You’re Wasting Your Highest-Intent Shoppers
Three flows and a welcome series is not a retention program
Hi Team!
Sorry for the brief absence. After 3+ years of rarely missing a week, I needed a short break.
Naturally, I used that break in the least restful way possible: spending an ungodly amount of time in Claude Code and Codex, dragging my life into the future.
I vibe-coded a bunch of tools for work, tinkered on too many side quests, and somehow found the brain capacity to finally redesign the newsie.
I brought more of my travel obsession into the look and feel, which makes the whole thing feel a bit more Eli-centric, including at least one boarding pass reference nobody asked for.
Outside of that, we celebrated Noah’s 5th birthday with a bouncy house, pizza, and a superhero theme, which is basically the holy trinity of five-year-old joy.
We’re also taking a last-minute points trip to Panama, 30k round trip on United via Air Canada points, and then prepping for 10 days in TLV in June.
On the work side, we launched Yotpo Discover, and we’ve been working on a few new ideas I’ll share here soon.
This week, we’re talking about why “having flows” is not the same thing as having a real retention program, why most brands are missing high-intent shoppers, and how to think about flows as a revenue channel instead of a checkbox.
Let’s get into it.
This week’s newsie is brought to you by Instant.
Most email flows were built for a world where personalization meant adding a first name and maybe showing the product someone left behind.
That bar is too low now.
A shopper who spent 20 minutes across three sessions looking at the same product should not get the same follow-up as someone who bounced after nine seconds from a TikTok click.
Instant helps brands fix this with AI-powered flows built around what shoppers actually do on site. It identifies shoppers, tracks the products they viewed, the variants they came back to, the carts they abandoned, and how close they were to buying. Then it sends personalized flows based on that behavior.
The product in the email matches what they were actually looking at. The timing reflects when that specific shopper is most likely to act. The offer is calibrated based on whether they need a nudge or would likely buy at full price.
The results are hard to ignore. Karen Kane added $1.1M in incremental revenue in 90 days. The Collagen Co. drove $10.6M. Linda’s saw a 109x ROI. July drove $3.9M. Nakie drove $2.7M.
Instant is quick to start with, easy to expand, and built to handle work your team never gets to. Most brands go live in under 30 minutes and see the lift within days.
It is as easy to turn Instant email flows on as it is to pause them. No long-term contract, no drawn out setup, and no extra lift from your team.
Book a quick demo with Instant before Memorial Day and get 50% off your first 60 days.
The “we have flows” problem
Ask a retention team about their email program and you will usually hear the same few things. Welcome sequence is live. Cart abandonment is live. Post-purchase is live. There is probably a winback flow somewhere in the account, though nobody is completely sure when it was last updated or whether it still references a product that got discontinued.
The team feels good about it because someone did the actual work to build those flows, and the program really is better than whatever came before it. Both things can be true. The program can be better than it was and still not be good enough.
A flow can be live and still miss most of the intent happening on your site. It can drive revenue and still underperform badly. It can look perfectly healthy in a dashboard while leaving money behind because the message, timing, offer, and product recommendation are too generic.
I once looked at a brand where more than half of email revenue was coming from the welcome flow. The team was proud of that number, but it should have made everyone uncomfortable. If the welcome flow is carrying the whole program, the rest of the lifecycle is probably underbuilt: browse abandonment is weak, winback is a blanket discount, price-drop isn’t running, and post-purchase is either too generic or pushy.
The brand thinks email is working because one room in the house looks nice. The rest of the house is empty.
Most brands stop at the obvious flows
Welcome, cart, checkout, post-purchase. Those are the basics, and that is also where most brands stop.
Customer behavior is more specific than those four buckets. Someone may view the same SKU five times. Someone may buy from one category and repeatedly browse another. Someone may purchase three times, then slowly go quiet. Those are all signals, and most programs treat them like noise.
What you end up with is a whole layer of mid-intent shoppers who are warmer than cold prospects but not close enough to convert on their own. The program has nothing thoughtful built for them.
A good retention program responds to meaningful behavior across the whole shopping journey. If a previously active customer starts going quiet, the winback should reflect what they used to buy and whether they are worth protecting margin for. None of this is new in concept. Every retention team has some version of it on a roadmap. The reason it stays on the roadmap is that building it properly is a pain. Each flow needs logic, copy, creative, segmentation, and ongoing maintenance. That overhead is what kills execution.
Campaigns build context. Flows close the loop.
Campaigns and flows should not have the same job.
Campaigns are for brand moments: product launches, seasonal pushes, editorial notes, big promos. They go out because the brand has something to say. Flows fire because the customer did something: viewed a product, browsed a category, abandoned a cart, stopped buying.
That means the message should be much closer to the behavior. A browse abandonment email does not need to open with a brand manifesto. The shopper was just on the PDP. They need the product they viewed, a clean reason to reconsider it, and an easy path back. A cart abandonment email does not need three lifestyle modules. Maybe they need shipping clarity. Maybe they need reviews. The job is to close the loop, not tell the brand story again.
Too many brands treat flows like smaller campaigns. They make the creative prettier, soften the message, add more brand language, and end up with something that looks nice but does not do the job. Pretty is nice. Useful converts.
Discounts are covering for weak relevance
A lot of brands use discounts to cover for lazy timing and generic follow-up. Someone abandons cart, so they get 10% off. Someone goes quiet for 60 days, so they get 20% off. Someone views a product twice, so they get routed into the same offer path as everyone else who did not convert.
This works just well enough to become dangerous. The dashboard shows revenue, the team feels validated, and nobody asks how many of those customers would have bought anyway, or whether what they actually needed was better timing, social proof, or simply the exact variant they had already shown interest in.
Basically, you trained your best customers to wait you out.
Lazy discounting erodes margin on conversions that were already going to happen, and once you set that expectation across your list, it is expensive to walk back. A loyal customer who buys every six weeks may not need a coupon on day 42. A first-time shopper who came back to the same PDP three times may need proof more than they need 10% off. When every shopper gets the same offer, you give away margin to people who did not need it and still fail to convert people whose actual objection was something else. Discounts are not bad. Lazy discounts are bad.
Open rates are not the scoreboard
Most retention teams are looking at the wrong numbers and calling it a strategy review.
Open rate has been unreliable since Apple’s privacy changes. In a lot of cases you are counting server pings as proof of engagement. CTR is more useful but still does not tell you whether the program is improving customer value or just catching shoppers who were going to buy anyway.
The better number is revenue per recipient, not per send, per person on the list. If it is growing month over month, your program is compounding. If it is flat or declining, something structural is broken and no subject line test is going to fix it.
The other number worth tracking honestly is incremental revenue: what you generated because the email was sent to someone who would not have converted without it. Email platforms are very good at taking credit. The actual lift is usually smaller than the dashboard suggests, and the programs that hold up under honest analysis are the ones where behavioral personalization is driving real additional conversions, not just getting credit for ones that were already happening.
What to audit this week
Start with the percentage of site revenue coming from email. If it is under 35% across campaigns and flows, your retention setup is missing the mark.
Then pull your email revenue breakdown by flow. If more than half is coming from the welcome series, you do not have a full lifecycle program. That means the same gaps are hiding in plain sight: the browse flow is not using the exact SKU, variant, reviews, or collection someone cared about. Cart and checkout are stopping too early instead of running a real sequence with smarter timing, proof, shipping clarity, and offer logic. Winback is just a blanket discount. Post purchase is not creating the next order.
Most brands will find the same thing: the foundation exists, but the coverage is thin.
Once you see it, the work becomes clearer. If someone looked at the same product three times, they should not get a generic “you left something behind.” If someone already bought the item, they should not get the new customer offer. If someone buys every 45 days, they should not get a panic discount on day 12. If someone is one click away from buying, do not bury the product under a paragraph about your mission.
Your customers are already telling you what they care about through their behavior. Most brands are only listening to the loudest signals. The brands that win will be the ones that hear the quieter ones, too.
The truth is, you probably already know this. These improvements are on your roadmap, but they keep getting pushed back. That’s where AI changes email and why you should take the leap: it gives your team the bandwidth to finally execute.
That’s it for this week!
Any topics you’d like to see me cover in the future?
Just shoot me a DM or an email! Cheers, Eli 💛
