Foreword
Ask most eCommerce leaders where their next phase of growth is coming from and the answer usually involves acquisition: more budget into paid media, better search visibility, a new channel test. All valid. But there's a quieter question that gets asked far less often. How much of the demand you've already paid for is actually being converted, retained and brought back?
For a large number of brands, the honest answer is: not nearly enough. And the clearest place to see it is the email programme.
This isn't because email underperforms as a channel. Quite the opposite. It remains one of the strongest returners in eCommerce marketing, and it's one of the few channels where you genuinely own the relationship. There's no auction to win, no cost per click, no algorithm deciding whether your message gets seen. Once someone is on your list, the cost of reaching them again is close to zero. The problem is that most email programmes were configured once, usually in a hurry during a replatform or a launch, and have never been seriously interrogated since. They tick over. They produce something. And because they produce something, nobody asks what they should be producing.
When we review email programmes as part of a wider performance audit, the weaknesses are rarely exotic. They're fundamentals that were never finished.
A basket recovery flow that fires once, several hours after the customer has gone, and then gives up. A welcome journey that tells the brand story beautifully but never actually asks for the first order. Order confirmations that arrive on time and are then followed by silence: no loyalty-building, no replenishment prompts, no reason to return. Lapsed-customer campaigns that either don't exist or blast one generic message to everyone who's gone quiet, whether they last bought six weeks ago or two years ago, and whether they spent £30 or £300.
Beneath the flows sits a slower-moving problem: list hygiene. Unengaged contacts pile up over time, and without an active suppression strategy they gradually degrade your sender reputation. Deliverability slips, inbox placement worsens and open rates soften. Because it happens by degrees, most teams only notice once the decline is well established and every send in the calendar is being dragged down with it.
None of these gaps is dramatic on its own. Collectively, they represent revenue quietly walking out of the business every day, through doors that are, in almost every case, straightforward to close.
The distinction between a functional email set-up and a genuinely commercial one is lifecycle coverage. A mature programme is working for you at every stage of the customer relationship, not just when someone is browsing or checking out, but in the spaces in between.
In practice, that means a welcome journey engineered to convert as well as introduce. Basket and browse abandonment sequences with enough depth to meet customers at different levels of intent, rather than a single nudge and nothing more. A post-purchase journey designed to build the second order, not just confirm the first. Segmentation that recognises your best customers are not the same as your discount hunters, and treats them accordingly. And a deliverability strategy that protects your sender reputation proactively instead of firefighting after engagement has already collapsed.
Get those pieces working together and email changes role. It stops being the channel that supports everything else and becomes one of the most predictable, defensible revenue drivers in the business, and one whose economics only improve as your acquisition activity grows the list.
We were approached by a well known apparel brand that had been running email for a couple of years. They had Klaviyo set up, a handful of flows live, and a reasonable size list. On the surface, things looked functional. Open rates were acceptable. The abandoned basket flow was recovering some revenue. They weren't unhappy with their email, they just weren't sure it was pulling its weight.
A proper review told a different story. Their abandoned basket sequence had one email. Their welcome series had three emails but no purchase incentive, and a conversion rate well below benchmark. They had no browse abandonment flow at all. Their post-purchase sequence stopped after the order confirmation. Over 40% of their list was classed as unengaged with no suppression strategy in place, quietly dragging down deliverability across every send. And their highest-value customers, the people spending three or four times the average order value, were receiving identical campaigns to everyone else.
The gap between what the programme was generating and what it should have been generating came to just over £38,000 in recoverable annual revenue. That wasn't a best-case projection. It was a conservative estimate built from their own data: list size, average order value, purchase frequency, and the distance between current flow performance and realistic benchmarks for their category.
Within three months of fixing the core gaps, which meant deepening the abandoned basket sequence, rebuilding the welcome series, launching browser abandonment, cleaning the list and implementing proper suppression, they were tracking ahead of that figure.
Because email doesn't operate in isolation, we review it the way we approach any performance channel: as part of the whole picture, not a set of metrics viewed one at a time. A typical assessment covers:
The outcome is a prioritised view of where revenue is being captured and where it's leaking, ranked by impact, with a practical roadmap for closing the gaps. Not a lengthy report destined for a drawer, but a focused set of the highest-value fixes and the order in which to make them.
Every brand's programme leaks somewhere; the useful question is by how much, and where. In our experience, most eCommerce email programmes we examine contain at least £10k in recoverable annual revenue, and frequently a good deal more. Crucially, it tends to sit in gaps that are inexpensive to close once they've been identified.
If you'd like to know what's sitting in yours, the sensible first step is booking a discovery call.
We'll ask a few questions about your current set-up, review what's in place, and give you an honest, data-led picture of where the revenue is going and what it would take to bring it back. No cost, no obligation, just the number.
