Email Marketing
for eCom brands
Still the most profitable channel for eCommerce brands, driving repeat purchases at the lowest cost.
Why is this
important
Ads Optimization
Just 1-3% are ready to buy now. Convert others through email instead of paying to get them back again.
Constant Presence
Direct and precise communication with your audience, keeping your brand present at the right moment, without relying on algorithms.
Customer Education
Email campaigns act as mini landing pages, giving you full control over how you educate, build trust, and guide customers toward a purchase.
Retention & Repeat
Email is the most effective channel for increasing returning customer rate, leveraging existing attention instead of constant re-acquisition.
Ownership & Predictablity
Unlike paid channels, your email list is a channel you own, allowing for stable, measurable, and predictable revenue growth.
RETENTION SIDE
ACHIEVEMENTS
100+ Brands Supported
We have worked with more than 100 partners across different eCommerce verticals, giving us a clear understanding of the main pain points in each category. That experience helps us create strategies that are not based on templates, but on what actually brings results.
10+ Services
Retention Side has a deep understanding across all retention marketing channels in eCom.
18 Months
We do not lock clients into long-term contracts. Our current average client lifetime is around 18 months across more than 100 accounts.
$30M Generated Revenue
Our work has helped clients turn email into one of their top 3 revenue channels through better flows, recovered carts, smarter sales-driven and educational campaigns, improved segmentation, and more intentional customer journeys.
5.000+ Emails Aired
We have created more than 5,000 emails built to make subscribers read, engage, click, and buy. Every email starts with research into the theme, goal, customer need, and level of awareness, so we can speak their language and connect with what actually makes them care.
HOW RETENTION SIDE
COMPARES TO A STANDARD EMAIL AGENCY
1. HOW WE MEASURE SUCCESS
2. HOW WE ONBOARD PARTNERS
Our onboarding is built around detailed questionnaires and
strategic workshops. We use them to understand business goals, brand positioning, customer behaviour, and why people drop off in the journey. Those insights help us create email communications that drive email revenue and support every other marketing channel.
3. OUR APPROACH TO CUSTOMER JOURNEY RESEARCH
We map the customer journey around each brand, then break down every step to understand why someone moves forward or drops off. We analyse behaviour, run surveys, speak with customer support, and look for patterns. What we learn can improve email, but also offers, landing pages, ads, product education, and retention.
4. OUR RETENTION EXPERTISE
It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers by capturing intent and creating clear, usable customer profiles. It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers by capturing intent and creating clear, usable customer profiles. It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers by capturing intent and creating clear, usable customer profiles.
5. OUR DESIGN AND CONTENT PROCESS
Retention Side is focused on everything that happens after the first purchase, so brands can get more value from the money they spend on acquisition. Email is only the tip of the iceberg. We connect it with SMS, direct mail, loyalty, subscriptions, and other retention channels that help customers come back again.
STANDARD AGENCY
1. HOW WE MEASURE SUCCESS
Standard agencies often measure account health instead of business growth. Open rate, click rate, and email revenue share can look strong while profit stays flat. You can have 100% opens and clicks and still make $0. Chasing a generic “30% from email” target ignores what actually improves retention and LTV.
2. HOW STANDARD AGENCIES ONBOARD CLIENTS
3. THEIR EMAIL AUTOMATION APPROACH
Standard agencies usually work from templates built around a one-size-fits-all journey. Most changes happen in design, not strategy. They try to create eye-catching emails without understanding the real problem the subscriber has at that exact moment, which means the automation looks good but often fails to move people forward.
4. LIMITED TO EMAIL & SMS
It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers by capturing intent and creating clear, usable customer profiles. It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers by capturing intent and creating clear, usable customer profiles. It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers by capturing intent and creating clear, usable customer profiles.
5. THEIR DESIGN AND CONTENT PROCESS
Most agencies focus only on email, or email and SMS at best. Even when they offer more channels, they rarely go deep enough to solve the problems that make those channels work. Others add email as a side service to increase agency profit, while their real expertise stays in paid advertising.
our Process
Research & Workshops
This phase lays the foundation for everything that follows. We analyze your brand, market, audience, and competitors to understand what drives purchases, where retention breaks, and where the biggest growth opportunities exist. Instead of guessing what to send, we identify what actually moves customers toward repeat purchases and long-term value.
Activities
Brand & Product Analysis
Customer Journey Mapping
Audience Segmentation Structure
Visual Improvement
Market Research
Competitor Analysis
Tracking Validation
Outputs
A clear breakdown of what to fix, what to build, and what to scale inside the email channel.
Clear understanding of your audience and buying behavior.
A mapped list of retention opportunities competitors are not actively using.
Creation & Implementation
In this phase, we turn strategy into execution. We build list-growth mechanisms, structure and manage zero-party data, and create automated flows and campaigns designed to move customers from one funnel stage to the next. Every element is tied to clear KPIs, allowing us to track performance, evaluate progress during regular account reviews, and ensure we are moving toward the defined retention goals.
Activities
List Growth Forms & Placements
Zero-Party data Collection
Lifecycle Automation Creation
Educational Campaigns
Promotional Campaigns
Account Pulsetake Dashboard (KPI)
Outputs
Higher list quality through intent-based data and smarter segmentation.
Automated flows that support education, conversion, and repeat purchases.
A structured email ecosystem that moves customers through the funnel instead of isolated sends.
Clear performance benchmarks to evaluate progress and guide future decisions.
Optimization & Expansion
This phase focuses on constant experimentation and challenging existing assumptions to maximize results over time. We analyze performance, test new approaches, and maximize what already works, while gradually introducing additional retention channels such as SMS, push notifications, loyalty programs, and direct mail. The goal is to create a connected retention ecosystem that increases engagement without overwhelming subscribers.
Activities
Behavioral Data Analysis
A/B Testing & Experimentation
Cross-Channel Orchestration
Lifecycle Optimization
Channel Prioritization Logic
Long-Term Value Optimization
Outputs
Clear signals on which messages, timings, and touchpoints drive repeat purchases.
Improved conversion across the funnel by redirecting users to the most effective retention touchpoint.
Stronger retention by meeting customers on the channels they naturally respond to, not just email.
Before working with Retention Side, most of our growth came from paid ads. When ads were performing, things looked good. When they weren’t, cash flow got tight pretty quickly. Over the past months, our repeat customer rate moved close to 40%, and that changed how the business feels. Revenue is still seasonal, but it’s far less stressful.
Founder
Nevena Komazec
Our Klaviyo account was a mess. Retention Side understood main issues in our industry and optimize our communication to reduce returns and increase LTV. Now our flows convert 3–4x better.
Founder
Louise Elia
Before Retention Side, 90% of our sales came from one-time buyers. Now returning customers drive most of our revenue, and checkout abandonment emails alone add 5 figures each month.
Founder
Faraz Zaidi
HOW DOES RETENTION SIDE
AUDIT LOOK LIKE
Retention Side offers a free ESP account audit when both teams agree there is a potential fit after the discovery session. The audit is built to provide real value and can serve as a practical improvement roadmap, whether we end up working together or not.
retention Side
We are covering all Retention Channels in the eCommerce industry.
Retention Without the Noise
Every Thursday, we share a strategy or insight we’ve discovered while working with top 1% eCommerce brands. Some sell this knowledge through courses, others lock it behind monthly retainers, and some don’t even know it exists. We share it for free, every week.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main role of email marketing for eCommerce brands?
The primary role of email marketing is customer retention. Instead of driving every repeat purchase through paid ads, email allows brands to convert one-time buyers into returning customers at the lowest possible cost. Through education and well-timed communication, email builds long-term value rather than short-term conversions.
Which metrics actually matter in email marketing?
Many brands still focus on vanity metrics like open rate and click rate. While useful for diagnostics, these metrics don’t guarantee revenue. A campaign can have a 100% open rate and still generate $0.
What truly matters are metrics that cannot be manipulated — metrics that require customers to spend money:
Lead-to-customer rate
One-time to returning customer rate
Units per transaction
Product diversification across purchases
These metrics show whether email marketing is driving real business impact, not just engagement.
Why shouldn’t Open Rate be the main success metrics?
Open rate should never be low — a low open rate usually signals a deliverability problem that must be fixed.
However, whether your open rate is 40% or 70% is influenced by factors you can’t fully control: traffic quality, niche, brand authority, and audience maturity.
Higher is better, but revenue is the real goal.
We’ve seen brands generate more revenue with a 40% open rate than others with 70%+. At the end of the day, you can have a perfect open rate and still sell nothing, which doesn’t move the business forward.
How is the email marketing channel structured?
Email marketing consists of four core pillars:
Deliverability
The technical foundation. If emails land in spam, everything else becomes irrelevant.List Growth
Every subscriber has a lifecycle. Some disengage over time, which makes continuous, high-quality list growth essential.Flows & Automations
Automated emails that support each step of the customer journey, helping users move from one stage to the next with the right information.Campaigns
Ongoing communication with subscribers, balancing educational and sales-driven messages to strengthen brand connection and drive revenue.
Why is Zero-Party Data important for eCommerce brands?
Zero-party data isn’t important only for email, but email is the easiest and most effective way to collect it.
When brands actively collect and use zero-party data, they gain deeper insight into customer preferences and behavior. This data can be used to improve not just email communication, but also ads, landing pages, product pages, post-purchase upsell and cross-sell strategies, and customer support.
Zero-party data allows marketing decisions to be based on real customer input, not assumptions.
Eliya The Label
Eliya The Label faced a growing return rate driven by sizing uncertainty and mismatched expectations. We rebuilt their email strategy around UGC content, survey data, and PostCo integration to close the gap between what customers ordered and what they kept.
Lower return rate across a $10M–$20M fashion brand
Higher email click rate after campaign design overhaul
Hedonism Wines
Hedonism Wines had a 100,000+ subscriber list sitting on Mailchimp with no segmentation — a broadcast tool, not a revenue channel. We migrated to Klaviyo, rebuilt deliverability from scratch, and turned email into their top performing revenue channel in under six months.
Average open rate after deliverability recovery
Attributed email revenue growth in 6 months
Voden Filters
It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers by capturing intent and creating clear, usable customer profiles.
It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers
It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers
FOUND
It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers by capturing intent and creating clear, usable customer profiles.
It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers
It turns anonymous traffic into identifiable customers