September 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.

📍Meet us IRL in Boston and San Diego! Catch us at K:Bos in Boston on Sept 9-10 and Commerce Roundtable in San Diego on Sept. 21-22! Reply if you want to meet up. (Scroll down for details.)

🎯 BFCM is 11 weeks out. The work that matters is happening right now, not in October.

🤖 Klaviyo just hired the founder of Drift as Chief Product Officer. What it means for your stack.

📰 Shopify adds WhatsApp, Attentive drops loyalty data, and the "slop" problem in marketing.

The Brands That Win Are Building Right Now. Every year, we watch the same pattern. Brands treat BFCM prep like it starts in October. By then, it's too late to do anything except run the same playbook as last year and hope volume carries you.

The brands that crush Q4 are doing four things right now.

1. Planning inventory around their email calendar.

BFCM isn't just a marketing event. It's a supply chain event. If your best sellers are going to be the focus of your email and SMS campaigns in November, the stock conversation needs to happen now. We've seen brands build incredible email campaigns around products that were out of stock by the second send. Plan your hero SKUs, coordinate with your ops team on restock timelines, and align your promotional calendar to what you can actually fulfill. Nothing kills BFCM momentum like a "back in stock" email for the item you just promoted two days ago.

2. Reactivating as much of your list as possible.

Your BFCM audience isn't just the subscribers who opened last week. There are thousands of people on your list who bought from you 8, 10, 12 months ago and went quiet. Right now, through early October, is the window to wake them up. Run a re-engagement series now. Offer something genuinely compelling, not a "we miss you" email with a 10% coupon. Get creative: early access to new products, a behind-the-scenes look at what's coming for fall, a genuine reason to re-engage with your brand before the noise of Q4 drowns everything out. The bigger your active, engaged list is by November 1, the more revenue your BFCM sends will generate. Full stop.

3. Shifting ad spend toward list building.

Right now, a huge percentage of paid acquisition is optimized for immediate purchase. That makes sense most of the year. But between now and October, the highest-ROI move is shifting a meaningful portion of ad spend toward building your email and SMS list with high-quality subscribers. Run lead gen campaigns. Gate early access to your BFCM sale behind an email signup. Build a VIP waitlist. Every subscriber you add in now is someone you can market to for free during the most expensive ad period of the year. The math is simple: a subscriber you acquire for $2 right now is worth significantly more than a click you pay $15 for on Black Friday.

4. Winding down the discounting. Now.

Start pulling back on discounts now. Let some pent-up demand build. When your subscribers haven't seen a sale from you in 6 to 8 weeks and then your BFCM offer lands, it actually means something. The brands that discount constantly through Q3 and then try to create urgency in Q4 are fighting against their own conditioning. Stop training your customers to wait.

There's also a margin case for this, not just a psychology one. A full-price sale in September or October carries a much better margin than the same sale run at BFCM discount depth in November. Every time you pull a sale forward into deep-discount territory to "hope for a big BFCM," you're trading higher-margin revenue now for lower-margin revenue later. Run that math before you decide to stunt September and October sales in anticipation of November. The bigger picture isn't just "save the urgency for Q4." It's "protect your margin everywhere you can."

The thread connecting all four of these: BFCM performance is determined by what you do now, not November.

If your retention program isn't actively working on these four things, book a free call with us. We're already deep into Q4 planning with our clients.

Pay Attention. Last month, Klaviyo acquired Agency (an AI-native customer success company) and named co-founder Elias Torres as Chief Product Officer. Torres previously co-founded Drift, which essentially invented conversational commerce. He originally hired Klaviyo co-CEO Andrew Bialecki at Performable, which HubSpot acquired in 2011.

This is not a random executive hire. This is Klaviyo signaling that AI agents are the future of their platform.

Klaviyo already processes 250+ billion data points per quarter across 9+ billion consumer profiles. Their Q2 revenue hit $370.6M (up 26% YoY), and their AI Composer tool surpassed 95,000 users in its first month. 27% of mid-market and enterprise customers are already using it. Their Customer Agent adoption is up 40% quarter over quarter.

Why this matters for you: The Drift playbook was about turning website visits into real-time conversations that close deals. Now that playbook is being applied to post-purchase. Imagine a retention "agent" that doesn't just send a flow email when a customer hasn't reordered. It actually converses, troubleshoots, and re-engages based on the full history of that customer's behavior.

We're watching this closely because it could change what "retention marketing" even means in 18 months.

Shopify adds WhatsApp to its messaging stack. Merchants can now run WhatsApp marketing campaigns alongside email and SMS, and collect WhatsApp consent through Shopify Forms. In markets where WhatsApp open rates dwarf email, this is significant. If your brand sells internationally, start thinking about WhatsApp as a retention channel, not just a support tool.

Attentive's 2026 loyalty data is eye-opening. 88% of consumers shopped a new brand in the past quarter. But 77% (85% of Gen Z) shop regularly with five or fewer brands. Multi-channel subscribers (email plus SMS plus push) are 2x more likely to repurchase from new brands. The takeaway: getting customers onto multiple owned channels isn't a nice-to-have. It's the mechanism that drives repurchase.

Klaviyo Social Marketing is now GA. Social Auto-Replies, customer profile enrichment from social signals, and a centralized content library with AI-powered insights. Early customer Kulani Kinis grew their ambassador program to 130K+ members (5x growth) and collected 4,800+ UGC posts. Social is becoming a first-party data collection channel, not just an awareness play.

Shopify is pushing agentic commerce hard. Merchants can now sell through ChatGPT, AI Mode in Google Search, and Copilot. The question nobody is answering yet: how do you retain a customer whose AI agent is making the purchase decisions?

The "slop" problem is real. Ari Murray's latest Workweek newsletter tackles how to spot declining quality in marketing output. As AI makes content creation faster, taste and quality standards become the differentiator. If your emails are starting to sound like everyone else's emails, that is a problem worth paying attention to.

Klaviyo is bringing K:BOS back to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, September 9–10. It's their flagship B2C marketing event: two days of keynotes (Gwyneth Paltrow and Christina Tosi are headlining this year), 24+ hours of breakout sessions, and a heavy focus on how leading brands are actually using AI and unified customer data to grow, not just talk about it.

We'll be on the ground for it. If you're in Boston this week, reply to this email and let's find a time to connect in person. Always better to compare notes on what's working in retention face to face.

Commerce Roundtable is bringing its DTC event to San Diego on September 21–22 at the Port Pavilion, right on the waterfront. Expect 750+ curated attendees, 20+ ecom speakers, and hands-on sessions built for operators, not passive conference panels.

Our own CEO, Melanie Balke, will be speaking at this one, joining Taylor Holiday, Chase Dimond, and Nick Shackelford and other speakers on stage. If you're around, just hit reply and come hang with us IRL, meet the team, and grab actionable ideas you can put to work immediately.

Need a second opinion on your retention program before Q4?

We audit email and SMS programs for 7-9 figure e-commerce brands. No fluff, no generic playbooks. Just a clear look at what's working, what's not, and what's leaving money on the table.