How smart brands are retaining more customers

Hey, it’s Arik.

I’ve been thinking a lot about retention lately.

Specifically, how quiet it is.

No one brags about a great flow the way they brag about a viral TikTok.

Meanwhile, email and SMS could easily be driving 30–60% of revenue for the brands that actually care about it.

Let me break it down in some fun facts:

1. 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of the existing customers.
2. The cost of recruiting new customers will be 5X more than retaining existing ones.
3. A 5% increase in customer retention drive 25% in profit or more.
4. Retaining customers by 2% can lower costs by as much as 10%.

If you’re not making the majority of your email money on autopilot… you don’t have a retention strategy, you just have a campaign calendar.

One brand I work with in the beauty space is a great example.

They’re doing over $872K in attributed revenue across a 4-month window.

Email: $540,292
SMS: $331,990

Combined, that’s 41%+ of total revenue from retention alone.

That doesn’t happen because of a great sale. That happens when retention systems actually do their job.

Now, it’s not glamorous, but it’s profitable.

Here’s the full break down:

$313K of the email revenue is coming just from automated sequences running in the background.

Welcome Series → $187K
Browse Abandonment → $44K
Site Abandonment → $32K
Checkout Abandonment → $30K
Replenishment → $11K

The Welcome Series alone pulled $1.42 per recipient, which is wild considering it runs on autopilot.

SMS is running lean and converting fast.
From Jan to May, they generated $264K, mostly through Attentive journeys, not campaigns.

In the same time frame:
- Their email subscriber count went up by 197%
- Their SMS subscriber count went up by 123%
- Signup popups are converting at 8–10%

If you're running email and want to level up your retention strategy, here are 5 ways you can strategically retain more customers, and what they look like inside this setup:

#1: Control the center
Instead of chasing new angles every week, anchor your messaging around the one thing that consistently makes people buy.

In this case, that meant doubling down on a core value prop: Simplified haircare catered to all hair types.


#2: Understand the real value of the asset
It’s not just what you send, it’s where and when you send it. The same email sent post-purchase vs. post-delivery will perform very differently.

For this brand, we mapped every core flow to real customer behavior, building in strategic delays and triggers that reflect how people actually make decisions, not how most brands hope they do.


#3: Position before submission
Modular creative gives you leverage, especially when you’re running across email, SMS, and paid.

For this brand, we’re constantly testing hooks, formats, and frameworks in one channel, and scaling the winners everywhere.


#4: Own the initiative
Retention isn’t set-it-and-forget-it. It compounds when you stay close to the data.

We review every flow regularly, even if it’s converting. If we think it can do better, we test. If something’s stale, we update it. Nothing sits for more than 60 days without a check-in.


#5: Don’t be afraid to pause what’s “working.”
This one’s counterintuitive: some brands pause good-enough flows to scale back temporarily and rebuild from a stronger foundation for longer-term gains. It’s a hard call, but often the right one.

All flows that were set up for this brand before we came in were put on pause, even the ones converting well, so we could rebuild from a stronger, more strategic foundation. And now, almost every one of those flows has improved in performance.


Retention isn’t just a system; it’s a rhythm. You can feel when it’s dialed in, and you can definitely feel when it’s not.

See you next Thursday,
Arik

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