Better Digital

The month your ads stop working is usually the month you find out you never knew what a customer was worth.

The cost per acquisition probably didn't move. Your tolerance for it did, and tolerance is what most stores are using in place of a number.

Here's the number. Take your average order value, multiply it by how many times someone buys in a year, then multiply that by how many years they stay. That's what a customer is worth to you over their life, and it's the figure that decides whether a $40 acquisition cost is comfortable or fatal.

Then divide it by three, because three to one is the floor most ecommerce brands aim for, and that gives you roughly the most you can afford to pay to win one. If you're paying more than that, the ads aren't broken, the maths never worked.

The part worth sitting with is that repeat rate sits inside that sum twice, so a small lift there moves the whole thing further than anything you can do to the ad account.

Our LTV Calculator runs all of it, including the ratio and which of the three levers is weakest for you. It's free and nothing you type leaves your browser.

Most customer retention strategies are just rent, and the rent goes up every quarter.

You send a code, some people come back, the number moves, and it reads like the flow is working. What's actually happening is that the people answering a 10% code are the ones who were waiting for a code, so next quarter they wait a little longer and 10 has to become 15.

Here's the check I'd run before touching the flow. Open Total sales breakdown in Shopify, take the discounts line as a share of gross sales, then run the same thing for the year before. If that share is climbing while your repeat rate sits still, you're paying more each year for the same customers.

If that gap is wider than you expected, the Bottleneck Quiz takes about two minutes and points at where it's starting.

I was reading a Klaviyo case study on a footwear brand this week, and the fix that moved their numbers was almost boring. They stopped sending the same promo twice.

Sending the same thing by email and by text is the fastest way I know to teach someone to ignore both. Most stores never split the list by which channel a person actually opens, so one subscriber gets hit twice for one sale. And these are careful people, right? It's just that the email tool and the SMS tool don't talk to each other, so nobody notices it's happening.

They sent each promo through whichever channel that subscriber was already engaging with, email or text, never both. Then they held the discount codes back for people showing signs of leaving, instead of firing the code at the whole list. SMS revenue up 46% year over year across the portfolio in the back half of last year.

If you're on Klaviyo or Omnisend, this is about an afternoon's work, because you're not building anything new. You're splitting a list you already have. Nobody's replatforming and there's no strategy deck involved, you just work out which channel each person actually opens, and then you send it there.

It's worth sorting out before your next send goes out.

You can lift average order value without putting the whole store on sale, and the mechanism is duller than it sounds.

You pair a hero product with the thing that actually goes with it, then you split the path into two or three obvious routes so nobody has to browse the entire catalogue to find the pairing you had in mind. And you price the bundle as one thing, because the moment it reads as two items with a discount stapled on, you're just running a sale again.

It's worth saving this one before you plan the next campaign.

I was reading a Klaviyo case study on a tea brand this week, and the part that stuck with me was which page they bothered to rebuild.

I'd have guessed the product page, but it was the account page. It's the one most of us build as an order lookup and then never think about again, which is fair enough honestly, because no customer has ever emailed asking for a better account page. They just quietly don't come back.

They put orders, subscriptions, loyalty points and the discounts you'd forgotten about all on one screen. Support resolution got 25% faster, and the people who used that page spent 12% more per order.

I'm not saying go and build what they built. I'm saying you need one page that answers three things: where's my order, can I buy this again, and what have I already got with you.

So what's the one question your support team answers over and over? Comment it and I'll tell you where it belongs on your account page.

Your abandoned cart email is working through a list of apologies the page wrote.

No reason to buy today, no pickup option for the local buyer, a shipping surprise at the total. Fix those on the page and the email goes back to its real job: a nudge for the genuinely busy, product first, discount last.

Save this for your next flow review. Comment FRICTION and I'll send you the Objection Map.