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.
Most merchants treat RFM as a scoring exercise that ends in a spreadsheet, when the only thing that pays off is the three email moves built on top of it and measured against open, click, and unsubscribe benchmarks.
Most merchants treat a back-in-stock email as a single send, but the open rate it earns depends on which inbox it lands in and which product category it belongs to, and the usual advice ignores both.
The usual advice names a magic hour for sending email, but the only numbers that actually hold up are industry open-rate benchmarks and quarterly retail sales figures, and neither one says anything about clock time at all.
Most advice about referral programs leans on growth-marketing folklore instead of the retail sales figures and storefront performance thresholds that are actually published, and this article sticks to only the numbers that exist in those sources.
The usual answer is that plain text always wins on trust, but client share data shows almost all opens happen inside one rendering engine, which changes what the test is actually measuring.
Open rate benchmarks for ecommerce sit well below what authors and non-profits post, which means a fashion merchant on a UTD storefront should judge an inbox campaign against 32.67 percent, not against whatever number a different industry is bragging about.