take your top gifters as the ones you’ll send to. How many e-gifts you send is up to you and your budget for this type of seasonal ABM campaign.
Leave refunds in rather than filtering to Payment only — refunds come through as their own rows with a negative-signed amount, so a pivot nets them out automatically. Filter them away and a customer who returned half their order looks like a bigger spender than they are.
Tip 🧠 Concierge invoices and orders are configured independently, so a concierge customer's transaction total might not always match their order total, and $0 orders are common. When in doubt about how much a customer spent with you, it never hurts to manually scroll through your client list to jog your memory or double-check the numbers.
How to Re-engage Gift Recipients
When it comes to gift recipients, you have to ensure you’re only messaging those who’ve opted into your marketing. This means that recipients of gifts sent via direct ship aren’t eligible as they never had a digital touchpoint to opt into.
However, any e-gift recipient who opted into your marketing while accepting their gift is eager to hear from you, so don’t let this valuable info go to waste this holiday season.
There's no contact-type column in the Marketing report, so "recipients" has to be inferred from which date fields are populated.
Step 1: Build Your List
Step 1: Build Your List
The Marketing report gives you one row per email address and tells you who has opted into marketing, which is exactly what you need to email people safely.
Click Reports in the left sidebar, then New exploration, and pick Marketing as your data source.
Click Columns and select Name, Company Name, Email, Last E-Gift Accepted At, Last Ordered At, and Opted into Marketing. Click Apply.
Click Filters and add Opted into Marketing is True, Last E-Gift Accepted At is not empty, and Last Ordered At is empty.
Click Sort and sort by Descending and Last E-Gift Accepted At.
Step 2: Export Your List
Step 2: Export Your List
Click Export, name your export, and click Export again. We also recommend clicking Save as report so this exact configuration is always handy.
You’ll get an email when your export is ready. Head back to Reports and click View exports, then Download to get a ZIP with your CSV inside.
Step 3: Send Your Email!
Step 3: Send Your Email!
When it comes to emailing e-gift recipients, we recommend uploading your CSV into your email marketing tool, like Klaviyo, and directing them to your self-service storefront.