Most retention agencies focus exclusively on the wrong thing that will never meaningfully improve Lifetime Value. They obsess over email sends without actually analysing the fundamentals that determine whether the strategy will actually work.

3 ways to grow a DTC subscription business: 1. Get more subscribers 2. Get them to stay longer 3. Get them to spend more Everything else is noise. Here are the best strategies for accomplishing all 3. 1. Get more subscribers Make Subscribe & Save the default option on your product page. Brands that switch often see take rate jump from 10-20% immediately. Add three value-prop bullets under the subscribe option that emphasise the value subscribers get vs 1-time purchase. Build continuity into the 2nd purchase from the first (i.e. all subsequent subscription orders get 20% off). Don't chase take rate at all costs. An offer that has ~50% churn by order number 2 is likely being gamed by subscribers. You have to find the sweet spot. 2. Get them to stay longer Track churn by order number, not calendar month. Around 70% of subscriber churn happens before the 3rd order, so that's where your effort should go. After this, retention curves tend to play out as fate will be. Get them using the product in the first 10 days. Set a goal for the customer and hold them accountable to it. Do NOT be afraid to overcommunicate during the onboarding phase - it'll decrease churn, not increase it. Fix failed payments, since up to 15% of churn can come from these. Smart retries and incentives for payments that consistently fail. Keep it simple. Always offer flexibility - don't default to a fixed renewal cadence. Subscriber behaviour is often at odds with how brands want to generate cash, but you need to respect the customer's needs. Treat your cancel flow as the highest-intent screen in the entire lifecycle. Start with a founder video reiterating the benefits, then overcome objections, before finishing on your best offer. 3. Get them to spend more Build an irresistible quarterly subscription offer. It brings more cash in upfront, and less billing reminders equate to less churn. Offer the upgrade post-checkout to get as many people onto it as possible. Once subscribers pass order 3, send them 1-2 upsell/cross-sell offers a month. They're your best customers and the ones most likely to bite, so stop being terrified of contacting them. Give them something new to buy. How often you do that is one of the biggest levers on LTV. Reward tenure: acknowledge your best subscribers at milestones (i.e. annually). They're your biggest spenders and deserve VIP treatment to fuel WoM growth. What did I miss?

3 ways to grow a DTC subscription business: 1. Get more subscribers 2. Get them to stay longer 3. Get them to spend more Everything else is noise. Here are the best strategies for accomplishing all 3. 1. Get more subscribers Make Subscribe & Save the default option on your product page. Brands that switch often see take rate jump from 10-20% immediately. Add three value-prop bullets under the subscribe option that emphasise the value subscribers get vs 1-time purchase. Build continuity into the 2nd purchase from the first (i.e. all subsequent subscription orders get 20% off). Don't chase take rate at all costs. An offer that has ~50% churn by order number 2 is likely being gamed by subscribers. You have to find the sweet spot. 2. Get them to stay longer Track churn by order number, not calendar month. Around 70% of subscriber churn happens before the 3rd order, so that's where your effort should go. After this, retention curves tend to play out as fate will be. Get them using the product in the first 10 days. Set a goal for the customer and hold them accountable to it. Do NOT be afraid to overcommunicate during the onboarding phase - it'll decrease churn, not increase it. Fix failed payments, since up to 15% of churn can come from these. Smart retries and incentives for payments that consistently fail. Keep it simple. Always offer flexibility - don't default to a fixed renewal cadence. Subscriber behaviour is often at odds with how brands want to generate cash, but you need to respect the customer's needs. Treat your cancel flow as the highest-intent screen in the entire lifecycle. Start with a founder video reiterating the benefits, then overcome objections, before finishing on your best offer. 3. Get them to spend more Build an irresistible quarterly subscription offer. It brings more cash in upfront, and less billing reminders equate to less churn. Offer the upgrade post-checkout to get as many people onto it as possible. Once subscribers pass order 3, send them 1-2 upsell/cross-sell offers a month. They're your best customers and the ones most likely to bite, so stop being terrified of contacting them. Give them something new to buy. How often you do that is one of the biggest levers on LTV. Reward tenure: acknowledge your best subscribers at milestones (i.e. annually). They're your biggest spenders and deserve VIP treatment to fuel WoM growth. What did I miss?

Last month, I convinced a founder to dump his five customer personas so his team can ship emails faster. I’ve been doing this for 2 decades now, and simple always beats complexity. On paper, personas sound like sophisticated marketing. Right message, right person, right time. But here's what actually happens when you build a campaign calendar around five personas: → Five sets of creative → Five sets of copy → Five approval loops → Five reports to interpret Every send now needs five decisions instead of one. And for what benefit? Your resource allocation goes up dramatically and the gains are never commensurate with the increased output. Here's how I’d segment by engagement for brands doing 8 to 9 figures: 🟢 Highly engaged: high frequency 🟠 Moderately engaged: reduced frequency 🔴 Low engagement: occasional sends, but never ignored One set of creative → one decision per send → maximum reach (90% of the time). I’m not saying persona data (or zero-party data) is useless. In fact, you need it on the first purchase. Collect zero-party data at signup, personalise the welcome journey, and map the attributes of your highest LTV customers back to your acquisition team. That's where individual context has real leverage, because intent is high and the message decides the sale. But for the weekly campaign calendar, go broad. The founder summarized it better than me: "We're a small team. Fewer decisions, fewer approvals. That's easier for us."

Marketing drives acquisition, product drives retention.

Want to know how a subscription brand really feels about its subscribers? Try cancelling. For a lot of brands, it's a single button. There's no option to skip, swap or push the next order back a month. I don't think most brands chose that on purpose. The portal was built by the subscription app, while the emails were created by the retention team. Neither of these teams is looking at what happens when a subscriber tries to leave. So cancelling is the easiest thing a subscriber can do. That's a problem, because ~70% of subscription churn happens before the third order. When we audit a subscription programme, I start with the cancellations: → Where they happened → Why they happened, and → What the subscriber was offered before they left Then I check what the portal actually lets them do on their own. What I want to see is a practical alternative before the cancel button, and ideally in the inbox. We've partnered with Zaymo to run those actions inside the email, so skipping or swapping is one tap instead of a login. Give people a reason to stay before you give them a way out. P.S. If you want to see how Zaymo puts skip and swap inside a Klaviyo email, take a look here: zaymo.com/examples

Every brand right now is planning its BFCM discounts. But the data says that’s the wrong place to start. Klaviyo’s 2025 BFCM data says that the brands with the smallest discounts grew the fastest, up 14% year on year. Meanwhile average discount depth actually dropped, and stayed under 30% even at the peak. Which flips the usual discount-first logic on its head. That’s exactly why Travis Bonneteau, our Head of Lifecycle Marketing, used his years of expertise to put together a full BFCM working plan covering: 🧲 The decisions you need to take first before writing an email 🧲 List growth and segmentation strategies that aren’t generic 🧲 A complete send calendar across Email, SMS, WhatsApp and Direct Mail 🧲 A QA checklist so nothing breaks on the biggest weekend of the year 🧲 A 30-day post BFCM winback email minus the discount codes Comment “BFCM” and it’s yours. P.S. Follow me if you haven’t already.

I think many people are writing Wardley off too easily for this one. I favour Dubious as well heavily but there's a chance Wardley could jump all over him early and go for it. It's heavyweight boxing at the end of the day and he has the power to hurt him and finish anyone. #DuboisWardley

This is 100% true. American mindset - for better or worse - is ravenous for success (financially). You can't not visit every corner of America and feel the infectious desire to level up. The contrast to Europe is night and day. Saying that, there's plenty of downsides to this culture as well but that's for another post.

Justin, the founder of ZZZ Bears, started the brand because his daughter couldn't sleep while he was away for work. A little bear in a Marine uniform is what got her through it. That is the first question we ask every new brand: why does anyone buy this in the first place? For ZZZ Bears, it's a family missing someone. And most kids only need one bear for that. You can't email someone into buying a second teddy bear for their kid. So we built everything around the reason people buy instead: 🧲 The Welcome Flow opens with Justin's story, because it's the same reason most families land on the site 🧲 Cross-sell flows offer the pieces that make the bear theirs: a name patch, a rank patch, dog tags, the bedtime storybook 🧲 A story flow asks families to reply and tell us what their bear means to them, giving the brand real content for its ads and website 🧲 Direct mail with our partner PostPilot asks families to pass a bear on to another family missing someone We also more than doubled sign-ups, from around 4% to 8.7%, so every one of those flows has more families to reach. Most of the effort goes into helping one family bring in the next. When most customers only buy once, the post-purchase journey is one of the best acquisition channels you have. As Justin says himself: “Working with Magnet Monster has been a fantastic experience. The quality of the strategy, design and overall communication at every stage of the project was 5 stars and we couldn't be happier with the end result!"

I've posted on LinkedIn for over 8 years but spend almost no time on the platform compared to X these days. The quality of content, interaction and networking feels better on X. There's less AI slop and people are more direct here too.

The very first metric I look at to get a pulse check on the health & maturity of an eCommerce business is Returning Customer Revenue. Returning customer revenue is a strong indicator that you can leverage more profitable channels (email/SMS) and your own customer data to drive growth. If it’s growing every single year, it’s a sign that you’re building a resilient business that can weather the rising CAC storms… for some time. The problem with this metric is that, looked at in isolation, you can be mistakenly led to believe that you can deprioritise acquisition with each passing year. Because it can be lagging, the damage doesn’t show up until subsequent quarters and years. But by then it’s too late, and you’re in damage control. This is when you usually see brands start to hammer their email list and resort to excessive promotions to compensate. So while it’s always one of the first things I look at when auditing a new brand, it has to be supported by analysing the following to forecast whether we’re heading into trouble or not: > New customer count, month on month. The count, not the revenue. > Your active customer file (90 and 180 day buyers). Growing or shrinking? > Total clicks from owned channels, not click rate. If all three are rising, returning revenue is a genuine health signal. If they're flat or falling, it's a countdown. Retention is downstream of acquisition. It always has been.

Your lifetime value (or revenue) can be going up, but "retention" is actually DOWN. Here's a real-life example from a US outdoor brand I audited last month. Their 12-month customer value had gone up every year, yet their repurchase rate was getting worse. Look at the table: at month 12 it looks like their retention is improving. $112. $114. $116. Now read the first column: spend in the first month went from $82.60 to $91.80. All the growth came from AOV optimisation. Then read the last column. What customers spent after their first month fell from $29.50 to $27. And this year's customers spend more in their first month than any cohort before them, yet they're already behind last year's at month six. Bigger first orders were covering for fewer repeat orders. The rest of the Shopify data says the same thing: 🧲 Month 1 repeat purchase rate: down from 10.2% to 8.9% 🧲 Returning customers per new customer: down from 0.85 to 0.71 🧲 Returning order AOV: up from $71 to $82 Fewer people coming back. The ones who did spent more (thankfully!) Each number tells a different story on its own. Only together do they tell the right one. Lifetime value is built from four levers: > How many customers you acquire > How much they spend the first time > How often they come back > How much they spend when they do This brand was pulling the second and fourth hard, yet the 3rd was declining. Repeat rates fell at every month after the first order, hardest in months 4 to 6. If your category determines your repurchase rate (it often does), what's the solution? I've found these levers to be particularly effective: 1. Release complimentary products - novelty drives repurchase rates up 2. Check to see if you're reaching everyone - over half the brands I audit rely exclusively on declining email performance. You need a proactive text + direct mail strategy to maximise distribution 3. Leverage subscription + membership models - not a golden bullet, but works for some CPG-based businesses to drive predictable revenue AOV optimisation is great, but it has a ceiling. Eventually, it stops covering for a shrinking repeat base. So you don't pick one lever and hope - aim to move all of them simultaneously.