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Your cancel flow probably hands a discount to people who were never leaving over price, and you still lose about 95 out ...
28/08/2026

Your cancel flow probably hands a discount to people who were never leaving over price, and you still lose about 95 out of every 100 who click it.

The standard build runs about five screens. Are you sure, here is what you lose, here is 20% off, tell us why, confirm. Pause turns up on the last screen in smaller text if it turns up at all. By screen three nobody is reading any of it, they are just looking for the fastest way out.

A cancel click is usually a bad month, or a delivery that turned up too soon. Neither of those is a decision to leave, and the flow never asks. Turn it around and the first screen offers something smaller than leaving: pause it, skip the next one, swap the product, with cancel sitting underneath in plain text. The discount then comes out only for the person who said price, because offering money to someone with four boxes in the cupboard just tells them you were not listening.

Skio published the number on this in June. A cancel flow that matches the offer to the reason saves 15 to 30% of the subscribers who try to leave, and most brands save under 5%.

Go and click cancel on your own store first. Then the Bottleneck Quiz takes two minutes and tells you whether retention is even where your money is going.

Attentive surveyed 600 US shoppers in June and asked when they start their Christmas buying. 71% said before Black Frida...
26/08/2026

Attentive surveyed 600 US shoppers in June and asked when they start their Christmas buying. 71% said before Black Friday. 46% said before November has even started.

Then they asked the same people when they expect the deals to show up, and 84% said November, most of them in the week before Black Friday itself.

Read those two together and the gap is the whole problem. The buying begins in September and October. The campaigns begin in November. So a store spends its biggest discount of the year competing for people who already spent the money, and it spends nothing at all on the two months where the spending was actually happening.

The fix is not a longer sale, and it is not a deeper one. It is having a reason to turn up in October that is not a percentage.

Tomorrow at 12:30 I am planning a whole Black Friday season on a merino clothing store, with every number on screen. Live on Zoom, no replay. Link is in the bio.

Open your own subscription box and look at whatever is printed on the card sitting on top of the product. On most stores...
25/08/2026

Open your own subscription box and look at whatever is printed on the card sitting on top of the product. On most stores it says thank you, or it carries a code for a friend, and that card is the only piece of marketing you can be genuinely certain the customer has seen.

It is also sitting in the one moment where you know exactly what is going on. They are holding the product, they have not used any of it yet, and the next charge is already scheduled. Nothing else you send all quarter arrives with all three of those true at once.

The thing worth printing there is the rate, whatever the rate turns out to be for your product. Something like: most people get through this one in about six weeks, and if you are quicker or slower than that, here is how to move your next delivery, with the link sitting underneath it. That sentence is doing two jobs, because it tells somebody what normal use looks like before they start assuming they are doing it wrong, and it hands the slow ones a door that is not the cancel button.

What a store gets back for reprinting that card is a customer who moves the date instead of quietly deciding, and a subscription that survives a slow month rather than ending in one. That is the cheapest way I know to reduce churn on something that has not actually gone wrong yet.

Save this and go and look at what is printed on the card in your own box one.

Most subscribe and save setups are a standing discount with a delivery date bolted on.The delivery date is the part nobo...
25/08/2026

Most subscribe and save setups are a standing discount with a delivery date bolted on.

The delivery date is the part nobody tunes. Someone signs up for 15% off, which is exactly what the button was built to make them do, and then four weeks later the second box arrives while they have still got three weeks of the first one left. They cancel. The reason field says too expensive, and it almost never is. They are just not getting through it as fast as you are billing them.

The annoying part is that you already have the right number sitting in your admin. Take the people who buy that product without a subscription and look at the gap between their first and second order. That gap is the cadence your customers chose for themselves, and if your interval is shorter than it, you are shipping ahead of demand and then calling the result churn.

Save this and run the check on your best-selling subscription product before the next billing cycle goes out.

The month your ads stop working is usually the month you find out you never knew what a customer was worth.The cost per ...
22/08/2026

The month your ads stop working is usually the month you find out you never knew what a customer was worth.

The cost per acquisition probably didn't move. Your tolerance for it did, and tolerance is what most stores are using in place of a number.

Here's the number. Take your average order value, multiply it by how many times someone buys in a year, then multiply that by how many years they stay. That's what a customer is worth to you over their life, and it's the figure that decides whether a $40 acquisition cost is comfortable or fatal.

Then divide it by three, because three to one is the floor most ecommerce brands aim for, and that gives you roughly the most you can afford to pay to win one. If you're paying more than that, the ads aren't broken, the maths never worked.

The part worth sitting with is that repeat rate sits inside that sum twice, so a small lift there moves the whole thing further than anything you can do to the ad account.

Our LTV Calculator runs all of it, including the ratio and which of the three levers is weakest for you. It's free and nothing you type leaves your browser.

21/08/2026

Follow for the version of retention that doesn't need a code attached to it.

Most customer retention strategies are just rent, and the rent goes up every quarter.You send a code, some people come b...
21/08/2026

Most customer retention strategies are just rent, and the rent goes up every quarter.

You send a code, some people come back, the number moves, and it reads like the flow is working. What's actually happening is that the people answering a 10% code are the ones who were waiting for a code, so next quarter they wait a little longer and 10 has to become 15.

Here's the check I'd run before touching the flow. Open Total sales breakdown in Shopify, take the discounts line as a share of gross sales, then run the same thing for the year before. If that share is climbing while your repeat rate sits still, you're paying more each year for the same customers.

If that gap is wider than you expected, the Bottleneck Quiz takes about two minutes and points at where it's starting.

I was reading a Klaviyo case study on a footwear brand this week, and the fix that moved their numbers was almost boring...
20/08/2026

I was reading a Klaviyo case study on a footwear brand this week, and the fix that moved their numbers was almost boring. They stopped sending the same promo twice.

Sending the same thing by email and by text is the fastest way I know to teach someone to ignore both. Most stores never split the list by which channel a person actually opens, so one subscriber gets hit twice for one sale. And these are careful people, right? It's just that the email tool and the SMS tool don't talk to each other, so nobody notices it's happening.

They sent each promo through whichever channel that subscriber was already engaging with, email or text, never both. Then they held the discount codes back for people showing signs of leaving, instead of firing the code at the whole list. SMS revenue up 46% year over year across the portfolio in the back half of last year.

If you're on Klaviyo or Omnisend, this is about an afternoon's work, because you're not building anything new. You're splitting a list you already have. Nobody's replatforming and there's no strategy deck involved, you just work out which channel each person actually opens, and then you send it there.

It's worth sorting out before your next send goes out.

You can lift average order value without putting the whole store on sale, and the mechanism is duller than it sounds.You...
19/08/2026

You can lift average order value without putting the whole store on sale, and the mechanism is duller than it sounds.

You pair a hero product with the thing that actually goes with it, then you split the path into two or three obvious routes so nobody has to browse the entire catalogue to find the pairing you had in mind. And you price the bundle as one thing, because the moment it reads as two items with a discount stapled on, you're just running a sale again.

It's worth saving this one before you plan the next campaign.

17/08/2026

Follow for retention that’s built into the offer, not bolted on after.

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