How We Increased The Retention Rate by 105%

Retention rate is one of the few metrics I actually pay attention to. Here is how we increased this business’ retention rate by 105%

In This Email You Will Find:

• How We Increased The Retention Rate by 105%

• I might have been wrong

• Tech Spotlight

• What I Have To Sell You

How We Increased The Retention Rate by 105%

This is really one of the best ways to measure the success of an email marketing agency.

It’s not open rates or click rates.

It’s how much more of an incremental impact you can have on a business’s existing database.

Step 1 - Complete flow rebuild

The flows were in a sorry state. Unlike most agencies, we focused on what mattered.

We completely rebuilt the six flows that truly drive revenue and focused on two key aspects in every flow—separating purchasers and non-purchasers in every split and educating the reader as much as possible.

I believe non-customers and customers are fundamentally different when it comes to the conversations that happen within emails. Every email that gets sent to non-customers has some sort of incentive in it. Why? Because any loss in revenue on the first purchase gets made up for in the second and third orders. If we can get more people to place their first order, a loss of, say, 10% of the margin gets recovered down the road.

The education part is massive here. These guys sell nicotine-free vapes. The importance of educating on withdrawals and consistency is huge, especially when it comes to increasing that retention rate (you can see we did a good job with the 105% increase).

Step 2 - Pop-ups

We created a series of pop-ups that targeted different people at different stages in the customer journey and set triggers on different landing pages.

Pop-ups are one of the most underutilized tools when it comes to email. People think they are only for email capture.

They are wrong.

They are for email capture, onsite conversion, cross-sells, zero-party data, and a whole bunch more.

Step 3 - Campaigns... a lot of them

We created a bunch of campaigns for different segments.

If you had purchased, we leaned heavily on the angle of ‘taking the first step to quitting’. Why?

Because we knew that pretty much everyone in our database was trying to quit smoking. And if they had not purchased, we just had to push them in the direction of getting started on what we know is a tough journey. We also included incentives for all those who had not purchased.

For those who had already purchased… the angle of remaining consistent had to be hammered home. If you had already started the journey of quitting, we knew that the message of sticking with it had to be reiterated at every step.

The result... check out the screenshot.

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I might have been wrong

I talk a lot about plain text versus creative emails. For those that don’t know, plain text is an email without any images or creative in it (see the below screenshot for an example) and creative is an email with images in it.

I ran a test (full results will be shared next week), where I split the audience 50/50 for a series of sale emails (3 to be exact). The results were actually pretty surprising… enough for me to really question my thoughts on the effectiveness of plain text emails for sales.

Next week I will have a proper breakdown, but the quick wrap-up of this is… creative emails for sales blew the plain text out of the water.

Monthly Tech Focus

Aimerce is performing well for several of my clients, and I plan to expand its use in the coming months. We actually just started it for another of the businesses I work with.

For full transparency, Aimerce sponsors this newsletter. The platform helps boost flow revenue by extending the lifespan of your website’s pixel, enabling you to send more abandonment emails.

Currently, five businesses are using the software, and here are the results we've achieved so far (excluding one):

Good - Dates from 20/11/24 - 17/3/25

Client 4 (Good) - Additional revenue of $2,720.66 which is a 3.90% increase in revenue

So far so good here.

Mod - Dates from 28/11 - 17/3/25

Client 6 (Mod) - Additional revenue of $812.07 which is a 6.19% increase in revenue. We had to turn this off as we the client had stock issues and were there for not generating a positive return.

Min - Dates from 28/11 - 17/3/25

Client 7 (Min) - Additional revenue of $6,233.65

Sel - Dates from 21/10 - 17/3/25

Client 8 (Sel) - Additional revenue of $21,264.36

Try them out for a month—Yiqi has a 30-day free trial going at the moment.

They are worth 5 minutes of your time: click here

My Referral Program

What I Have To Sell You

 Check out some of the guides I put together:

• Master outline of every flow of an e-commerce business needs: click here

• ChatGPT prompts for 6 automations: click here

• Editable design files that you can copy and paste for your own business/agency: click here

• Make more profit with your next email sale: click here

• My strategy for making money as a consultant: click here

• 639 different swipe files for email and sign-up forms: click here

Thanks for tuning in!

 Cheers,

Gavin