Email, SMS and WhatsApp marketing
Most established businesses have spent years acquiring customers and comparatively little effort keeping them. The list sits in a platform somebody set up once, gets a newsletter when there is time and quietly loses value.
It is usually the cheapest revenue available to a business and the most neglected.
Who this suits
- You have a customer database of meaningful size.
- You sell something people buy more than once or that they could recommend.
- You are spending on acquisition while your existing customers get very little attention.
- You have automations set up years ago and nobody is sure whether they still work.
The commercial case
When an acquisition channel is working at a cost per customer roughly equal to a first order, as happens often in ecommerce and subscription businesses, every repeat purchase after that is where the margin actually lives.
Retention is not a nice extra in that model. It is the business model.
That is the calculation we run with clients before recommending how much attention this deserves.
See the customer retention work with Mills Milk and Brownings the Bakers.
What we do
- Campaign production
- Planned against your commercial calendar rather than sent when someone remembers. Copy, design, build, test, schedule.
- Automations
- Welcome, abandoned basket, post purchase, replenishment, win back, review requests, birthday and lapse triggers. Built once, monitored and revised when performance drifts.
- Segmentation
- So the people most likely to buy get the relevant message and the people who are not engaging are handled differently rather than emailed harder.
Reactivation, list health and reporting
- Reactivation
- Working out which lapsed customers are worth pursuing and what offer actually moves them. We have run these successfully, including discount led campaigns that produced strong uptake with very little ongoing admin.
- List health
- Deliverability, authentication, suppression and hygiene. An email that lands in spam is a cost with no upside.
- Reporting
- Revenue attributed to email, separated from the rest, in Holisticly alongside your other channels.
Platforms
Klaviyo
Where ecommerce revenue is the objective and you need the segmentation and the purchase data connected properly.
Mailchimp
Where the requirements are simpler and the team needs something familiar.
We work in whichever you already have unless there is a clear commercial reason to move. Migrations cost money and lose history, so we do not recommend them casually.
WhatsApp and SMS
For some businesses these outperform email significantly, because the message is actually seen. We have run WhatsApp campaigns that reached open rates far above anything achievable by email.
They also carry more risk. People treat their WhatsApp and their phone as more personal than their inbox, so the bar for relevance is much higher and the tolerance for frequency much lower. We have seen customers question whether a legitimate campaign was a scam simply because the sending profile was not clearly branded. Those details matter.
We use these channels where the message genuinely warrants the intrusion, with proper opt in, clear branding and conservative frequency.
How we measure it
- Revenue attributed to each campaign and automation, separated from your other channels
- Open and click rates as diagnostics rather than as the headline, because an open is not a sale
- Reconciliation against your ecommerce platform or booking system rather than trusting the email platform's own count
What we need from you
- Access to your email platform and your ecommerce or booking system
- Clarity on what you actually sell and what the margins look like, so we are not driving volume on your least profitable line
- Product or service information, offers and any assets
- Someone who can approve a campaign within a day or two, because email planning falls apart when approvals sit
Compliance
Common questions
Find out what your list is worth
Answer a few short questions to find the right starting point, or explore the Growth Audit if you want retention assessed alongside everything else first.