You're spending money every month bringing customers through the door. Paid search, paid social, maybe both. The traffic is coming in. Some of it is converting. But a chunk of the revenue that should be following those customers through the door is quietly leaking out the back.
It's not a traffic problem. It's not a product problem. It's a retention problem. And for most ecommerce brands, the place it shows up most clearly is email.
Not because email doesn't work. It does - it's consistently one of the highest-returning channels in ecommerce. But most email programmes are set up quickly, left largely untouched, and never properly reviewed against what they could be doing. The result is a channel that's contributing something, but nowhere near what it should be.
What's Actually Going Wrong
The issues we see most often aren't complicated. They're the basics, done incompletely or not at all.
Abandoned basket flows that consist of a single email sent hours after the customer left, with no follow-up. Welcome sequences that introduce the brand but stop short of pushing for a first purchase. Post-purchase journeys that confirm the order and go quiet. Win-back campaigns that either don't exist or go out to the entire lapsed segment with the same message regardless of how long they've been inactive or how much they spent.
And underneath all of that, a list of health problems that most brands don't notice until it's already doing damage. Unengaged subscribers accumulate. Suppression lists don't get updated. Sender reputation erodes gradually, open rates drop, and by the time it's obvious something is wrong the damage has been building for months.
Each of these on its own costs money. Together, they add up to a significant amount of revenue leaving the business every single day through gaps that are entirely fixable.
What Good Looks Like
A properly built email programme works across the full customer lifecycle - not just the moments when a customer is actively browsing or buying, but the gaps in between.
That means a welcome series that does commercial work from the first email, not just brand storytelling. Abandoned basket and browse abandonment sequences with enough depth to recover customers at different stages of intent. A post-purchase journey that builds loyalty and creates genuine reasons to come back. Segmentation that treats your highest-value customers differently to someone who bought once at a discount. And a list health strategy that protects deliverability rather than reacting to it after the fact.
When these things are in place, email stops being a channel that supports other marketing and becomes one of the most reliable revenue drivers in the business. The economics are straightforward: no cost per click, no auction, no algorithm. You own the audience. The only variable is how hard you're working it.
What We Found For An Apparel Brand
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.
When we looked properly, the picture was different.
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. They had over 40% of their list classed as unengaged with no suppression strategy in place, which was 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 their email programme was generating and what it should have been generating came to just over £38,000 in recoverable annual revenue. That's not a projection based on best-case assumptions. It's a conservative estimate built from their own data - their list size, their average order value, their purchase frequency, and the difference between their current flow performance and realistic benchmarks for their category.
Within three months of fixing the core gaps - deepening the abandoned basket sequence, rebuilding the welcome series, launching browse abandonment, cleaning the list and implementing proper suppression, they were tracking ahead of that figure.
How We Approach A Review
When we look at an email programme, we're working through the full picture rather than focusing on individual metrics in isolation. That means:
- Flow coverage and depth - what's live, what's missing, and whether what exists is doing enough
- Campaign strategy - frequency, segmentation, and whether sends are doing any real commercial work
- List health - engagement rates, suppression, deliverability risks
- Revenue attribution - what email is actually contributing versus what it should be contributing at this list size and customer value
- Segmentation maturity - are different customer groups being treated differently, and are the highest-value customers getting the attention they warrant?
The output is a Revenue Leak Score - a clear breakdown of where revenue is being captured and where it's being missed, with opportunities prioritised by impact. Not a long report full of recommendations that never get actioned, but a focused picture of the highest-value things to fix and a roadmap for fixing them.
How To Get Started
The first step is understanding what your number is. Most brands we review are leaving more on the table than they realise - and it's usually sitting in gaps that aren't difficult to close once you know where they are.
We're confident enough in what we find that we'll tell you upfront: in our experience, there's at least £10k in recoverable email revenue in most ecommerce programmes we look at. Often it's considerably more.
If you want to find out what's sitting in your database, the right place to start is a conversation.
We'll ask a few questions about your current programme, take a look at what you've got in place, and come back to you with an honest picture of where the revenue is going and what it would take to recover it. No cost, no commitment - just the number.
