The retention journal
The Retentionist is a working journal on customer retention in ecommerce. We read the platform benchmarks, take the flows apart and write down what actually brings buyers back: email and SMS, loyalty, win-back and the numbers behind repeat purchases.
The welcome flow is the highest-earning automation most stores will ever run, and the published data is unusually specific about how to build it: what each email does, how far apart they go, and when a discount actually pays.
The window between checkout and second order is where retention is actually decided, and the published open rates there embarrass every other flow. Here is the six-email sequence I would build, position by position.
Klaviyo, Omnisend and Mailchimp each publish their own email benchmarks, measured on different brands with different definitions. I put all three into one sortable table and marked exactly where the numbers stop being comparable.
The published vendor data says texts convert around 0.1% as campaigns and 0.77% as automations. At a penny per message, that spread is the entire difference between a profit center and a subsidized hobby.
I walked the pricing calculators of Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp, MailerLite, Drip and Brevo on the same day and wrote down what each one charges a 5,000 contact store. The gap between the cheapest and the priciest serious option is about $50 a month.
I pulled the pricing sections of the five biggest loyalty apps in the Shopify App Store on the same day and put them side by side. The plans do not measure the same thing, and that is where the surprises live.