Why email can't fix eCom issues alone

eCommerce brands must stop working with email agencies if they expect to "fix" their growth problems. After working with over 200 brands at my Klaviyo Elite Agency, here are the top 5 dirty truths most agencies won't tell you. 1. Email's success is intrinsically tied to acquisition Over 70% of your customer base will likely never buy from you again. Increasing returning customer revenue is a critical part of building a healthy business, but true growth comes from increasing your database of customers to target. That comes from new visitors to your website, not existing ones. 2. Email can't fix poor retention alone Retention rates & churn are largely a bi-product of the lived experience with your product. If the customer experience sucks and your product fails to deliver, no amount of emails can solve this problem. You can use email & lifecycle strategies to diagnose the problem, but it's going to be up to a separate department to drive true change. 3. 80% of email results are driven by brand equity The best marketer in the world can't polish a turd. An agency can only help you if they're working with solid raw materials. That means product market fit, reliable shipping and a strong customer experience. If you have these in place, most people will be able to generate revenue for your brand as they'll be capitalising on trust you've already built with your customers. 4. Arbritrary % of email revenue is irrelevant Many email marketers will argue until they're blue in the face that over 40% of your revenue needs to be driven by email marketing. This is a nonsensical platitude not backed by any meaningful data. It's healthy to have a significant portion of revenue driven from retention channels, but it's also going to be impacted heavily by the stickiness of your product, seasonality, assortment and pricing strategy. A generic % target doesn't give you any indication as to how healthy your strategy is. 5. Short-term revenue strategies come at the expense of long-term profitability If you see an agency with an absurd guarantee, it's inevitable that their "strategy" is going to be hammering your customers with a lot of heavy discounting to achieve revenue targets. Front-loading revenue this way nearly always leads to profit erosion and subsequent drops in returning customer revenue. _______ What did I miss from this list? Would love to hear your thoughts too. #emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

Harsh eCom truth for brand owners: email marketing alone will NOT grow your business. Yes - I said it. I get that you probably get 100s of cold emails per week… All pitching a variation of “we’ll get you to 30% Klaviyo attributed revenue” Or “we’ll outperform your current email flows or you don’t pay a penny”. It’s cute. Even if those agencies *did* do those things for you - it wouldn’t help your brand much. You don’t need better emails. You need better retention & better ways to squeeze more profit out of your customers. This way, your brand *actually* grows leading to more bankable profits & better margin. So what’s a better way than focusing on improving your emails? It’s identifying profitable metrics in your brand & scaling those. Metrics like:  - Time between purchases  - Average order value  - Sign-up to conversion rate  - Repeat purchase rate This approach keeps you focused on what actually matters in your brand for growth. And let me tell you, growth doesn’t come from better:  - Open rates  - Click-through rates  - Unique opens It comes from:  - Net profit  - COGS  - Marketing efficiency ratio If you only cared about growth-led metrics like the above? You’d make more money, see a better margin, and would have more capital to redeploy in your brand. The brands that understand this will fare better as we move into 2025.

If you're lucky, 30 of every 100 eCom customers you acquire will make a second purchase with you. The other 70 will churn forever. Top reasons the other 70 churn: ❌ Didn't like your product ❌ Thought your product was mid ❌ There was nothing else on your site they want to buy ❌ They forgot about you The first three reasons can't be "fixed" with retention marketing. You can use customer research to improve the product. You can adjust your messaging to acquire more relevant customers. But a sick post-purchase flow isn't going to turn a pineapple pizza hater into a pineapple pizza lover. The bigger your brand gets, the harder it will be to create something that appeals to everyone. And that shouldn't be your goal anyway–it leads to forgettable products and brands. The last reason–they forgot about you–can be addressed with marketing, but it can't be solved completely. Each year we get a new stat about how many ads the average person sees in a day. I think it's north of 3k now. In that environment it's hard to stand out. There are definitely products sitting in my home that I impulse purchased from Meta ads, where I would have to do some serious research/contemplation to tell you what brand I bought it from. The faster you scale by capturing brand-unaware in-market demand (Meta and Google), the worse your retention rate is going to get. You can hammer these folks with post-purchase marketing, but there is a real point of diminishing returns. TL;DR: you will never solve churn completely. Investing a ton of time and money in retention at the expense of acquisition is a wasted effort.