🔄 Play For Keeps

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Hey it’s Kent again.

Quick trivia: the average brand spends 5-7x more acquiring customers than keeping them. Yet loyal customers spend 67% more than new customers. 

Retention’s ROI is just so much better than acquisition’s. 

Obviously, you can’t do retention if you don’t have customers, so acquisition comes first, but it’s a good idea to implement basic retention tactics even early on. 

Once you start getting a steady inflow, it should become just as important to you as acquisition. 

This week →

🧠 Acquisition Tactics - How to make customers spend 67% more

✍️ Next Level Stuff - The post-purchase trick that creates superfans

🤬 Community talk - Don’t just acquire customers. Build community

Free classes to help you level up your game:

• Stand out by mastering your Brand Voice

• Increase Sales with Shopify Content Marketing

• Grow your visibility online: how Semrush can get you there

TACTICS

How to make customers spend 67% more

You need customers to actually BUY first before you can start selling them again. Here are some email tactics to help get them in the door. 

😴 Step 1: Get their email.

No matter how glossy your website or how killer your product design, online shoppers need a good reason to share their email, let alone to slap down their credit card. 

This starts with your offer and pop-ups. The easiest route is bribery - a basic discount for sharing their email or phone number. This works, but it’s only the first, basic step. 

The trick is to make shoppers WORK for their discounts or free gifts. 

Ask them to share why they are looking at your products. Push traffic towards a quiz that matches them with a SKU or bundle. Not only can you leverage that information to personalize your follow-up, but shoppers will feel the product is more “for them” if they’ve been guided to it by interactive UX. 

You can also tailor your triggered follow up flows according to where on the website they visited, such as certain collection or product pages. You can even know what other websites they’ve been visiting, and a ton more stuff about them using Semrush’s One2Target. [Refine Your Targeting].

👑 Create intent-based segments, not just standard ones

Stop slapping "Dear {First_Name}" on emails and calling it personalization. According to Obvi's experience, true personalization starts with understanding purchase intent:

• Check the intent behind they keywords searched to reach you by entering your domain in Organic Research then checking “Keyword intent”. Is it commercial & transactional, or rather informational? Makes a difference.

• Ask customers directly why they're buying (via post-purchase surveys with tools like Gojiberry)

• Create distinct email journeys for each motivation

• Segment users based on their on-site behavior or pre-purchase quizzes

• Customize messaging that speaks to their specific goals

When Obvi implemented this approach, they saw open rates jump 37% and repeat purchases climb 22%.

🎮 Add mystery and gamification to drive engagement

Forget standard abandoned cart emails. Obvi also found that adding “mystery” gifts to abandoned carts—only revealed upon purchase completion—increased recovery rates by 39%.

→ You can do the same with apps like EasyGift to automatically add gifts to carts when specific conditions are met, such as cart value thresholds.

🎰 Gamification in general works wonders for engagement. Try these:

• Scratch and WIN!: Scratch card pop-ups allowing visitors to win instant prizes in exchange for their contact information.

• Neowauk – Survey, Quiz, Games: Gamified pop-ups, including surveys, product recommendation quizzes, and games, to capture leads and enhance customer engagement. ​

• Gamify Discount, Email Popups: Replace traditional pop-ups with engaging games like spin-the-wheel or scratch cards to boost sales and email subscriptions.

⚡ Treat SMS and Email differently

When someone gives you their phone number, they’re letting you into a more personal space than their inbox. SMS is more intimate, and people expect a different experience. I liked Feras Khouri’s take on it.

❌ Don’t abuse SMS’ power, though.

• People will opt out quick if they feel like they’re being texted for nothing.

• If your campaign encourages replies, make sure there’s a system in place so people get a real, non-robotic response.

It’s a privilege. Treat it like one.

NEXT-LEVEL STUFF

Relationship-Building Moves

Convincing customers to buy once is nice. 

Convincing them to stick around and buy again - or tell everyone they know to buy - is the true growth unlock. 

The Post-Purchase Magic: Surprise & Delight

Two examples that prove retention isn't just about email sequences and discounts:

🐕 The Chewy Story Everyone Talks About

The dog food company Chewy has a subscription product. Eventually, the family dog the food is for will die. Dog owners tend to forget about the subscription until the next shipment arrives.

Chewy's response? They not only happily credit the final purchase but send a bouquet of flowers to the owners a few days later.

This small gesture has generated massive goodwill, countless social media shares, and customer loyalty that extends to other pets in the household.

🏆 SnapPad's Review Reward System

At SnapPad, we developed a surprise and delight program. 

When a great review would pop up from a customer, we'd share it with our internal team. At the end of the month, we'd pick our favorite and send that person a SWAG pack + a personal note of thanks for being a 'Snappadder'."

Now we have a customer for life. And a walking billboard who will wear our merch at the campground.

Why it works: These approaches build emotional connections that discount codes simply can't match. They transform transactions into relationships.

COMMUNITY

Make Them VIPs

A lot of new brands are going to market having already built an audience or community. 

Founders who do this know that you can shrink your CACs by having a readymade group of people to market to. 

That’s why “creator brands” are all the rage these days. 

But even if you don’t start out with an audience, it’s possible to quickly build a community around your brand using tools like Facebook Groups. 

You can seed this with a few of your best customers or most engaged influencers and then grow it with quick mentions in your post-purchase messaging. 

The great part about communities is they more or less run themselves once you get enough momentum. They are also a built-in market research and product feedback machine that can provide you with super valuable data from within your own “walled garden”. 

Even if you don’t create an explicit community, consider developing an email and SMS segment dedicated to your most passionate customers. 

Call them VIPs and then treat them like VIPs → 

• First look at new products

• Beta tester and limited edition merch opportunities

• Special discounts or sneak peeks before everyone else

• “We need your help” surveys 

Make your VIPs feel special and part of the team. They’ll return the favor 10X. 

Cut down on time. Semrush’s Social Media Toolkit streamlines everything so you can find loyal fans and keep them coming back. [Strengthen my Community]

DATA POINT

5 = 25

That's not a math error. According to research from Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25-95%.

Despite this powerful ROI, many companies continue to focus primarily on acquisition rather than retention (like we did), leaving significant profit potential untapped.

Most brands can’t afford to leave a bunch of money on the table. So if you’re still just batch-blasting standard email campaigns and calling it retention, I recommend making 2025 the year you up your Email/SMS/Community game. 

With ❤️,

Kent Wilson

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