Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you had an amazing weekend, slept well, got to relax, and recharge in the way you love. I’m writing this newsletter on Saturday, after I just recorded a Limited Supply episode with Joseph Siegel, who works on retention for IM8, Instant, and a handful of other brands you'd recognize. We spent 45 minutes on the stuff that almost never makes it into a deck, and I came out of it with a notebook full of things most brands are leaving on the table.

So today's email is not a strategy doc. It's four small, unsexy details that quietly do a lot of the work of a retention program. None of them require a new platform. None of them require a relaunch. Most of them are sitting inside your existing email tool right now, doing nothing.

But before we get into that…

Vendor of the Week

Roku — The CTV platform to surpass 100 million streaming households

I had a conversation with the team at Roku a few weeks ago and I left the call surprised by the scale they’re at. Roku just crossed 100 million streaming households. According to Comscore, the Roku Home Screen drives more than 3x the engagement of the next leading TV operating system in the U.S.

Most of us still think of CTV as a thing big brands buy through agencies in $50K minimum spends. That model has quietly died. Roku Ads Manager is a self-serve platform where you can launch a campaign on the same screens running Netflix, Max, and Disney+ with the same workflow you'd use to spin up a Meta ad set. Targeting, creative, budget, live in a few minutes.

The part that actually matters for DTC: shoppable ads. Roku's Shopify integration lets a viewer hit OK on their remote, see your product card on screen, and check out without ever opening a phone. The TV becomes the funnel. Not awareness, not "upper-funnel halo," actual purchases attributed back to the spot.

If you've been pricing CTV out of your media mix because you assumed it was a brand-budget channel, that math is outdated. With 100M households on the platform and shoppable ads built for consumers to try, this is the most integrated marketing moment you can create with CTV.

Set up a campaign on Roku Ads Manager.

Limited Supply

This past week’s episode of Limited Supply was the opposite of what this newsletter is about… it was all about the funnels pioneering growth. The brands that are building and shipping new ideas, new formats, and finding winners. Not a game of “Let’s sit in a conference room and think of our messaging.” No. Test 55 ideas, scale the 3 that win.

Search “Limited Supply” and click the blue cover art on Apple Podcats, Spotify or YouTube.

The 4 retention details most brands ignore.

Today’s email is focused on four things Joseph mentioned that I feel are heavily overlooked when brands are coming to market or focused on building out everything they can to extend their customer LTV. If you feel like any of the four aren’t already in place for your brand, take it as a sign to work on this before the busy summer season (then holidays) start. Do it now so you can test your way into it, don’t just assume what works for others will work for you too. 

Your shipping emails are the highest-open emails you'll ever send. And they're sitting in Shopify doing nothing.

Order confirmed. Order shipped. Order's on the move. Order delivered. Four emails, sent to every customer, opened by basically all of them. They are the most-read emails your brand will ever produce. And in most accounts they're still sitting inside Shopify's default templates, where you can't see open data, can't change the design, and can't add anything that actually drives retention.

Pull them into Klaviyo. (Wonderment and Malomo both make this easy.) Then flip the script on what they're for. The transactional details (when it ships, what's in the box, the tracking link) get pushed to the bottom. The top of the email becomes the onboarding moment you wish your post-purchase flow was doing: what your first 12 weeks on the product is going to feel like, what to look out for in week one versus week three, how to actually use the thing.

By the time the box is at the door, the customer already knows why they bought it, what's coming, and why they should stick around. You haven't paid for any extra impressions. You just stopped wasting the ones you were already getting.

Your product insert should sell the outcome, not the ingredients.

Most brands treat the insert as a "we know we should put something in the box" item. A nice founder note, maybe a discount code, into the recycling it goes.

The brands doing it well are using the insert to do one of two jobs. The first is to teach the customer how to actually get the result they bought the product for. Mars Men ships a 30/60/90 day habit tracker. Fill it out, take a screenshot at day 90, get a free month. They've quietly pre-baked three months of retention into a piece of paper. Alice Mushrooms tells you to take one a day for daily benefit, two if you want a good night. Ultra tells you one pouch, two pouches, three pouches, depending on how Ultra you want to feel.

The pattern is the same in every one of those examples: the insert is framed around the outcome the customer wants, not the ingredient list. "If you want X, do Y" beats "here's our proprietary blend" every time. The customer doesn't care about your formula. They care about whether they're going to feel better in three weeks.

If your insert is a thank-you note from the founder, you're using a piece of premium real estate as a coaster.

Gifts on a delay are the cheapest retention lever you have.

Most brands think about gifts at the point of purchase. Free thing in your first box. Done.

Gifts on a delay are a different game. Grey Matter ships you a frother in your first box, then a shaker bottle a month or two later. On the surface that sounds basic. In practice the shaker bottle is the difference between a customer who shakes the powder up perfectly every morning and a customer who's stirring clumps in cold water with a spoon and quietly losing interest in the brand.

The gift is doing two things at once. It's a surprise from a brand the customer has now been with for a couple of months, which is the moment they were most likely to churn. And it's actually making the product work better, which means they're more likely to stick around because they're getting a better result.

Two rules to keep this from going sideways. The gift has to be additive to the product experience (the shaker bottle for the powder, not a tote bag). And it has to be sub-5% of your gross margin, ideally well under. If the gift costs more than the lift in retention you get from it, you've just built an expensive way to lose money.

If you don't want to source physical product, do the partnership version of this. ClassPass, Calm, Otherthip, Postmates, all of these companies are spending money to acquire customers. If you can deliver them a customer for the cost of three months of service, you're effectively trading your COGS for their CAC. Free to the customer, perceived value of fifty to a hundred dollars, real cost of basically nothing on either side.

The upcoming-order email is where most subscriptions die. Stop sending a receipt.

If you run a subscription brand, the most important email you send is the one that goes out three days before the next charge. And in most accounts, that email reads like a parking ticket. "Your order ships in 3 days. You will be charged $89." Open rate, sure. Conversion to a cancel click, also sure.

The brands that actually retain treat that email as the last piece of onboarding content the customer will see before they get more product. Not "you're about to be charged." Instead: "here's what's about to unlock in your next 30 days on the product. Here's what other people felt at this stage. Here's the dosage tweak that month-three customers tend to make." The transactional details are still there. They just live at the bottom, where they belong.

While you're in there, segment the flow by order cycle. The customer about to get their second box does not want the same email as the customer about to get their fifth. Different stage, different benefits, different message. Most brands are sending one generic email to everyone and wondering why churn is highest right before the charge.

Boring on the surface. Compounding underneath.

None of these are flashy. Nobody is going to tweet about your shipping email design. Nobody is going to screenshot your insert and make it go viral. That's exactly the point. The brands at the top of every category are winning on the details that don't get talked about, because the details that don't get talked about are the ones that quietly compound.

If you take one thing from this email, open up your account this week and look at your shipping emails. If they're still in Shopify, that's your weekend project. Move them, rewrite them, front-load the value. You'll see it in your second-order rate inside of a month.

That's all for this week

This upcoming episode of Limited Supply with Joseph will be one of my favorite guest episodes, and I highly recommend you tune in when it drops. Retention isn’t just a metric inside Klaviyo, it’s how you build brand.

It's Sunday night, which means it’s a 9-hour sleep night to reset before the week, and attack it head on. The weather is getting sunnier, which means there’s more going on, everywhere. Make sure you take care of yourself, go for a walk, get sweaty, and stay hydrated. Have an amazing upcoming week. I’ll see you next Sunday!