I can’t even enjoy the victory because I’m so sad about Koné.
This sucks man. We could score 15 goals and id still be upset after seeing one of our best young players legs snap due to a reckless tackle.
Coach Jesse, I’ll lace up if u want someone to slide tackle everyone in stoppage time.
We took a health brand from $120k to $294k in 30 days. Here's exactly what we changed.
Quick disclaimer before I get into it. Ad spend did go up about 25% during this stretch. But revenue went up 124%. And their cost per acquisition actually went down while scaling, which almost never happens. So the ads alone don't explain what happened here.
So here's what we actually did as retention marketers who were hired to help these guys scale:
The first thing we touched was the popup. Their previous one was a basic newsletter signup. 2.5% conversion rate. We scrapped it completely and built a two step quiz instead. The first screen asked shoppers what they were shopping for. Sleeping issues, joint pain, snoring, whatever applied to them. The second screen served them a personalized discount on the exact product that matched what they just told us. Someone says they have trouble sleeping, they see "grab 10% off our sleep product, limited time." It felt personal from the very first second on the site. Conversion rate went from 2.5% to 9.3%. We basically tripled the number of emails coming into the list without changing the traffic at all.
This worked especially well because the audience is primarily seniors. That demographic responds really well to feeling like their experience is being tailored to them specifically. Generic popups don't cut it with people who have a specific problem they're trying to solve.
The email flows they had before we came in were basic. The bones were there but there was no real trust being built, no social proof, nothing that made a new customer feel confident about what they just bought. We rebuilt everything from scratch. Longer sequences, more personalization, reviews and testimonials woven throughout, and content that actually spoke to the specific problems each segment came in with. Within the first seven days email was already responsible for around 20% of total revenue. It's sitting at about 33% now with another 5% coming from SMS.
Then we went after the cold list. About 12,000 to 13,000 subscribers, a good chunk of them hadn't engaged in a while. We warmed them up gradually through win-back flows before touching them with any campaigns. Once we saw who was responding we segmented out the engaged group and hit them with a summer sale. That campaign was a significant chunk of the revenue bump in this period. The people who still didn't open anything after all of that went into a suppressed segment. Some of them will get one email around Black Friday or a major holiday just to see if they come back. Most won't. But some will and it costs almost nothing to try.
On top of all of this we started posting daily on their Instagram and had a couple of posts go viral on TikTok. That organic traffic came in at zero cost and landed on a site that was now actually converting properly because the popup and the email capture were doing their job.
When all of it hit at the same time the numbers moved fast.
$120k to $294k in 30 days. Cost per acquisition went down. Profit margins went up. And the systems that drove it are still running in the background every single day.
Happy to go further in depth here
When i launched at the start, we used to have like 15-20 orders a week and it was totally managable. I use to pack it up in evening and drop it at Post office the next morning. But now as i am hitting like 200 orders a week, i am actually drowning.
My place is basically a warehouse now with inventory lying everywhere. Im spending multiple hours every day just on packing and shipping. As i am rushing, wrong items, wrong addresses have increased costing me 2 chargebacks already.
And forget about those support tickets about changing address, editing order or removing an item. Its like there's always something that needs manual attention.
The worse part is that i should be happy with the growth but instead i just feel stressed all the time. I barely have time to work on business anymore as i am working in this part.
I was wondering if you guys could share some automations, tips or anything which can reduce my workload? And yes i am thinking about outsourcing as well. Anyone been on the same path as me. What did you do?
Been in ecom for almost 15 years. The brands that scared me the most weren't the ones with bad products. They were the ones with no backup plan when the ads stopped running.
I've worked with over 50 brands and ran more than 10 of my own. In that time I've seen Facebook accounts get banned overnight, ad accounts suspended over policy violations, products flagged for reasons that made absolutely no sense, and competitors reporting ads just to slow someone down. It happens more than people talk about.
And every single time it happens the question is the same. Now what.
Google is the obvious answer and yes it works. But this post isn't really about the obvious answers. I'm more curious about what people actually did when they got creative about it.
Here's some of what I've tried over the years when paid acquisition was off the table. Building out niche communities on Reddit and letting the organic traffic compound over time. Influencer deals where the payment was pure commission so there was no upfront risk. Paid promos inside niche Facebook groups that flew under the radar. Cold email campaigns targeting wholesale or B2B buyers. Reaching out directly to people posting about related products on social media and just starting a conversation.
Some of it worked better than expected. Some of it was a complete waste of time. But all of it taught me something about where buyers actually hang out when you're not paying to put something in front of them.
What did you do when your ads went down and you couldn't just throw money at the problem? Especially curious about the stuff most people wouldn't think of.
Typically when you lose your best player and your championship window closes you rebuild. In my opinion that means keep all your 1st round picks and extending key players on reasonable contracts so they can be flipped for more young assets when the time is right.
When I look back at the front office moves since 2022, it feels directionless. We basically traded 3 first round picks to build a core that’s arguably worse than the core we had. (OG/Pascal/Scottie)
The front office acted as if we didn’t have money to pay these guys, then proceeded to overpay Brandon Ingram, Immanuel Quickley and Jakob Poeltl. That’s a $100M/year trio that’s less productive and more expensive than the $90M dollar duo we could have had with Pascal and OG.
Wouldn’t the cap sheet be WAY better with OG/Siakam/Scottie + a bunch of rookie contracts?
OG and Siakam are both clearly positive assets on their current contracts. I just don’t understand the thought process. We’re not saving money, we’re not more talented and we actually have less trade flexibility now because some of the extensions have proven to be negative assets.
*We had to trade for the ghost of Chris Paul to avoid the tax coming out of a lottery season.*
Now looking at the east next year, I genuinely fear the teams that tanked properly. Charlotte’s future is bright. Detroit jumped from the worst team in the NBA to the #1 seed in a few years. We still look like an expensive play-in team.
I think the kicker for me was last season. It was the perfect year to tank but we started tanking way too late. As much as I love CMB, no GM in their right mind would willingly choose to build around 2 power forwards who can’t shoot in 2026. We should have had a top 5 pick but we let teams like Philly out tank us and get VJ Edgecome.
I think Bobby needs to figure out a direction soon. He has 2-3 years to turn this team into something legit before Scottie Barnes reaches his prime years. It’s a shame that we *unintentionally* traded away a top 5 pick in this draft for a guy who probably won’t even be on the team when Scottie is 28.
I've personally set up email flows for at least 50 brands. I am going to share how I set up email automation for brands that do 30k-150k per month. Brands doing less than 30k a month often don't need all of these emails, they can focus on abandoned cart, welcome series and browse abonnement. Brands doing more than 150k a month will need more in-depth flow work but I can expand on that in another post.
Here's the breakdown:
Welcome Series (6-10 emails)
Post Purchase (Broken into multiple flows)
Browse Abandonment (3-5 Emails)
Abandoned Cart (5-8 emails) (custom abandon cart flows for specific products if necessary)
Sunset Flow (2-3 Emails)
Customer Winback (3-5 emails)
Customer Review
Special Flows
This is relatively simple work, but it is time-consuming and will probably take at least a few days to complete. But no need to worry, you don't have to go all out. Simply turning on some of the Klaviyo default flows and editing them so that they're onbrand will easily boost your revenue by at least 5%. Dont be discouraged to dedicate a couple days into your back-end automated marketing. These sales add up, the earlier you set these emails up, the more money you'll make in the long run.
Most brands with big email lists are sending the same email to everyone and it's killing their numbers
I worked with a print on demand store a few years back that was doing about $1.5 million a month. Massive list. Tons of traffic. On paper everything looked great.
The problem was the email strategy was basically built for a store a tenth of that size. They had one campaign going out to everybody. Dog people, cat people, reptile people, all getting the same email on the same day about whatever product was trending that week. Fifty plus different customer types and they were all being treated like the same person.
The first thing we did was stop sending and start mapping. We spent weeks going through the data figuring out who was buying what, when they were buying it, and what they had in common with other buyers in the same category. By the end of it we had built out over a hundred different segments. Not because we wanted to make things complicated but because the data made it obvious that these were genuinely different people with different interests and completely different reasons to open an email.
Then we started using merge tags in a way most brands don't bother with. Subject lines personalized by city. Preview text that referenced what someone had actually browsed or bought. A pit bull owner in Atlanta getting a different email than a reptile owner in Seattle. Same promotional mechanic, completely different feel.
Campaign volume went from a few sends a week to basically one targeted send every single day. And because each one was relevant to who was receiving it the numbers actually held up instead of tanking the way they do when you blast your whole list constantly.
The other thing that changed was how we handled winning products. When a design went viral we didn't just let it ride until it died. We pulled every customer who had bought something similar in the past and re-engaged them specifically. New angle on the same product but it felt personal because it was actually relevant to what they had already shown interest in.
By the end of it campaign revenue went from around three percent of total store revenue to about fifteen percent. The list didn't get bigger. The product didn't change. The targeting just finally matched the actual customer base.
Most brands never look at their list this closely. They see a big number of subscribers and assume that means they have one audience. Usually it means they have ten audiences that nobody has bothered to separate yet.
I've been running r/ShopifyPros for a while now and working with ecommerce brands behind the scenes for even longer. One trend I've been watching closely over the past year is how fast people are shifting from Google to AI when it comes to finding products.
The numbers are hard to ignore.
61% of consumers have already used ChatGPT or another AI tool for online shopping. (SOURCE) 80% of consumers plan to use AI to shop in 2026. (SOURCE) During the 2025 holiday season, traffic to US retail sites from AI sources grew 693% year over year. (SOURCE) And when those AI referred shoppers actually land on a store, they convert at 4.4 times the rate of regular organic search visitors. (SOURCE)
That last number is the one that should make every store owner stop and think.
These aren't window shoppers. People who ask ChatGPT to recommend a product have already done their research inside the conversation. By the time they click through to a store they are close to a buying decision. The intent is different and the conversion rate reflects that.
The problem is most Shopify stores are completely invisible to these shoppers. On average, less than 1% of a store's traffic comes from AI sources right now. The stores that have actually optimized for AI visibility are seeing closer to 10%. This is possible in the same niche, with similar products; the biggest difference is the results.
I've been testing a few tools on some of my client stores to close that gap. One that stood out was IndexGPT. It essentially audits your store for AI visibility, handles the technical stuff that most merchants have never heard of, and gives you a simple checklist of what to fix. The stores I tested it on went from basically zero AI traffic to something worth paying attention to.
It's not a magic fix. The stores that saw the best results already had solid foundations. Good reviews, a real About Us page, legitimate trust signals. But for stores that have those things in place, the gap between where they were and where they ended up was pretty significant.
AI search is still early enough that moving now actually means something. The stores sitting on the sidelines are going to have a much harder time catching up in two years than they would today.
If anyone has been experimenting with AI visibility on their stores I'd be curious what you've been seeing.
Feel free to chime in on this so we can all figure out ways to become more visible to AI.
Klaviyo audited 100 email accounts and found the same problem in almost all of them
I was reading a piece from Klaviyo the other day where their digital strategy team went through nearly 100 account audits across B2C brands in 2025. They weren't looking for one-off fixes. They were looking for patterns. The stuff that kept showing up over and over again no matter the brand, the niche, or the list size.
The number one problem they found was also the simplest one. Brands were sending the same welcome experience to everyone, including people who had already bought.
Klaviyo put it pretty plainly in the article. "That's how you end up discounting a customer who did not need a discount, and sending 'here's why you should trust us' messaging to someone who already trusted you enough to purchase."
When we go into a new account the welcome flow is almost always the first thing that stands out. Most brands have everyone going down the same path with no splits and no logic based on whether someone has actually spent money with them or not.
You're handing out discounts to people who were already going to buy again, and you're pitching trust-building content to people who already trust you. Neither makes any sense when you actually think about it.
Here's what the split looks like in practice. Non-buyers need three things from your welcome flow. Remove doubt, help them understand what you sell and why it's worth it. Build trust through social proof, reviews, and the brand story. Then give them a reason to buy now. That's the sequence for someone who hasn't spent a dollar with you yet.
Buyers need something completely different. Confirm they made the right call. Tell them what happens next, shipping timelines, how to use the product, what to expect. Then when the timing is right introduce them to something else they might want, but lead with relevance not a reflexive discount.
Two totally different conversations and most brands are having one.
The second thing Klaviyo flagged across almost every audit was measurement. A lot of brands were running attribution windows that didn't reflect how their customers actually buy, which meant they were making decisions off numbers that weren't telling the full story. Before you touch creative or start tweaking send times make sure what you're measuring is accurate. Bad data leads to bad decisions every single time.
I've worked with over 50 ecom brands and I can count on one hand how many of them had this set up correctly before anyone actually looked closely at it. Most had the same welcome flow going out to everybody regardless of whether they'd spent money or not, and they had no idea how much it was costing them.
If you wanna check out the Klaviyo article, you can find it here.
I expected RJ to lead in PPG, but definitely wasn't expecting him to lead in rebounds as well. Very proud to see a Canadian showing up big for the Toronto Raptors.
Also love that he's been standing up for his teammates every single night.