There is a moment in almost every conversation about email marketing when somebody opens the creative, and suddenly everybody has an opinion.

The hero needs more impact. The CTA needs to come up. Perhaps the product should be larger. The subject line could be punchier. Maybe the offer needs to be clearer. Entire meetings can disappear this way, and none of these are unreasonable conversations to have.

What is slightly more worrying is how often considerably less time has been spent asking who is going to receive the email in the first place, why they are receiving it, what we actually know about them, or what else the brand is already saying to them.

We have seen brands spend weeks perfecting creative and then build a two-email automation around it with little more than a time delay separating Email One from Email Two. Nobody has looked properly at the RFM data. Nobody has asked whether a customer buying for the fifth time should be having the same conversation as somebody who has never bought at all. Nobody has considered whether that customer is already sitting inside another automated journey at precisely the same moment.

But the font is definitely correct. Sort of... after we have had the heated discussion about why you cannot use your custom font on a email because Outlook won't render it.

This feels backwards.

And, while we are talking about creative decisions, the recent Callaway Golf and Good Good debacle was perhaps an extreme reminder that even enormous brands, with plenty of people involved in producing and approving creative, can still get it spectacularly wrong.

The campaign was not an email retention story, obviously, but it illustrates something useful. Creative is subjective. Culture is complicated. What feels funny in the room can look considerably less funny once millions of people see it. What worked six months ago may suddenly feel tired, or tone deaf, or simply disappear into the algorithm.

Retention has a different advantage.

We have data. Rather a lot of it.

Email marketing has been around long enough for us to understand a lot more

Amid all the conversations about AI, TikTok, algorithms and whatever the next great acquisition channel might be, email has become almost reassuringly old fashioned.

Commercial email marketing has been around for decades. eCommerce platforms record what customers bought, when they bought it and whether they came back. ESPs record engagement and interaction. Shopify gives us order history. Subscription platforms show us consumption cycles. Loyalty programmes tell us who participates and who quietly loses interest.

There is very little mystery about whether somebody bought something three weeks ago.

Compare that with trying to predict the next piece of viral creative on TikTok. There are extremely talented teams making very intelligent bets in those channels, but nobody can tell you with certainty what the algorithm will reward six months from now.

We can, however, know that a customer who bought six times last year and has suddenly stopped behaving normally is worth paying attention to.

That distinction is important because retention should be one of the parts of ecommerce where we are making fewer guesses. Instead, it can sometimes feel as though we have simply taken the old campaign calendar and plugged it into considerably more sophisticated technology.

Thursday is still Thursday, so apparently everybody needs an email.

Kiara changed the way we think about retention marketing

A large part of Total Commerce's expansion into retention has been driven by Kiara Gupta.

She has become talented addition to the team, because she has steadily pushed us away from thinking about email as a production function and toward thinking about it as a customer-data problem.

Ask Kiara about improving a welcome flow and the conversation very rarely stays on the welcome flow for long. Before anybody starts talking seriously about Email Three, she wants to know who is entering the sequence, whether existing customers are slipping into it, what happens if somebody purchases after the first email, whether they are receiving other campaigns at the same time, whether the incentive is appropriate for everyone in the audience and what happened to the customers who completed the journey six months ago.

Then she will probably ask to see the RFM data.

This has been one of the most important evolutions in how Total Commerce approaches retention. We are not interested in adding flows simply so that an ESP account looks more sophisticated. A brand can have twenty beautifully named automations and still have a fairly rudimentary retention strategy.

Equally, a short sequence can perform extraordinarily well if it responds to the right customer behaviour at the right moment.

The number of emails is not the strategy. Understanding why those emails exist is.

RFM may not be sexy, but it tells you who your customers actually are

RFM is hardly the newest acronym in marketing. Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value have been used to understand customer behaviour since long before anybody had heard of Klaviyo. Which is the point.

The technology has become vastly more sophisticated, but the commercial questions remain pleasingly sensible. When did this person last buy? How often do they buy? What are they worth?

Once you start looking at a customer database this way, the idea of “the list” becomes increasingly absurd.

A customer who made their first $40 purchase yesterday is not the same person, commercially speaking, as somebody who has spent $2,000 over twelve orders. A previously excellent customer who has suddenly gone quiet is not the same as somebody who made one discounted purchase three years ago and never returned.

Yet open almost any promotional campaign and it is remarkably easy to find all of them sitting together in the audience. This is where the retention work gets interesting.

Sometimes the most valuable decision is not what to send, but whether to send anything at all. A customer may need to be suppressed because they have just purchased. A VIP customer may deserve early access. A recently lapsed, previously high-value customer may need a very different proposition from the rest of the database. Product A may have a completely different repeat-purchase cycle from Product B.

These are not design decisions. They happen much earlier.

Which brings us to Germany/Portugal/Poland...

Over the past year, Total Commerce has spent a lot of time speaking with ecommerce businesses outside the United States, particularly in Germany, Spain and Portugal, as well as brands operating across the wider EU and APAC.

One observation from eCommerce Berlin Expo stayed with us..

The email technology landscape did not look quite like a large US ecommerce conference. Klaviyo had a smaller presence than we would normally expect to see in the States, while Brevo, Mailchimp and a broad range of other ESP and retention platforms were highly visible.

At first, it is tempting to turn that into a technology conversation. Which ESP are European brands using? Which platform is winning in Germany? Is Brevo becoming more relevant to ecommerce?

Those are interesting questions, but they are not really the important one.

The more important thing is that the customer behaviour underneath those platforms is largely the same.

A German customer who has bought five times is still a repeat customer. A shopper in Spain who repeatedly visits the same category without purchasing is still showing intent. A Portuguese customer who normally replenishes every eight weeks and has suddenly gone twelve is behaving differently from their usual pattern.

And yes, the email can still be entirely in German/Portuguese/Polish..

A German brand can continue writing German copy, using German creative and speaking to German customers in a way that feels completely appropriate to that market. Total Commerce can still work on the retention architecture underneath it, because the questions we are answering are fundamentally about customer behaviour.

Is the segment too broad? Are customers being over-messaged? Is the replenishment logic based on an actual purchase cycle? Are high-value customers being treated differently? Are campaigns colliding with automated flows? What does the RFM data tell us about who is active, valuable, slipping away or likely to purchase again?

None of those questions require the email itself to be written in English.

At the same time, being a US-based ecommerce team is not incidental to what we offer. For brands already selling into the United States, or looking to grow here, we bring a very specific understanding of the US ecommerce market, promotional environment, technology stack and customer expectations.

So these are not competing ideas.

An EU brand can use local expertise where local expertise matters, while using Total Commerce to build and optimise the retention system across markets. And when the US becomes part of that growth strategy, there is additional value in having a team that already understands the market.

The constant across all of it is the customer data.

The language may change. The creative may change. The market certainly changes.

The job of retention is still to understand what the customer has done, what that behaviour means, and what should happen next.

This is also why the ESP is not the strategy

Klaviyo is an excellent platform. So are several of its competitors. But there is always a danger in allowing the capabilities of a platform to become the retention plan.

A new feature appears and suddenly every brand needs it. Someone publishes the definitive eight-email welcome flow and suddenly eight emails become best practice. An app produces a beautiful dashboard, so the numbers in that dashboard become the objective.

Kiara is particularly good at pulling the conversation back to the customer.

What are we actually trying to make happen? If a campaign launches a new product and generates plenty of attributed revenue, but nobody buys the product being launched, was the campaign successful?

The dashboard often says yes (They all love a good attribution model in their favor) however, commercially, the answer may be very different.

This is why our retention work increasingly starts by going further into the customer data before making recommendations about campaigns or flows. The ESP can tell us what happened inside the ESP. The business needs to understand what happened to the customer.

Perhaps the next six rounds of revisions should be spent on the audience

None of this is an argument for ugly email. We like good creative. An email should feel like the brand sending it. It should look considered, work properly on mobile and give the customer a reason to pay attention.

Creative is where the strategy becomes visible. But that is exactly why it should come after the strategy.

Before another three-hour conversation about whether the hero needs changing, it might be worth spending the same amount of time looking at the people who are actually going to see it.

Look at the RFM data. Look at the customer journey between first and second purchase. Look at what purchasers of Product A tend to do next. Look at who is lapsing. Look at who is receiving three automated emails and a campaign within forty-eight hours. Look at who is being offered a first-purchase incentive despite being on their fourth order.

There is a very good chance that the most valuable opportunity is hiding there rather than in another template revision.

And this, ultimately, is why we think retention is becoming such an important part of Total Commerce's international work, and why Kiara has become such an important part of Total Commerce.

She has helped move the conversation from “What emails should we make?” to “What are the customers telling us?”

That question works in New York. It works in Berlin. It works in Barcelona, Lisbon, Singapore and Sydney. The answers and the data always helps us move our brand partners forward.