Your January Customers Hit 90 Days This Week…
Check their return rate before you scale Q2 spend
Are you spending over $50,000+ / month on Meta or Google every month but not getting the results you need or hoped for? Nord Media is taking a select few brands to help them scale and hit their goals for Q2. If you’re looking to increase your growth profitably, let’s chat.
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An operator managing $100K+/month in Meta spend can tell you their 7-day ROAS, their CPM trend, and their best-performing creative format this month.
But almost none of them can tell you what percentage of last quarter's customers came back.
Across the accounts we manage, the second purchase rate is the most consistently untracked number in DTC.
You can run a technically excellent acquisition machine and still be building on a leaky foundation. If 4 in 5 customers never return, scaling spend accelerates the treadmill, not the business.
Before Q2 spend goes up, pull one number. Here's what it is and what it tells you.
I see brands running SMS that are confident it's working.
New data from 1,000+ shoppers suggests otherwise.
82.4% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase because they couldn't get an answer to a product or order question. Only 39% of brands believe unanswered questions are causing that kind of drop-off.
That's a 43-point gap between how brands think their SMS is performing and what customers are actually experiencing. Your dashboard looks fine…but customers are quietly leaving.
Postscript and DTC surveyed 1,000 shoppers and 840+ operators doing $1M+ in revenue to quantify exactly how wide that gap is.
They broke it down by vertical, brand size, and response time. The further you dig, the more uncomfortable it gets.
If you're running SMS and confident in how it's performing, this report is worth 10 minutes. It'll change how you think about what your subscribers actually experience.
What the Data Shows
A February 2026 benchmark report from BS&Co analyzed 156,110 DTC customers across 10+ verticals:
Overall repeat purchase rate: 18.8% within 365 days. Roughly 4 in 5 customers never buy again.
The timing cliff: 50.3% of all repeat purchases happen within the first 30 days of the original order. 76.4% happen within 90 days. After 90 days, only 23.6% of repeat buyers remain and they trickle in over the following 9+ months.
The post-purchase gap: Most brands run 7-14 day post-purchase email flows. A 7-day flow covers only 15.9% of the repeat purchase window. A 14-day flow covers 29.5%. Brands go silent exactly when customers are most likely to return.
Customers you acquired in January are right at the edge of the 90-day repeat purchase window. If they haven't returned by now, the probability they ever will drops sharply.
The probability chain from Smile.io's dataset of 1.1 billion shoppers across 250,000 commerce brands:
After one purchase, a customer has a 27% chance of returning
After a second purchase, that jumps to 49% chance of a third
After a third, 62%.
The second purchase is the inflection point. Every dollar of Q2 acquisition spend buys a customer with a 27% return rate. Every investment in moving existing customers to a second purchase compounds the economics of everything already spent.
What Good Looks Like by Category
Second purchase rate benchmarks vary by what you sell. Here are three benchmarks from the same dataset:
Consumables (supplements, food and beverage, specialty beverages): 22-44% repeat rate. Top supplement brands hit 39-44%.
Apparel: 15-17%.
Durables and home goods: 7-11%.
The diagnostic across accounts:
If you sell consumables and your 90-day second purchase rate is below 25%, you have a retention problem.
If you sell apparel and you're below 10%, something is broken in the post-purchase experience.
If you sell durables and you're at 12%, you're likely outperforming your category.
One important data point: 77% of second purchases are reorders of the same product, not cross-sells. Most post-purchase flows are built around product recommendations and "you might also like" carousels - optimizing for the 23% minority.
For consumable and apparel brands, "ready for another?" outperforms "have you seen this?"
Pull the Number Before Q2 Spend Goes Up
Three steps. This is a 15-minute pull in Shopify native analytics.
Step 1 - Pull your January cohort: Go to Analytics > Customers. Filter by first order date: January 1-31, 2026.
Step 2 - Check second orders: How many of those customers placed a second order by March 23rd? That's your 60-75 day second purchase rate for the January acquisition cohort.
Step 3 - Compare to your category benchmark:
Consumables: are you above 25%?
Apparel: above 12%?
Durables: above 10%?
If yes, scaling Q2 acquisition spend is compounding. If no, scaling spend will buy more customers who disappear at the same rate.
Brands on Klaviyo can build the same view by segmenting January acquisition cohort and filtering for repeat purchase events.
What to Do With What You Find
At or above benchmark:
Scale Q2 spend with confidence. The math is compounding.
Extend your post-purchase flow to cover the full 90-day window and front-load the first 30 days - that's when 50% of repeat purchases happen and most brands have gone silent.
Below benchmark:
Fix the retention gap before adding acquisition budget. Three highest-leverage moves:
Extend post-purchase flow to 90 days
Lead with reorder prompts for the original product, not catalog recommendations - 77% of second purchases are the same item
If you're a consumable brand without a subscription option, add one - customers reordering manually at high rates are signaling they want automation
The scaling logic: a brand acquiring 1,000 customers/month with a 15% 90-day return rate needs to keep acquiring 850 new customers just to stay flat. Scaling spend to 1,500 customers/month accelerates the treadmill, not the business.
More acquisitions on top of poor retention don't fix the problem. It amplifies it.
Final Thoughts
My March 16th newsletter gave operators the budget reset framework. This is the retention check that should run before that framework executes.
If you haven't pulled your second purchase rate, you're setting Q2 targets without knowing whether Q1 was working.
Pull the number before you increase budget. If it's healthy, scale. If it's not, fix the back door before you open the front one wider.
If you want a growth partner who is invested in helping you build a profitable business, someone who is going to push you to make changes that focus on profitable growth. Book a call - let’s chat.
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Disclaimer: Thank you to Postscript for sponsoring today's newsletter.
