You're reading this because you want to grow and scale your ambitious e-commerce brand, but you:

• Have lack of knowledge and resources to embark on this difficult and, in most cases, lethal journey for brands. 

• Understand that mastering various paid channels in addition to email and SMS marketing is the only way to run, expand, and scale e-commerce business. 

• Need someone to tell your story and deliver a compelling message on the proper platform at the right time. 

• Desire to focus on running your business operations, managing a strong business, and enjoying the results of your work.

This is where we jump in.


👉🏼 Here's what I'll do for you:

• Determine your MARKETING STRATEGY, key indicators, goals, and tactics in relation to the goals and target audience of your brand.

• Set up excellent ANALYTICS that go beyond the limitations of post-iOS changes and allow us to make DATA-DRIVEN decisions.

• Manage your budget and OPTIMIZE performance of your campaigns across all the advertising channels.

• Ensure a constant SUPPLY of UGC (User Generated Content), designs, and text for all forms of advertisements.

• Build an excellent RETENTION RATE through email and SMS marketing, which will be a key factor in increasing CUSTOMER LOYALTY.

• Make sure your website is set up in such a way that it gives the best user experience and, as a result, a HIGH CONVERSION RATE.

• Work on improving AOV (Average Order Value) and LTV (Customer Lifetime Value) with additional tactics and tools.

• Create advanced, time-limited campaigns and OFFERS that will not be based only on discounts.

• Advise you during the DECISION-MAKING processes, but the final decision will always be yours.


Are you ready to grow and scale your eCommerce brand, take control of your business, and become the FIRST option in your Target Audience's mind?

👉🏼 Shoot me a DM, or head over to my Featured section and check out our Offer.

See you on the other side.

Robert Balkovec

When was the last time anyone questioned the financial outcomes of retention marketing activities?

Going by the logic:

Every action you take must have a future expectation of results...

Nothing should be left to best practices or "experience".

This is the baseline of all good marketing.

And no one should ever settle for less.

Yet this is pretty typical for many agencies...

Trust-me-I'm-an-expert "strategy".

Nurturing customers, meeting the customer where they're at in the journey, personalisation.

Makes sense in theory, but what’s the incremental lift?

Is it the most efficient use of your limited resources?

At the 7-figure mark, trying to break 8-figures, this is an ever more crucial time.

That's what CTC's Global Accelerator Program solves for.

1. Better alignment with traditionally siloed growth <> retention teams.
2. Better agility to support a very dynamic marketing calendar.
3. Better analysis of activities that impact your P&L.

Together with Growth Strategists, Retention Strategists make this work.

At CTC, we always sign our names on the bottom line.

Because we know that’s what it really means to win.

If this speaks to you, let's chat and see if we'll be a good fit for each other.

Josh Tay

People sleeping on direct mail in the welcome series.

Here's a playbook you can copy:

1. Look at your time to first purchase chart

2. Locate the point where subscriber conversion almost stops
- Or when revenue from the cohort plummets

3. Trigger direct mail sequence at that point
- Do a sanity check with your existing email/sms welcome flow.
- You'll likely see the same occurrence.

4. Conduct a holdout on postcards if you're trialing for first time
- Once you see positive iROAS and iRPR, you can go 100% treatment

5. If no incrementality identified after maturity period for trial, kill campaign

We normally start with one-time winbacks as a trial to show proof of concept.

Then proceed to automate segments that hit our target iROAS.

Then move to mailmatch on welcome/cart abandons.

Then finally trial prospecting campaigns.

We've got skincare, accessories, fashion, furniture, babycare all on direct mail.

If there's anything cyclical, there's opportunity.

When disengagement happens on email, sms, app push, try a new channel.

This way you don't hurt your deliverability.

Or complain about long repurchase cycles because of the nature of the product.

Your strategy is only as strong as the playbooks you can piece together.

Director of Retention, Common Thread Collective | Building the world’s strongest retention program for 7 & 8 figure DTC brands

Just because you sell skincare, doesn't mean you need to only talk about skincare.

In this example, we tested running traffic to 2 quizzes.

Quiz 1: Which smoothie matches your personality
Quiz 2: Which beauty routine is right for you

We didn't expect the smoothie version to outperform by so much.

Most people would've stopped just after creating a quiz.

Or maybe compared quiz AOV/LTV vs non-quiz takers.

But we thought this would be a worth-while test.

Lesson: Think about your customers' lifestyle. 

And alternatives (not complementry) for your product. 

Weave them together.

Points-based loyalty programs don't mean much to your customers.

Incremental? Doubt it.

It seems to be more a place where high LTV customers with repurchase intent congregate.

Correlation ≠ Causation

Look into your loyalty program.

Don't compare loyalty program LTV vs non-loyalty program LTV.

Instead:

Compare loyalty program 2+ customer LTV vs non-loyalty program 2+ customer LTV.

There you'll see the difference in LTV, which reveals the truth.

Membership programs are slightly different.

These are paid plans.

Where customers pay a monthly/quarterly/yearly fee for benefits.

(not to say loyalty programs are useless. "points" are just more effective when paired with memberships. because from a customer’s pov, points mean practically nothing but a discount. which you also could argue, you might as well just send a discount code post purchase with cumulative spend threshold)

This is where bonus stacking comes in very handy.

We see that there actually is a huge portion of customers who come in with membership already on first purchase.

And there is significant incremental lift in LTV for these customers.

Over 60 days, 180 days, 365 days.

This can't be a set it and forget it program though.

You need to plan moments around this.

And campaign calendar to push the growth of this program.

Flows updated for this as well.

People think that this should be an upsell post-purchase.

Data shows otherwise.

Making back your cost of membership program is also fast.

Eg. if program is $500/mo, at $49 per subscriber, you only need 10 subscribers per month to breakeven.

Drive adoption and factor in benefit costs into your unit economics.

- feature membership program in nav bar
- include section on perks in middle of home page
- add membership program to cart drawer
- traffic running to dedicated membership program LP with different angles for different personas
- email flows pushing membership program both pre and post purchase featuring exclusive products
- campaigns with different angles to drive adoption targeting non-members/product highlights with cta to membership page

A 1% adoption rate in your customer list isn't unattainable.

With additional LTV front-loaded from membership fee + LTV from repeat purchases, this is a playbook worth looking into.

Memberships work great for highly consumable brands even with subscription program, and cyclical businesses where novelty is a big factor for returning customers.

Emails and SMS are a tiny portion of the much bigger retention play.

Offer structure, unit economics, looking at new vs legacy repeat rate to caculate rev potential...

These need to be considered.

Think deep.

Take big swings.

Make big money.

---
Client Niche in image: Accessories

Now this is a fascinating insight that our retention team passed to the growth team.

Client industry: Apparel

And we found that customers who bought designs with dogs had much higher LTV than those who didn't.

What brand will be doing:

- Add new filter for dogs for easier nav
- Test new designs with dogs

What we'll be doing:

- Dedicated dog ads
- Find more of such niches

How much time is your team investing into drawing insights?
Is your team reporting on metrics or taking action?
Are you asking the right questions?

Giving discounts in your flows to increase AOV?

What criteria do you have to determine who receives a discount?

Everyone?
Non-customers only?
Discount with threshold? But which amount?

To answer that, you'll need to look at your AOV histogram.

1. If you based it off AVERAGE order value, you might be pretty off

- Averages lie
- If we had set it at the mean, there'd be a very big chunk of people who wouldn't have moved
- Purely because their cart value might've been too far (see how far mode is from mean)
- Mean is getting pulled up by select customers who spend enornmous amounts
- Question is, where are most of your customers?

2. Look at MODAL order value for help

- Your objective is to move people one bucket up
- Moving the bulk of customers up will translate to higher AOV by default
- It's the same for how you'd create free shipping thresholds or free gift with thresholds in your gamified cart drawers.

There's math to most of these things.

Only do things when it makes sense for the business.

When creating any post-purchase upsells/cross-sells, always rely on your product journey map.

The common way:

Person adds sample > They buy regular next

Data might show otherwise.

In this case, person goes straight into bundle.

Even for singles, they seem to not replenish the same product.

Instead, they gravitate towards bundles, and stay on bundle orders.

This could drastically change the way you push for repurchases.

Interestingly, this mystery item was the fourth most purchased item.

This item's added to the cart drawer as a default upsell on every product.

Avg item price: $35
Mystery item: $15

Objective: How can we liquidate slow/dead inventory faster?

Go-forward questions:

1. Should we create a mystery bundle option too?
2. Can we create "mystery gift" as a front-end offer?

These will all be tests to be conducted.

Ask the right questions...

... Come up with the right hypotheses

... Test the right things

... Take the right actions


Client niche: Accessories

You might win on revenue, but at what cost?

(Long post ahead!)

Today I want to breakdown a real post-mortem of a recent play we did for women’s headwear brand.

And exactly how we still hit the forecast while mitigating downside risk. 

Context:
Client wants to repeat last year’s promo mechanics and marketing calendar.

Expectation:
Client looking for 1.5x rev growth with 20% higher CM.

So unfortunately, that means getting more out of email and sms channels

Problem:
Based on projections following last year’s cadence, we weren’t likely to hit target revenue desired by client.

Constraint:
At the end of the day, it’s the client’s business, and we’re here to deliver results. So it’s our job to best solve for it.

Is this sustainable? 

Nope. But it’s the best stop-gap measure before we have a conversation on expectations, while still delivering on performance to prove we can.

👀 Observation of historical:

Every major promo (BFCM, Mother's Day, Labor Day, Independence Day) did generate more revenue YoY. 

Revenue up 87%, but they had to send to 133% more people to get there. 

At some point, we’ve just been adding subscribers who don't convert into the campaign mix…

Dragging down the economics of the entire channel.


🧠 Insight 1:
RPR declined every single time—ranging from -7% to -42%. 

What was happening is that they were running the same plays to bigger lists and getting diminishing returns per subscriber.

It was reusing the same promo mechanics promo on promo, because “it worked”.

And expanding audiences toe extract more revenue.

What was “working” was going to crash real soon.


🧠 Insight 2:

The correlation between campaign frequency and RPR was actually positive (+0.25).

More campaigns in a month didn’t tank performance. 

What does correlate with declining performance though, was list size growth:

Early period: 56K avg recipients/campaign → $0.0326 RPR
Late period: 126K avg recipients/campaign → $0.0261 RPR

As the send sizes expanded 2-3x, engagement metrics collapsed.


🔬Analysis:

Most would think we have a list fatigue problem.

Initial thought is to reduce sends.

But we actually don’t have a demand elasticity problem.

We are just dealing with the law of shitty cohorts.


👎 The wrong things to do:

1. Expand audiences to get more impressions.
(This will trigger law of shitty cohorts)

2. Reduce send volume
(This wouldn’t allow us to hit rev targets)


👍 What to do:

1. Increase send volume to tighter engagement segments since list has been proven to be able to handle.

2. Product promos only to go out to product-interest segments.

This is why we never skip forecasts.

The forecast allows us to gap-find and it’s based on the exercise of rigorous forecasting that we uncover these insights that we’d otherwise have missed out on, which might have resulted in incorrect execution.

4 mistakes I made when first forecasting email revenue and how you can avoid it too.

I wish we could figure this out faster too.

But the retention scape in this aspect is still in its infancy.

We're doing our best to fail faster.

To come to a clearer truth.

Here's 4 things I got wrong and how we're solving for it now:

1. Not taking monthly volume into account (rev degradation)

❌  As we increase campaign volume, unsubs might increase and RPR might decrease.

What should've been done was to create a weighted average of RPR based on volume of sends per week over time, split by promo vs non-promo

---

2. Not taking post-promo revenue dips into account

❌ From the last promo sent, you need to determine the "cooldown period" before demand picks back up again.
---

3. Not taking last-year-same-period's email volume into account

❌ For the sake of simplicity, I naively assumed last year's RPR to be same as this year's. 

I just applied a seasonality factor on top with a YoY growth factor.

But the diminishing returns from higher volume played a bigger role than I anticipated.
---

4. Not discounting active subscriptions in email campaigns

❌ If you send a general educational campaign to your engaged list with active subscribers in there...

You'd have been inaccurately attributing revenue.
---

Now we're factoring all that and building it into our forecasting algorithm.

And fully automating this to eliminate human error.

Humans are terrible at extrapolating data.

Worse if we need to incorporate several other aspects.

Tech enablement is the future of marketing.

Built upon solid reasoning, 
asking the right questions, 
with an endless desire to improve, 
and relentlessness to follow-through on the outcomes we promise on

Email revenue targets must roll up into total daily/weekly/monthly targets.

Just like all other demand capture channels.

If there's no expectation of results, you're shooting blind.

And any post-mortem reporting holds little value.

It's easy to look backwards and come up with reasons as to why it didn't work.

Sometimes that'll be too late.

You missed your goals.

Proactivity starts with the forecast, based on the growth plan.

Are you holding email accountable to performance, or justifying fluke performance after the fact?

Now, next big problem to solve is this:

How do we determine demand elasticity of the list?

1. Are we just redistributing revenue to email when it would already have come through?

- send frequency vs organic revenue baseline
- residual correlation of rev lift when stripped of seasonality and normalised for evergreen spend

2. Are we just bringing forward LTV from future months?

- early warning signs of list and offer fatigue

3. Are we accounting for revenue dips post high-volume/promo periods?

- revenue curve over time, revenue reversion pattern


How would you solve for these?

Your cart drawers, checkout upsell, post-purchase upsell funnel will bump your LTV up more than a bounce-back post-purchase email will.

On these pages, you have 100% open rates.

With the highest purchase intent.

Take advantage of it.

Different products in cart might need different upsells based on:

- LTV growth by product
- Total LTV by product (including AOV)
- Balance with product demand (volume)
- Product journey
- Frequently bought together

Then once you have your various funnels/upsells in place, there should be monthly measurement to identify what needs improvement.

How equipped are you and/or your retention team right now to execute this?

Always nice to know we're pacing on target, within <10% delta.

We still have big moments we're expecting towards end of month.

Tracking performance this way takes away guesswork.

The worst thing an agency can do is to come up with excuses to justify underperformance.

Over and over again.

When all that was needed was accountability.

Reviews immensely help reduce friction to the purchase.

People look at the number of reviews to know if this brand/product is trustworthy.

It makes sense to build your review war chest.

In post-purchase surveys, we've asked specifically about reviews.

Question 1: "What made you choose to shop with us?"

Options: "Reviews", "Referrals from friends", "Video tutorials", "Others"

Of those who selected Reviews, we had a logic to ask the next question...

Question 2: "How did the reviews help you make a decision today?"

Options: "Other customers' stories", "Photos/Videos of products in use", "Number of reviews vs other brands"

And we saw high photo/video review responses.

This isn't a theory propogated by review apps.

We personally tested this.

That's how we know what to do.
(Always be skeptical and own your own data. Everyone on the internet lies. Maybe I'm lying too)

But if you're too lazy to test, here's what you can do to set up.

1. Go to your review app
2. Create coupon tiers
3. Customise review request emails to let customers know about the added incentive
4. Set an expiry on the discount
5. Send reminders to customers who left respective reviews, to claim their discount

Optional:
A/B test with Intelligems or a similar tool, with and without reviews on your PDP.

Or with the number of reviews stars right above your product name.

And see how that affects conversion rate.

Who said retention was only emails and sms?

Is your retention person supporting you with these?

No fluffy customer journey theory.

Just real stuff that you can implement right now.

And all the data points you need.

Feel free to take this and run with it.

Client niche: F&B, subscription

How to overcome weak subscription program take-up rate

We're now more than 90 days past BFCM.

You know what that means?

Time to reactivate your black friday shoppers who are unengaged on digital.

Looking at your repurchase windows, you'll see that majority of LTV lift for new customers happen within first 90 days. 

(typically)

If you're a brand with replenishable products...

Or you sell things with high novelty/"new drop" factors...

This is definitely something you'll want to get in on.

Relook at past year's data and you'll also find this:

Your black friday buyers are a lot more sensitive than other promo period shoppers/evergreen.

(I've had a post with some of this data before if you wanna check that out.)

So if we're nearing the end of the highest probablity curve of repurchase and they're still not coming back...

Much less engaging...

You'll want to do something about that.

1. Offer
Again, we know holiday shoppers typically only buy with discounts

2. New channel
If they're not engaging on email, sms, try new mode of communication

And this is the perfect time to start.

+ you only have a very short window to execute.

You'll want to run your winbacks for this group of customers before the next major sale.

Which for most US brands, is going to be Memorial Day and 4th July Sales.

If you start right now, you'll need a couple of days to get post cards delivered to doorsteps.

Then, people don't take action immediately.

Postcards might sit on their desks or coffee tables for a while.

That's why we wait out with a 60-day maturity period.

🚨 IMPORTANT:
You don't want your winback offer clashing with your site offer.

Because now that just muddies data and the offers cannibalise each other.

Timeline:
Now > 14 Mar = Plan your campaign, offers, creative, segments
15 Mar > 20-ish Mar = Delivery
20 Mar > 20 May = 60-Day Maturity Period

Just in time for memorial day promo launch date.

And you can do your usual holdouts.

But this is a crucial time to strike.

If you want to run a proper winback campaign, do it once, do it right.

Are you levergaging Web Push notifications?

- Welcome
- Browse abandons
- Cart abandons

If you find your lead:conversion rate on these email/sms flows are weak, it might make sense to have another channel to support.

At the end of the day, it's about impressions.

So where do your customers hang out, that you also be on?

Show up there and drive them back to site.

Then track lead:conversion efficiency

The way you structure a tiered loyalty program must take psychological triggers in mind + factor in unit economics.

Weak participation rate = Poor incremental revenue

= unnecessary complexity 

= useless extra cost to run the program

Three post-purchase micro surveys conducted across three different brands.

All had one same option:

"When there's a sale on"

In all instances, that came up as the highest volume response.

This is probably the reality for most ecommerce brands.

People are most likely to shop when there's a sale or a discount.

Knowing this, it's ever more important to bake the discounts already into the price of your product.

So that you can afford to "discount" when necessary.

Without having a really strong, notable brand, is it really possible to never go on sale, and still maximise your growth potential both on new and returning rev?

What do you think?

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