June Retention Newsie

Welcome to The Retention Newsie by The Email Marketers - your biweekly dose of what's actually working in email and SMS retention for e-commerce brands. No fluff, no recycled 'best practices.' Just what we're seeing in the trenches with 50+ brands.

Let's get into it. 

📬️ Inbox Rundown

• 🔁 The subscription churn problem nobody talks about: Why your customers cancel even when they love your product
• 💸 The discount data is in: Brands that discount less are growing 2x faster
• 📱 Klaviyo just connected social to your CRM: What Social Marketing means for your flows
• 🔍️ Identity resolution is the new deliverability: Why recognizing your customers matters more than ever
• 📰 News roundup: AI disclosure laws, agentic commerce, and RCS goes personalized

We need to talk about subscription churn. Because we keep having the same conversation with brands, and it starts the same way every time: "Our subscription cancellation rate is climbing. We think it's a pricing issue."

It's not a pricing issue.

Here's what's actually happening. Your customer signed up for a monthly subscription of vitamins (or protein powder, or skincare, or coffee). They were excited. They took it every day for the first two weeks. Then life happened. They missed a few days. Then a week. Then the next shipment arrived, and now they've got two unopened bottles sitting on the shelf.

By month three, they're staring at four bottles. They feel guilty. Not because they don't like your product. They genuinely do. But the guilt of watching product pile up is stronger than the loyalty they feel toward your brand.

So they cancel.

This is the "too much product" trap, and it's one of the most misdiagnosed problems in DTC retention. Churn that looks like product failure is actually habit failure.

The customer still believes in what you sell. They just fell off the routine, and your subscription model punished them for it instead of helping them get back on track.

Recommendations + Discount Data

Here's where it gets worse. Most subscription portals give customers exactly two options: keep my subscription active, or cancel. That's it. A binary choice. If your customer just needs a breather (skip a month, stretch their delivery to every six weeks, swap to a smaller size), but the only exit door you've built says "cancel," guess what they pick?

You're trading a one-month pause for permanent churn because your flow gave them a binary choice.

What we recommend to every subscription brand we work with:

1. Add a "skip this month" option before the cancel button. Make it the most prominent choice on the cancellation page. Customers who skip are dramatically more likely to resume than customers who cancel.

2. Offer flexible cadence adjustments. "Every 4 weeks" shouldn't be the only option. Let customers stretch to 6 or 8 weeks. A customer receiving product every 8 weeks is infinitely more valuable than a cancelled customer.

3. Build habit-stacking email content into your post-purchase flows. Don't just send shipping confirmations and upsells. Send content that helps customers actually use the product. Morning routine guides. Recipes. Pairing suggestions. The goal: make the product part of their daily rhythm, not something that sits in a cabinet.

4. Track "product velocity" as a leading indicator of churn. If someone's reorder cadence is slowing, that's your signal to intervene before they hit the cancel button. A well-timed "running low?" email with a skip option beats a desperate retention offer after they've already decided to leave.

The brands we see win at subscription retention are the ones that treat it as a customer experience problem, not a pricing problem. Your product isn't the issue. Your customer's relationship with using it is.

New research from Klaviyo and ProfitPeak analyzed thousands of brands. The headline: brands that discount less are growing twice as fast.

• Low discounters grew GMV 12% YoY vs. 6% for deep discounters. That's a 2x growth gap.
• Low discounters posted 8% margin growth. Deep discounters saw margins fall 11%. That's a 19-point spread.
• 88% of all orders went through some form of discount. That's nearly every transaction.
• 68% of discounted orders came from returning customers (vs. 11% for full-price orders).
• Revenue in the 2 to 4 weeks after a sale dropped 27% below normal baseline.

Read that last stat again. The post-sale revenue dip tells you everything: discounting doesn't create demand. It shifts it. You're borrowing from next month to inflate this month.

And the returning customer stat is the real kicker. Discounting is not acquiring new customers. It's subsidizing people who were already going to buy from you.

The Reality: If your retention strategy is built on discount-driven flows (welcome discount, winback discount, VIP discount, birthday discount, abandoned cart discount), you're training your best customers to wait for the next sale. Every discount code in a flow should be earning its place with hard data, not sitting there because "that's how everyone does it."

Klaviyo Launched Social Marketing

Klaviyo now connects Instagram comments and DMs directly to customer profiles in your CRM. Someone comments a keyword on your post? Klaviyo auto-replies, captures their email, and drops them into your welcome flow. Every social interaction now lives on the same profile as orders, browsing data, and email engagement. This is the bridge between social engagement and owned channels that brands have been duct-taping together for years. Worth exploring if Instagram is a meaningful traffic source for your brand.

Identity Resolution Is the New Deliverability

Attentive published data showing brands that solve identity resolution see 20% higher conversion rates and 95% higher triggered email revenue. With Apple shortening first-party cookies to 7 days and 75% of shoppers using 2+ email addresses, traditional platforms that treat each email as a separate person are missing the full picture. Recognizing your customer across devices, browsers, and channels is becoming as foundational as landing in the inbox.

RCS Gets Personalized Product Feeds

Klaviyo now supports dynamic personalized product feeds in SMS and RCS messages. The same per-recipient product recommendations that power your email flows now work in text. RCS messages can show swipeable carousels with multiple personalized products. Configure once, and Klaviyo handles the per-recipient logic across email, SMS, and RCS. If you're already running product recommendation blocks in email, extending that to text is now a one-step setup.

AI Disclosure Laws Are Live

New York's SB8420A took effect June 8: any marketing image featuring an AI-generated human now requires a disclosure label. Fines start at $1K for the first offense and $5K per subsequent image. California's AI Transparency Act (SB 942) follows on August 2, requiring AI watermarks on AI-generated content. If your creative team is using AI for lifestyle imagery or model composites, audit your assets now. These are the first major state-level regulations directly impacting how marketers use AI-generated creative.

Shopify Built a Dashboard for AI Shopping

Shopify introduced a dedicated Agentic Commerce section in Shopify Admin. Merchants can now monitor how their products perform across AI shopping agents (ChatGPT, Shop, CoPilot), review optimization recommendations, and improve visibility. The fact that Shopify built a first-party management tool for this tells you where commerce is heading. AI is mediating how customers discover products, and brands need to optimize for it the same way they optimize for Google.

Lock in your spot today!

Your owned channels are the only asset no algorithm change can take away. We’re here if you want a second opinion on whether your email and SMS program is keeping up.