I'm CJ. I run retention marketing across multiple ecommerce brands — pet products, food storage, jewelry, wine, health, beauty. Different industries, same patterns.

I started this newsletter because I kept seeing the same mistakes killing revenue at almost every brand I touched. Not complicated stuff. Not “you need a $50K tech stack” stuff. Basic things hiding in plain sight.

So before your first real issue hits your inbox on Tuesday — here are 5 of them.

Go check these in your account right now. I'm serious. Open a new tab.

Most brands send 1, maybe 2 welcome emails. “Here's your 10% off.” Maybe a brand story. Then nothing until the next campaign blast.

Here's what that's costing you: your first welcome email gets 3-4x the open rate of any campaign you'll ever send. That's the highest-attention window a subscriber will ever give you. And you're burning it on a single coupon delivery.

A real welcome flow is 5-7 emails over 10-14 days. Incentive delivery, brand story, product education, social proof, a nudge toward first purchase. By email 5, you've either built a relationship or you haven't — but at least you tried.

Pull up your subscriber list. Filter by “hasn't opened or clicked in 180+ days.” I'll wait.

That number — 30%, 40%, sometimes over 50% of the list — is dead weight. You're paying your ESP to store those contacts. You're paying to send to them. And every time you do, their non-engagement tells inbox providers your emails aren't worth delivering.

Here's the part that hurts: those dead contacts aren't just wasting money. They're dragging down your deliverability for the subscribers who actually want to hear from you. Your best customers might be getting sent to Promotions or spam — because your list is full of ghosts.

The moment after someone buys is the moment they trust you the most. They just gave you their money. They're excited. They're paying attention.

What do most brands do with that moment? Order confirmation. Shipping notification. Then silence until the next sale campaign.

No product education. No “here's how to get the most out of what you just bought.” No cross-sell based on what they purchased. No review request timed to when they've actually used the product. Nothing.

The post-purchase flow is where one-time buyers become repeat customers. Skip it and you're relying entirely on discounts to bring people back. That's not retention — that's bribery with diminishing returns.

This is the one that gets pushback every time. But the data doesn't care about your comfort level.

Most brands send 1-2 campaigns per week and think that's “enough.” They're terrified of unsubscribes. So they under-send, under-engage, and watch their list go cold.

The brands that win at retention? They send 3-4 campaigns per week. And here's what actually happens: revenue goes up and unsubscribe rates barely move. The people who leave from a 3rd email per week were never going to buy. The people who stay are your actual customers — and they're buying more because you're staying top of mind.

Under-sending isn't playing it safe. It's the most expensive mistake on this list because it compounds every single week you do it.

This is the big one. The metric that tells you whether your retention program is actually working — and most ecommerce marketers can't tell me what it is.

Your repeat purchase rate is the percentage of customers who buy more than once. That's it. Simple number. And it determines everything: how much you can afford to spend on acquisition, how fast you can scale, whether your email program is driving real behavior change or just generating opens.

If your repeat purchase rate is below 25%, every mistake on this list is costing you 10x what you think it is. Because you're not just losing email revenue — you're losing customer lifetime value. And that means your acquisition costs never pay off.

Every Tuesday morning, I send The Retained — a breakdown of the best (and worst) emails from real ecommerce brands, pulled from a classified database I built tracking nearly 100 DTC brands.

You get the actual emails. Screenshots. What works. What doesn't. Patterns I'm seeing across industries. And the data behind all of it.

No theory. No “10 tips for better emails.” Just real emails, analyzed by someone who runs this stuff every day.

Your first issue lands Tuesday. If you checked even one thing on this list, you're already ahead of most brands.