Turn first orders into second and third ones
The cheapest revenue in the business is sitting in a list that is being emailed badly. Every customer you already have cost money to acquire, and most brands spend far more finding the next one than they spend earning a second order from the last one. I run retention as a trading channel with a margin, not as a newsletter.
You are probably here because one of these is true.
- Repeat rate is a number nobody has looked at in a year.
- The calendar is a discount every fortnight and the list has learned to wait for it.
- Flows were set up when the account was opened and have not been touched since.
- Every email goes to everybody, and unsubscribes are rising faster than the list.
- Subscriptions exist, and churn is quietly eating the growth.
- Email revenue looks fine in the platform and nobody has checked what it is claiming credit for.
What I actually do.
Find out what a customer is actually worth. Repeat rate, time to second order, cohort value and margin by segment, from your own data. This decides how much you can afford to spend on acquisition, and most brands have never done the sum.
Rebuild the flows that carry the revenue. Welcome, post-purchase, replenishment, winback and abandoned checkout, written for your product and your customer's actual buying cycle. These do most of the work and get the least attention.
Segment properly. New against returning, by category, by margin, by lifecycle stage. Sending less to more of the right people beats sending everything to everyone, on revenue and on list health.
Build the calendar on margin. A promotional plan that starts from contribution and stock rather than from the discount. Some offers are worth making and some cost more than they earn, and the calendar should know which is which before it goes out.
Make subscriptions hold. Onboarding, cadence, pause and swap options, and the churn points found and fixed. Retention in a subscription business is a product decision as much as a marketing one, and I treat it as both.
Measure what the channel actually added. Platform attributed revenue is generous. I report on incremental revenue, list health and margin, so you know what the channel is worth rather than what it says it is worth.
The first ninety days.
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Weeks one to four
Data pulled and the customer economics worked out. Flows audited, the broken and missing ones rebuilt first, and deliverability checked before anything else is sent.
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Weeks five to eight
Segmentation live, the promotional calendar rebuilt on margin, and subscription churn points identified with fixes in flight.
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Weeks nine to twelve
Results read against the baseline, winning flows extended, and a retention plan for the next quarter that finance can see the margin in.
Retention run day to day, on a real profit and loss.
I currently run ecommerce for a direct to consumer coffee brand, where subscriptions, CRM and the profit and loss are the job, so this is work I do every week rather than advise on from a distance. It is also why coffee is the one category I do not take on. At Naturewall I ran CRM as one part of a single growth plan alongside paid, search, affiliates and influencer, against stretch revenue targets we consistently exceeded. Client results will appear here as they arrive.
The full track recordTwo things I will not do.
I will not build a calendar on discount. If the only lever is a percentage off, the brand is training its customers to wait, and I would rather fix the flows and the segmentation first, where the margin is.
I will not report platform attributed revenue as if it were real. You will get the incremental number, the list health and the margin, and if the channel is being over credited I will say so.
Questions.
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Which platform do you work in?
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Whichever you have. Klaviyo is the most common on Shopify and I know it well, but the discipline is the same in any of them. Moving platform is rarely the answer and I will tell you if it is.
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How quickly does retention work show up?
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Flow fixes show in weeks. Repeat rate and cohort value take a quarter or two to move visibly, because you are waiting for customers to come back. I will tell you which numbers to watch at each stage so it does not feel like nothing is happening.
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Do you write the emails?
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I plan the programme, write the briefs and edit the copy. If you have a writer or designer they do the production. If you do not, I bring in people I have worked with for years, at cost, under my direction.
Other services
Tell me your repeat rate.
If you do not know it, that is the first thing to find out, and twenty minutes is enough to work out what it is probably costing you.