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- Fri 9/11 | Ed 413 | You're losing customers you already paid for
Fri 9/11 | Ed 413 | You're losing customers you already paid for
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Somebody bought from you on Tuesday and you will probably never hear from them again.
Not because the product was wrong but because nothing happened in the 30 days afterwards, and 30 days is roughly how long you get before they forget which brand it was.
Today, 6 things that decide whether they come back, and none of them are a win-back discount in March. 👇
Also inside:
→ Why Coca-Cola painted its trucks red, and what it has to do with your packaging
→ The 30 brands you compete with, and every email they send
→ A hunting jacket company and a French dessert brand both had a good week
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Coca-Cola painted its delivery trucks red in the 1920s because the trucks went to small towns where the billboards and the newspaper ads didn’t. A century later the colour itself is legally protected, not the logo, the colour.
Jimmy’s take on what that means for every box you ship is worth 2 minutes.
A repeat customer costs nothing to acquire, buys faster, and spends more. Everybody knows this. Almost nobody has a plan for the month after checkout.
What you get instead is a receipt, a shipping notice, a review request, then silence until the win-back email in March that opens with “we miss you”.
Here are 6 things that get you there, roughly in the order they happen.
1. Answer the question they didn’t ask
Right after somebody buys, they get a small wobble. Did I pick the right one. Is this going to work. Should I have waited for a sale.
Most brands answer with a receipt. The ones people come back to answer with reassurance: a short note on why this option suits them, a customer saying the same thing, a line about what to expect first. Put it in the post-purchase emails, the order page, even the packaging.
Steal this: Put 1 piece of proof in the order confirmation. It is the most-opened email you will ever send and it is currently a receipt.
2. Tell them the truth about timing
The brands hitting 85% repurchase rates inside 30 days are not the ones making the biggest promises. They are the ones that set the clock honestly.
If your product takes 3 weeks to do anything noticeable, say so on day 1. A customer who was warned about the slow start waits it out. One who was promised results by Friday writes you off on Saturday.
Steal this: Write down when a customer should expect the first real result, then put that sentence in the flow.
3. Treat the first 14 days like the whole relationship
This is the window where a product either becomes part of somebody’s week or ends up in the cupboard. Once it is in the cupboard, no discount gets it out.
Ship something in those 2 weeks that has nothing to do with selling. A surprise guide, a recipe, a genuinely useful delivery update, an invite into wherever your customers talk to each other.
Steal this: Map 14 days on paper and give each touch 1 job. Ask AI to draft the sequence off your product page, then cut whatever reads like an ad.
4. Break the onboarding into things they can finish
Nobody reads the 2,000-word guide. They will read a 2-minute email that teaches 1 thing and leaves them slightly better at using what they bought.
Brands running daily micro-lessons or short masterclass emails instead of a single manual see 20% higher retention and 33% more upsells and cross-sells inside the flow. Every lesson is a reason to open and an excuse to mention something else.
Steal this: Take your longest post-purchase email and split it into 4 short ones. Same words, 4 opens instead of 1.
5. Check which offers bring back the wrong people
One brand ran a free seasonal product with its orders. Sales went up. So did churn, because the promotion had filled the list with people who wanted the free thing and nothing else.
The fix is not to stop running offers. Swap the one-off gift for a starter bundle that gives somebody a reason to keep going, and track repeat rate by offer type so you can tell which promotions bought customers and which bought a spike.
Steal this: Pull last year’s promotions and check 90-day repeat rate on each. Upload the export and ask AI which offer cohorts actually came back.
6. Use what the first week told you
By day 7 you know a lot. Who opened everything, who opened nothing, who has already used the thing and who has not taken it out of the box.
Those 3 people want completely different emails and most programs send them the same one. The quiet ones need help getting started. The keen ones are ready for a multi-month bundle, which also carries them past the 4-month mark where most subscriptions quietly die. Even the billing cadence matters: moving from monthly to every 28 days adds around 8% to lifetime value over a year.
Steal this: Split your day-14 send by whether they have engaged at all. It is 1 segment and it does more for the number than anything else here.
The takeaway: the second order is won before the first one arrives
None of this is a loyalty program or a points scheme. It is a month of paying attention at the one moment a customer is guaranteed to be paying attention back.
Dukier did it by sending less to better-chosen people. Pick 1 of the 6 and build it this week. The people who bought from you on Tuesday are still reading.
Every brand you compete with is planning Q4 right now, and all of it will show up in their email before it shows up anywhere else.
Inboox tracks 10,000+ Shopify brands and 1.5M+ real emails. Follow the 30 that actually matter to you, get everything they send, and read an AI breakdown of why each one is built the way it is.
Build a collection for the 5 brands you keep getting compared to and it fills itself from there.
$10 a month, and there’s a 7-day free trial if you want to go looking first.
A hunting jacket company just got a Cox cheque
Tom Beckbe started in 2015 when Radcliff and Mary Menge decided hunting jackets could be better, and this week it took a minority investment from Cox Outdoors, the newest arm of Cox Enterprises. The money goes into stores, product and conservation work with Ducks Unlimited. A new Atlanta shop opens this month.
Petit Pot raised a Series A on pots de crème
The French-inspired dessert brand closed a seven-figure Series A on September 8, co-led by Eclair Partners and Terri and John Penshorn, with its existing shareholders following on. The plan is to widen a refrigerated dessert set that has looked the same for 20 years.
Both of these are brands that stayed narrow for a decade before anybody wrote them a check. Worth remembering in a quarter where everything argues for going broad.
Annnnd that’s a wrap for this edition!
Thanks for hanging with us today. If this gave you an idea for your next send, share ecomemailmarketer.com with your favorite DTC marketer.
Remember: Do shit you love.
🤘 Jimmy Kim & Chase Dimond
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