Email and SMS Retention Strategy with Jimmy Kim

Intro

0:00This is probably my biggest tip of it all when it comes to email and SMS. SMS should never, never feel like the email version of your email. Zero-party data is only great if you understand all the different layers of your customers and where they are before using this high personalization touch actually comes in place. If you can't tailor message, timing, tone, you don't have segmentation today. All you have is a list. And this is where the most important lesson comes in segmentation.

0:25It's not that you're doing it just for deliverability reasons. You're doing it because this is how the architecture of your retention program should evolve, and these are the things that you've got to think about.

Retention Redefined Intro

0:45This is Retention Redefined, a practical framework for profitable email SMS in 2026. Now, we did this live on stage, but unfortunately, one of our recordings did not make it. So, we're doing a screen share of this presentation that I'm re-recording here today, and we hope you enjoy the presentation. So, to kick

Why Retention Matters

1:03it off, who what are we talking about? We're talking about retention marketing because retention marketing it has the obvious right now. If you're reading this, you already know the truth. Number one, acquisition is getting harder. Things are getting more expensive, and paid media is becoming more and more unpredictable. And the customer acquisition cost or CAC continue to climb, and attribution continues to feel like guesswork some days. Now, here's the facts. The brands with the strongest retention systems aren't spiraling in a negative way right now. They're scaling and doing it profitably, and that's why you're here watching this video. So, today we're going to talk about retention marketing and the changes that are happening in 2026. So now, when we think

Send Smarter Mindset

1:40about retention in 2026, here's what we think about. Retention isn't nice to have anymore. It's not a single flow. It's not one campaign that magically fixes anything and everything. That is just not how retention works anymore. It's not about a single email campaign. What it is is a measurable strategy, one that is paired with two different channels or more, email, SMS, sometimes with push notification and mobile activation. It's a lifecycle messaging framework. There's an actual system behind this. And the mindset that is changing right now is that we're going from send more to send smarter. And that's the thing that we've got to think about today. So, let's go ahead and start thinking about the steps of a mind mind shift by kicking off the mind shift of retention today. So, the first thing we think about is that there is an old school method of thinking that is happening right now. We need to send another campaign. That is the way that people think about retention right now.

2:35Where the modern retention thinking has evolved to where is the customer in their journey and how do we move them one step further? That is simply the thought process that is happening and evolving today. And what we're here to do today in this presentation is to make you think like this. So, that starts with thinking about that shift, right? And it starts with the goals. The four

Four Retention Goals

2:56goals of a modern retention program start look like this. The number one is to reduce the time of first purchase. You know, one of the things that your job as retention marketer is is to figure out not only to help you retain your customers and make them make that second purchase, but to help support the acquisition funnel, which is what we're talking about right here, to reduce that first time of purchase. The reality is is most purchases happen within the first email, the first message, the first hour, the first time they opt into that pop on for the discount. However, your job is to measure that and figure out how to reduce that time of first purchase as fast as possible.

3:31The second thing you want to think about as a goal is to increase your repeat purchase rate. This is the golden rule of any retention marketer. You're not an email and SMS marketer anymore. What you are are is a retention marketer. A retention marketer's goal is to change your RPR, your repeat purchase rate. How often are people buying? And this is also very important to understand that, you know, as an email and SMS marketer and retention marketer, the thing that you may be thinking about is what is a good number. And this is really important. When you think about what a base number can be, I've seen base numbers with poor programs go from anywhere from as low as 5 7% all the way up to 30% plus when it comes down to it.

4:11A lot of it has to do with how good the product is. If the product is great, you're going to repeat repeat retention rate, your repeat purchase rate will be good automatically. And your job in email and SMS is to help improve that. If they're not very good, you do need to take a look at the product and the product onboarding experience because generally that is part of it or you just might not have a product that retention is an important part of the business.

4:33Third, you've got to think about improving average order values. How do we get people to spend more money? How do we get them to make that second purchase? How do we get them to give you more money, but also by driving them tremendous more value. That's something you've got to think about. Last but not least, of course, the biggest thing that we all talk about in e-commerce and direct-to-consumer is extending the customer life cycle value, right? The customer lifetime value, their LTV. How do we extend that number and how do we make more out of the customer over the lifetime of that customer's journey with us. Now, we want

Modern Customer Journey

5:04to understand a modern customer journey because things are evolving and in this part, step number two, one of the things that we think about in here is we want to make sure that you have a clear understanding how the modern customer thinks about their purchase history and their cycle when it comes to things, right? First and foremost, when we think about how does the cycle work? This is where it starts. Number one, we think about awareness. I know you exist. This is where most people call top of the funnel, different things that are happening, running advertising, organic social, you're doing SEO, all the different things to get people where that's not part of the retention program, but it's very important that that is existing because if you don't get new traffic up to the top of the funnel, there's no way for people to know that you're around, you exist, and you're aware, right? Now, what does happen is eventually they go into the interested moment where this might be relevant to me. This is where most

5:54people are starting to discover the product. They've seen an ad, they've clicked on it, they're watching it, and so forth. And this is often when people are getting the coupon or opting in for the newsletter because they are interested and this might be something that is solving their problem or giving them the solution to that problem that they're trying to solve. Which leads to the first purchase. Now, explicitly I like to call the first purchasers just buyers. They're not customers yet because they're just trying your product. They're giving you a shot. The first purchase is a try method. It's not about making a purchase because they're your customer yet. They are simply purchasing because they're a buyer. It seems like this product will solve my problem or my needs, and so I'm going to go ahead and try it. Now, this is where most people call and they skip from here and go right to the loyalty program, which is absolutely wrong when it comes to modern customer journeys. What we're going into is now what we call the

6:46onboarding or the first use phase. When people are making that first purchase, what they end up doing after that is they need to go into a great onboarding and first use. They need to help succeeding, right? This is the help me succeed stage. This is where you as a retention marketer are warming up the audience or warming up the the buyer by teaching them how to use the product, how to achieve results from that product, how to feel good from that product, whatever that might be that drives that first use. Which ultimately will help drive into that second purchase trigger. This happens within the first 0 to roughly 90 days of their cycle in most products where if you're onboarding and giving them the first use, getting them to activate and reorder, they're usually coming back for that second purchase trigger. This was worth repeating. This is when the the buyer becomes a customer ultimately because now they're seeing the value of the product and want to repeat and make that next purchase. Which leads me to

7:39inhabit an emotional buying. This is truly the most important part of the cycle that is extremely hard to get someone to. From taking them from just someone who's stumbled across your product or service on an advertising campaign that you're running to someone who loves your product and they start having emotional buying because it is part of their habit and cycle. This is when you're starting to get that emotional buying. That is really the goal that you're trying to get. Now, no matter how many great your emails or how great your SMS is, the reality is is having emotional happens through education, happens through a good product, and happens through a product that has a cycle that is. And if you're a CPG product, for example, if you're the protein company, they have felt your effects of using your protein product, for example, over last 30 days and now they're ready to jump in and, you know, jump in and say this is worth repeating.

8:30Which ultimately leads to the final place, advocacy. This is your loyalty program. Too many people jump from this first purchase all the way down to the advocacy and the reality is is that they should be going from purchase to onboarding to second purchase and before you get into advocacy. You'll see how late that is on purpose because advocacy doesn't happen because they don't want other people to know after they've made their first purchase. What they want you to know is that they want to tell their friends after they've built an emotional buying or habit that they believe is very important to them. So, that's the modern customer journey and it's super important. Which leads us to

Segmentation That Matters

9:04segmentation that matters. You know, what's interesting is, you know, through the rooms that I visited and traveled over the four cities that we did with the retention roadshow, I rate I I asked question people a question. I said, "Do you know what RFM is?" RFM is recency, frequency, monetization. This is an old adage term. Back in the day when I was starting off my retention marketing journey in 2008, the reality was we didn't have all the fancy great tools that you have today. What we did have was Excel and a downloadable database.

9:32And what we would do is we download that database every day so that we can get our emails prepared. And what do is we throw it into Excel and create a pivot sheet. And we take the ideas of this, right? So, we split them up into either buyers or prospect list, right? People who have bought and who haven't. Then we start looking at the RFM. Recency, which is how recent the day activate purchase, you know, connect, open the email, click on the emails, yada yada.

9:56monetization, how much did they spend, right? Giving a pie chart of what they spend or how much were they intending to spend. And then recency frequency is the second one is how often have they purchased, how often have they visited your site, and how often have they opened it, right? So, recency is how long, frequency is how often, monetization is how much, right? And so, what modern segmentation has allowed us to do now is go into a deeper set of segmentation rules that allow you to do it. Now, they are rule-based, which means that whatever you set on the rule, they're static to those rules. So, how does this all work? Well, here's how we

Five Segmentation Levels

10:33look at segmentation over time. And this is the five levels of segmentation in my humble opinion. And this is how we see the most best brands operate. So, number one is the basic. This is what most people are doing this. 90-day engage, 30-day engage, 60-day engage. It's engaged versus unengaged. All you're doing is creating relevance. People who are connected, not only is it good for deliverability, but it is 100% the first level of segmentation. In 80% of the rooms that I visited, this is what people are doing today. Now, secondly, the thing that most other people are doing is that they are doing a lot of behavioral stuff. They browse, they added to cart, they purchased. These are the behavioral triggered messages that occur. Segmentation, that's all automation workflows are. They're just automatic real-time segmentation that triggers a message, right? That's a triggered message behavioral system.

11:21Level one and two, 80% of the room has it. This is when we start getting into the more personalized things that people don't seem to understand today, and where most of the money is left for most retention programs right now. Level three right now is what we call the customer type, the one-time buyer versus the VIP versus the subscription. When you think about this, this is really about the simplicity of a personalized life cycle. If you've ever heard that term personalization or personalized life cycle, this is where it starts. If a person has never purchased versus a person who's purchased once, a buyer, versus someone who is a customer or a VIP because they've purchased multiple times, versus someone who's on a subscription who's purchasing all the time, these are different types of buyers and these should have different types of messages, which is why we look at this as level T3. If I'm sending a single email out today, I'm not sending one email, I'm sending three different emails out. One for the person who's

12:10never purchased, two for the person who's buying it, and three for the person who's on a repeat customer, right? So, the the prospect, the buyer, the customer. I'm going to have three different personalized life cycle emails going out to that same email. And the messages are certainly tweaked. Good news, we've got AI now. AI can help you retweet those messages really quickly, make some updates and design, and get you out into the market. Number four is the predictive, which is to me what we call the replenishment timing, the churn model, the category preferences.

12:42You know, this is the anticipatory message. This is anticipating what they might be doing, and you have this based on the data that's available here today in this world and time, right? You can guess how when and often and, you know, how often they might make that purchase and what that category timing might look like. Like, for example, if I'm a CPG product, I might look and say, "All my repeat products happen within roughly about 30 days." Because if you're doing consumable, that makes sense, right? So, if you've got that, then you can drill down and say, "Okay, look, only 20% of the people are rebuying. Of the 20% rebuying, they're buying at an average of 26 days." So, that means at 23 days, I should be a on top of them starting to get them to make that second purchase because, based on the data that I have, their replenishment timing starts is often done around day 26. So, I need to start warming them up around day 23, getting them getting them into a place,

13:33and getting them to purchase. That's just one example of a replenishment timing. This obviously comes into churn modeling and category preferences. This all happens through the data that is available to you. And then number five, which is zero-party data. Many companies put this up way too high on their list. Zero-party data is only great if you understand all the different layers of your customers and where they are before using this high personalization touch actually comes into place. We all ask quizzes, we ask for their preferences, we ask what they like, but oftentimes, the only thing that happens is this data is just stuck in your ESP. The reality is you shouldn't be thinking about like that. And what you should be thinking about is when you are ready to accept this information because you have all the other segments set up, that is when zero-party data actually becomes useful.

14:20Now, I've got a one-time buyer, for example. So, someone who's only purchased one, never purchased again. Based on their quiz preferences, likes A, B, and C. I'm not sending them D, E, and F. I'm sending them more of A, B, and C because that's what they purchased and that's what they like based around their quiz results. That's an example. The second thing might be a subscription person who has preference they only subscribe to a certain product. They probably like that product unless you can offer them something complimentary to add onto their subscription, it's going to be a challenge to get them to go in. And the simple rule of all of this comes down to this. If you can't tailor message, timing, tone, you don't have segmentation today. All you have is a list. And this is where the most important lesson comes in segmentation.

15:01It's not that you're doing it just for deliverability reasons. You're doing it

Email SMS Pairing

15:04because this is how the architecture of your retention program should evolve, and these are the things that you've got to think about. Which leads me to pairing. And this is something that people argued back and forth, and I believe that we're starting to see a real number and data points that gives us a very clear understanding, especially those that have paired them, those have stayed away from pairing them, but the ultimate answer looks kind of like this. So, email is always been the storytelling, the visuals, the education. When you're launching a new product, you are building emotional trust. Emails are visual highly, there's a lot of space, there's a lot of information, there's a lot of lines of text. You've got a lot of space to really tell the story.

15:46Though in we never wanted to look like your website, what we do want it to do is tell a great story and sell the click, right? Your only objective with email is to sell the click, pre-warm the audience, get them going. They're already warm, you're really getting them to a next level, which is to get them to click and add to cart. With SMS is a little bit different, it's the urgency. Something is urgent, there's friction to remove, and those are the two things that we think about.

16:08In fact, if you think about the data points of SMS to email, this is really interesting. SMS tends to have a half-life or shelf life around 2 hours. When I send an SMS, within 2 hours they're either clicking, activating, doing something. Where email generally will go 48 hours or even longer depending on the email because people aren't often checking their emails in real time. They're checking their emails at 7:00 p.m. when they're browsing and sitting on the couch, or they're checking it first thing in the morning when they wake up before they head to work. So, when you think about it that way, email is time insensitive where SMS is very time sensitive, which is why it works best in the urgency method. And the messages tend to be transactional and there's no personalization or conversation behind it. I mean, there is personalization and or conversation behind it because you can ask questions, make it something that works together. So, I always tell people you use both when carts are abandoned, right? Those are that's a

17:02perfect urgent moment. You're launching a sequence, you should be using both channels. The reality is, you know, one of the things that I'll give you a pro tip here today is that people tend to be afraid to send an email and SMS at the same time at the same moment, but the reality is those messages aren't checked at the same time. That email is most likely not going to get checked in real time where that SMS is, right? They work at a one-two combo, so use it that way.

17:26Same thing that works in sequences. So, if a cart is abandoned, I'm sending them an email and an SMS 1 hour in because I want to make sure that I am in front of them in every channel I can because chances are trying to catch them in any channel is just as hard as catching them in one. You're offering a first-no VIP experience. That's always important. Obviously, people love that for SMS, but you still got to do it on email, too, because people's messages are missed.

17:51This world is noisy. There's a lot of messages going out. If you're not one of the 120 emails that the customer is receiving today, someone else is, so get in the noise. That's a thought. And of course, last but not least, subscription onboarding or retention from churning. Both are great for email and SMS, especially if you're creating more conversation and personalization around those messages. All right? And remember, this is

SMS Should Feel Human

18:14probably my biggest tip of it all when it comes to email and SMS. SMS should never never feel like the email version of your email. Very simple. It should feel like the human version. One has a conversational tone, should be a little slang, forgiving on spelling, short, sweet, punchy, while the other is educational, visual, storytelling, design-centric. These are the things you should be thinking about. Which leads us to the messaging framework. You know, what's interesting

AI Plus Human Messaging

18:41about what we call the messaging framework is that AI plus human integration is here, and this is how the best marketers are doing it. Now, let me start with a simple caveat line that I've been telling everybody. If you were a good marketer before, AI is taking you and making you a 10x marketer. If you were a bad marketer before, AI is making you a 10 times worse marketer. That's the integration because they only work together in tandem based around the inputs and outputs that you are able to feed it. Remember, AI is only as good as the end user and the prompting that is happening behind it. We've got a great prompt download that you can download either we'll have a link to your or one of the frameworks that you'll be able to download, but there's a lot of ways to actually use human integration and AI together. But for now, let's talk about this right now.

19:27So, AI helps scale messaging while humans help deepen those connections. You need both if you want speed and quality. The best retention marketers is strategies in 2026 not about replacing the marketer, they're about giving that marketer leverage. And that's what we're talking about. So, what does that look like in real home form? Well, AI is looks like this. Think about your AI as your draft generator or your personal data analyst, your segmentation assistant, your timing and delivery optimizer, or your idea starter when it your creativity hits the wall. So, let's start with the top here. Draft generator, they're great for helping you come up with ideas, angles, different things. Personal data analyst, if you're not using an MCP with your ESP, you should, but however you can upload any data you want into your AI and it can help you analyze your personal data like a junior marketer might do for you. It can help you even big figure out your segmentation rules. So, if you have an idea of a customer and you ask it to

20:20help you your with your rules that you want to do to create a segmentation or if you're using an MCP, create those segmentation and push it automatically to your ESP like your Omnisend. Timing and delivery optimizer, this is always great. You can punch in your data, it can start giving you better idea around that. And of course, when you're stuck because we've all been at the blank white page and we don't know what the idea might be. We do look at this as an idea starter.

20:43And then you think about your human touch as emotional clarity, right? The human touch is always going to drive emotional clarity because it can do something that robots can't, which is to develop emotions. It's going to be relationship builder because you have historical knowledge of where they might have been or where they're going to take them. That's definitely there. Humor and tone, this is often lost in AI. Too often do Do see brands that sound exactly the same And the reality of why they sound exactly the same is one and only one thing only. They use too much AI, they have been unable to train that human tone into their AI, and so therefore the human needs to be in the loop to help it really drive that human tone to keep that. If you don't say a certain word or there's something you don't do it specifically because you avoid it or you only talk in a certain level of optimism or negativism or funniness, whatever that might be, these are all part of what a good tone keeper

21:35should do for you. And then of course the brand memory, right? Brand is everything now in 2026 and into the future. It is becoming more and more important. Just good marketing is not going to outrun it. You've got to create memory with the brand and reality is the human's going to help create that brand memory and it ultimately leads to what we call the real conversation layer, which is your human touch. The things that are you're going to be doing to drive the value of the dollar for your for the person, right? How you're going to get the people to respond, how you're going to get them to remember you, how you're going to get them to act. These are the conversation layers that cannot be replaced with AI.

22:09That leads to some of the strongest use cases here included today. So, number one, I love using AI to spot performance trends and suggest fixes. Again, if you haven't used an MCP, check out our other video on how to use an MCP. You should definitely check that out. But an MCP ties into your ESP and allows you to go in and spot those performance trends in seconds and how to fix them. You want to also let AI create test variants in for you. That's a beautiful thing about AI. I don't love when it creates my first version, but I do love when it creates test versions of the things that I have because we as marketers often are stuck in our own bubble of thought and sometimes we can't think past the test variations that we should be thinking about. we should also be using it to predict the best guest times based on the send behavior, not based on guesswork. Predicting the best send times based on the customer behavior is based on data that you're

22:59giving it, not just guesswork. Of course, personalizing messages at scale, right? I talked about this earlier, but using purchase data, tone signals, life cycle stage. If you have a prospect, a customer, and a buyer, you do not want to send them the same email today. You want them to send them the email based around their personalized life cycle, which is based around where they are in their journey. A prospect, they might be less interested in your founder story and more interested in just the the discount that you have.

23:30Where a customer is really into your brand story, learning about you, but they don't need to know the instruction how to use the product. And then a buyer is sitting there, they've made one purchase, and they're unsure if they should make a second purchase. You need educate them, give them proof, testimonials. These are three different messages. AI is great at helping you take one message that you created and making those three different versions of that message. And then of course, offloading compa- repetitive tasks to AI so you can focus on your strategy, creative, and storytelling, which is the magical part of why retention marketers will exist in the future. The strategy, creativity, and storytelling is really where the magic will lie. And there's a lot of repetitive tasks that we do.

24:12That's where you're using something like Claude, Co-work, or Perplexity Computer, or any of the versions out there where you can automate those Monday morning reports. You can have it check on things. You can have it spot performance trends. All these things that AI can do for you. Remember, AI in the future isn't AI or humans. It's AI supporting humans creating messages that still scale and still feel personal. And those are some of my strongest use cases.

Eight Non Negotiable Flows

24:37Which leads me to the eight non-negotiable flows. Look, there are only eight non-negotiable flows when it comes to segmentation and different things that you're doing with your life cycle system. These are the ones that I care about most. There's plenty more out there you can do it. But the worst thing I see often when I'm going into it and when I'm at the stage is that people have one of two things. They either have no flows, meaning they've got one or two flows today, or they've got 48 flows and only three of them, five of them are making you money. Here's the eight flows that make you money, backed by data, backed by seeing hundreds and thousands of users and their data and the things that they're running, their flows they're running, and where all the dollars and values are brought in, okay?

25:16So, your retention angle starts with your welcome flow. This is your email and your SMS that is your welcome, your pop-up, your coupon, your newsletter, whatever that might be. Then, we jump into what I call my conversion boosters. Look, people were going to buy anyways, you're going to help them buy faster. Cart abandonments, browse abandonments, checkout abandonments, all of those fall into what we call conversion boosters. Then, a great [clears throat] onboarding first use. The first time they've ever purchased a product, they should get a very special set of messages on how to use the product, how to get the best value out of those products, how to find support, how to have education, get keep them hyped up, which leads you to the second purchase accelerator trigger.

25:53This is finding someone and trying to get them to make that second purchase, and figuring out what gets them to make that second purchase. And that leads to eventually your cross-sell, your expansion. These are things that you've got to think about, right? How do I get them to upsell? How do I get them to spend more dollars? How do I get them to buy something outside of the category they've purchased? Use your data they've got you've got, use information, use predictive analytics within the system, and start selling them other products, right? That's what your campaigns are doing often. you've got your replenishment or reorder for especially for those CPG products. You know your dates, you should have a singular or maybe multiple flows that are focused on replenishment replenishment and reorders.

26:33your VIP loyalty, remember, it's not about your first buy, it's about your repeat buyer. When they get into your repeat buying cycle because they purchased more than two, three times, this is when you want to introduce that loyalty and upsell. Right? How do I get them to be a loyal customer, be a member of my program, do the things they want to do for advocacy, which is ultimately the word of mouth, which is what you're trying to derive out of them. And last but not least is churn prevention and win back. Clearly something that you've got to be thinking about. When are my customers are leaving my subscription? When they're no longer becoming active? And again, not worrying about my prospects here. Where win back is successful in this day and age is really on your buyers and trying to get those buyers who have spent a dollar with you to come back, not the prospects who stopped opening your emails after 90 days because they most likely weren't going to buy. There's a great talk by

27:21Devin on this YouTube channel that you can watch. In that channel, we talk about all the data points. You'll learn that most prospects, 85% of them actually, buy within the first one day. So, if you remember that in your mind and you're really optimizing for the 80%, not optimizing for the last 20% of the micro, you will know that this is something that becomes super important, especially for those buyers because it was already hard enough to get those people to buy. And the rule of thumb here ultimately comes down to this.

27:48Every flow should have the following: a purpose, a trigger, a persona-specific message, a testing plan, and improvement, right? What was the purpose of this flow? What was the trigger that set this flow off? What is the messaging based on the persona of these people? Where are they in their first version, right? Someone who's on their first use should not be getting the same type of email that your VIP and loyalty will get. What's the testing plan? How do I figure out how to test this thing? And then of course, what are the metrics that I'm following here? We're going to talk about metrics in a second here, but those are the improvement metrics that you'll want to talk about when we get to it.

Metrics That Matter 2026

28:23So, here are those metrics when you're thinking about those metrics that matter in 2026. So, here are the changes in metrics and the things that we believe are the most important metrics and why they matter. Metric number one, repeat purchase rate. We got that clear. I want to make sure that I'm saying that. How do we know your retention program is working? How do we know your product is sticky? How do we know that people like your product? It's your repeat purchase rate. Again, from the earlier data point that I shared with you earlier, if you've got a 5, 10% repeat purchase rate and you've got no retention program, you probably have a product problem as well.

28:56If you've got a high repeat purchase rate like 25, 30, 35% and your retention program is pretty basic right now, well, guess what? Good news. Your retention program has lots of room for optimization and probably will be able to increase that quite dramatically. And most people will fall under that 10 to 20, 20, 5% marker of repeat purchase rate. I'm talking about your retention program. I'm talking about your repeat purchase rate, not your percentage of revenue attributed by your ESP. I'm talking about your repeat purchase rate and that number only. That is telling you where your program sits and this is where you measure it. If you start your program working on a brand as a marketer and you've got a 25% your number your goal, your only goal should be to try and get the 25 to a 26, 26 to 27, 27 to 28 and so on forth.

29:42Next thing that you need to think about is your time to second purchase. How do you increase your repeat purchase rate? By focusing on the time to second purchase. The strongest predictor of long-term retention is how fast you can get them to make a second purchase. Most companies are doing it within 30 days to 90 days, right? That's where most are. But, it is product dependent depending on where you are, but the reality is getting them to get that decision is very important here.

30:07Your next one is active subscriber versus your SMS list, right? You're no longer caring about list size anymore. What you are focused on is how active your subscribers are and what their list health looks like. So, quality is more important than size here today. You want to keep and measure that number. You want to see over time, over next 30, 60, 90 days, not your number of subscribers you have, the number of total active subscribers that are mailable, that you believe are in cycle. That number is your quality number that you want to measure. So, if I have 100,000 list, but only 25,000 active, very very normal to see. 25,000 active, I'm tracking that 25,000 number weekly. I'm not tracking my top line number cuz that just doesn't matter anymore.

30:48And then of course your LTV by cohort, right? The real retention report comes from where is the dollars being made? where is the top of the funnel coming in? If I can under identify that my Facebook ads are doing better than my than my Instagram ads that are doing better than my Apple 11 ads or my you know, whatever network that you're using, trying to understand your LTV and value based around it in the long term.

31:13This is where you can be really helpful to the rest of the marketing department, but it's important for you to understand because you know where to put the focus and energy into. That's why you need to know your LTVs. Another one that's really important is AOV by channel. Between your campaigns and flows, where is your dollars? Where are your AOVs and where can you improve those numbers? This is certainly an important thought process that you should be putting into your report report cards into 2026.

31:38And last but not least, this is something that people don't spend enough time on, which is really an important number. It's your negative click, your unsubscribe percent. This is the do they care signal. And you know what's funny about the do do they care signal? It's not just as simple as do they care about your product? Is your messaging strong? Do you stand for something or do you sound generic or do you sound offensive? All of these are important. A lot of people have unsubscribe rates between 0.1 to 0.3. And most likely it means your messaging's pretty stale. Whereas if you have an unsubscribe rate that is a little bit higher, .5, .7, .9, even up to 1%, you're probably pretty edgy or you're emailing a list that doesn't care about the product at all, right? There's multiple reasons, but you should be able to dissect why are people unsubscribing when you see a spike in that. You want to know why. And it doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Remember, there's only two things you want to do with your

32:31prospects, right? This is the bulk of your list where you're paying most of your ESP. You want them to do one or two things. You want them to either unsubscribe or you want them to buy. And if you're thinking about it that way, and that's only way you think about it, this is so important for you to think about why do they care and why the unsubscribe rate matters ultimately.

Your 90 Day Plan

32:53Which leads us to your 90-day plan. If you're watching this and you're still here right now, you've obviously felt an importance to be here. What should you do over the next 90 days? Well, number one, I've got a downloadable down below you should download. It's a book workbook. You should be able to download it and follow along with me. But number one to four, you're going to fix your segmentation. That's number one. Let's just identify our segmentation. If you're on level one or level two right now, let's figure out your level three and then start rebuilding your life cycle messaging because this is important. You need to be able to talk to your customers the way they want to be talked based around the product life cycle that they're in today, not because you want to just fix your messaging. You can't just fix your messaging if you can't take the information and data that you have in front of you and not be able to tell them what they do need to do with it, right? Number five through

33:36eight, then you start your flows based around those life cycle moments. And then you want to start introducing SMS pairing. Notice how I wait till week five to eight to SMS pair because you've got to fix your base root foundation problems before you can even add another channel into that flow. And then of course, week nine to 12, you want to start bringing that zero party data that you want to start doing and adding and start collecting it and adding more predictive triggers based around data that you've gotten. That is my 12-week plan for most people. And then over those 90 days, the things you need to measure are very simple. One, you need to know what the time and purchase time to second purchase looks like. You need to start measuring that. Your active subscriber engagement, remember, we're not talking about your total list, we're thinking about your subscriber engagement. Let's make sure we're measuring that. Your flow driven versus campaign driven versus your revenue that's coming out of that. Make sure you're tracking that very clearly. I

34:24would even go to say you should be taking your flows and you should be decoupling your welcome flow to your post-purchase flows and everything post-purchase. So, one is before they become a customer, one is after they become a customer, three is your campaigns, and that also split between your customers and your prospects because you need to know where your revenue is. Here's a hint, most of your revenue comes from your customers on repeat purchases. You'll see that happen as you start to split that. And all of this drives out to are you driving an LTV uplift to the flow over those 90-day period with with the customer? You're measuring that, you're repeating that, you're recycling that until you figure out exactly what's working great for you.

Retention Is A System

35:03Look, retention is not just anything. Retention is a system. It's built on five things: value, timing, relevance, relationship, and progression. The value you drive at the right time with the right information, which is your relevance, building the relationship based around the data points that you have is how you create progression. Retention is a system. And if you can think about that entire system of the modern customer journey, this is how you win in retention and design a programming for retention that works. A lot of the talks that we've had in our retention road show that you can watch all the videos. We're going to link them into the the bottom. You'll link them into this channel. You can watch them all is that everything we talk about is all different parts of this side of things. How do we end up driving this experience for the customer? Because in order to drive that, this is what's

Closing And Thanks

35:52important. So, we hope you enjoyed this presentation. I wish I could have given you the live version of it, but this is probably clearly a very simple, clear one, less Q&A involved in it. However, this is retention redefined. My name is Jimmy Kim. This was from the Commerce Roundtable Retention Road Show. We hope you enjoyed. Thank you.