How to fix your retention stack to crush your Q2 revenue goals

Q2 begins in just a few days.

Across the accounts I manage, paid budgets are locked, media plans are set, and the Ads Manager work is done. But most brands haven't touched the back end - where that acquisition spend either pays off or bleeds out.

Before I let any brand increase their paid spend for a new quarter, I check one thing first: whether their retention infrastructure is converting the traffic they're already getting. If it isn't, scaling ad budget is pouring water into a leaky bucket.

Here’s what I use across accounts to fix retention: Instant. ​It’s an AI-powered retention platform that drove 25-35% of its Shopify brands' total revenue last month. For brands without proper retention infrastructure, email typically accounts for 10-15% of total revenue.

AI-powered retention marketing is what gets 7-figure brands to 8-figures. That’s the secret behind the insane growth of Liquid IV, TRX and Kind Patches, and your brand could be next.

Here’s a lazy retention strategy: set up 2-3 email flows at launch, send every shopper the same abandoned cart email from last year and hope it works.

if you built your welcome series and abandoned cart flow 12 to 18 months ago and haven’t really touched it since, you’re not alone.

But your catalog has changed, your pricing has changed, your bestsellers have shifted, and your email flows are still recommending products from last year. ​Email is generating 15% of revenue when it should be 35%.​​And that’s problem #1: your email flows are outdated.

Stale email flows kill performance slowly. Open rates drift down. Click rates flatten. Revenue per email drops. And you don’t notice because the flow is still “on” and still generating some revenue. It’s the slow leak that nobody plugs.

That’s only what’s happening across your 2-3 flows. Truth is, you should have 12 email flows running at all times and covering these behavior segments you’re currently missing:

That’s problem #2: you’re leaving revenue on the table by ignoring high-intent actions taken on your site.

These are customers who already expressed interest and remain untouched. If you don’t even bother sending those dropped off shoppers a follow-up email, you’re not even trying to convert them - you’re throwing out half of your paid budget through the window.

Problem #3 is invisible: it’s about capturing and remembering your shoppers.

You’re already paying a lot to drive thousands of shoppers to your site, and with Instant AI you can set up those 12 flows in minutes curated for your brand’s tone and voice.

So why are 88% of the shoppers dropping off from your site still never receiving an abandonment email from your brand?

Your email capture pop-ups should be working harder. I used to tell brands that if they could get 2-3% of their cold traffic to give you their email and SMS info, they were doing well.

With Instant’s tool, I’m seeing opt-ins on popups increase by 2-5X the normal rates. It’s literally adding 2-5X more emails to your list which gives you 2-5X more opportunities to convert these leads after they close their browser window that day.

The best thing about Instant is that they remember opted-in shoppers forever. No more unknown shoppers on your site because their cookies expired within 48hrs, your email list will keep growing and stay active whenever first-party shoppers come back.

Problem #4: why do you keep sending the same exact email to every single shopper?

You need to look at what each shopper actually did on your site, then send the email that person should get. Right product. Right message. Right offer.

Like you had someone manually writing the perfect follow-up for every single shopper, and run all of that at scale automatically. Guess what? That’s Instant’s most secret sauce.

If you're about to spend more on acquisition, you need more of those visitors remembered and more of those behavior segments captured. You need up-to-date flows that hyper-personalize the copy, products and offers for each shopper. Otherwise, you're scaling a funnel with a hole in it.

Instant pixel + identification: Remembers opted-in shoppers forever, so that you stop leaking high-intent site traffic you’re already paying for.. Most eCommerce brands only identify 5% of site visitors, and Instant can increase that by up to 10x.

AI-powered popup: Captures email and SMS from cold traffic at 2-5x normal opt-in rates. More emails captured = more people in the flow = more revenue from the same traffic spend.

Automated email flow engine: Builds, sends, and continuously optimizes every core email flow - welcome, browse abandonment, cart and checkout abandonment, price drop, loyalty win-back, back-in-stock, and new product. Personalized at the variant level (specific product, colorway, size the person looked at). No human writes these. Instant AI runs A/B testing continuously and compounds month over month.

Setup takes 5 minutes, and it works on any Shopify store. Brands generating over $500k/month in site revenue see >85x ROI on average when they go all-in with Instant AI-powered emails flows.

​Linda’s sells high-quality quilting supplies and provides educational content to empower quilters of all skill levels. They are a merchant with thousands of SKUs, where manual campaign management is literally impossible.

With Instant AI powered price drop flows enabled, it quickly became a top-two performer, just behind their cart abandonment flows (also from Instant) in total revenue.

After using instant, they added $3.5M in incremental revenue which was a 109x ROI compared to what they paid for the tool. Now, Linda’s email revenue makes up 51% of their total Shopify revenue, 5x higher than before Instant which is insane.​Or Karen Kane, who saw $2.7M in incremental revenue and a 91X ROI compared to what they paid for Instant. For years they were barely driving any revenue from their browse abandonment flow, then they switched to Instant AI and that single flow jumped 8.9x and became their #2 revenue driver.

The automated price drop campaign has also become a massive flow for them, driving 20% of their total flow revenue (which was 0 before Instant).

You already have Klaviyo. You've been pitched retention tools before.

​ThirdLove had the same setup: a sophisticated retention team that had already tried every tool on the market.

They gave Instant the worst starting position: third priority behind both Klaviyo and a legacy vendor.

​Instant still outperformed both.

$790K in incremental revenue since go-live at a 30x ROI.

That number was measured under strict 24-hour open and click attribution - compared to Klaviyo's standard 5-day open/click attribution. It wasn't inflated by a wide attribution window. The number holds up under scrutiny.

Their challenge: high unknown shopper volume that they couldn't retarget due to cookie limitations.

​Instant identified those visitors and triggered abandonment flows back into Klaviyo. More high-intent visitors identified → significantly more browse and cart abandonment events triggered in their existing Klaviyo setup → recovered revenue from traffic that previously disappeared.

ThirdLove subsequently made Instant its go-to partner.

"Instant's identification capabilities are the best we've seen, and we've tried them all. What really impressed us was how quickly we started seeing results, and how knowledgeable and committed their Customer Success team was." - Leanne Chan, Sr. Director of Retention and Growth Marketing at ThirdLove.

ThirdLove isn't an outlier. This is consistent across categories and brand sizes.

​Threadheads: $822K in 90 days, 76x ROI.

​Kind Patches: $375K in 50 days, 35.8x ROI.

​Noli Shop: 11x more incremental revenue in month 9 compared to month 1 - same setup, compounding over time.

Then there’s another leading skin brand I know about who saw $1.1M in incremental revenue in the first 100 days on Instant. They achieved an absurd 303x ROI compared to what they paid for Instant.

This brand has consistently achieved 10-20% MoM growth in email flow revenue through Instant’s identification.

They’re sending more emails every month, and because revenue per email is constant, they’re scaling faster than ever before.

There are 50+ case studies on their site. The pattern holds across fashion, health, supplements, outdoors, food, and home - consistent regardless of category or starting point.

​Instant compounds.

The more visitors it identifies, the more behavior data it has to optimize flows, and the more revenue per email grows month over month.

The best time to start is now.

You're about to spend more on paid ads. The math works out significantly better when you have retention infrastructure that captures what paid sends you.

You can set this up in 5 minutes before Q2 starts, or you can look at Q2 results in July and wonder why ROAS softened even though campaigns were running fine.

I think the best part about Instant is that the more emails you send, the more Instant’s AI learns and is able to run A/B tests in terms of copy, images, products, and offers to improve your revenue per email. This is how the significant MoM growth is achieved with Instant AI.

What blew me away is how bought in their customers are. The case studies are super powerful, but here’s what leaders at these companies have been saying about them as well:

“Since starting with Instant, our email flows have never been simpler and have driven us more revenue than ever before. Total game changer.” – Yentrang Phan, Director of Performance Marketing, TRX

"At Neuro, we're always looking for ways to deliver the most personalized experience possible. Instant made that easy to achieve, with no additional work from my team, and delivered immediate ROI. It's helping us drive profitable retention by turning traffic into long-term, loyal customers." – Brooke Cullison, VP of Media & Acquisition, Neuro

"We already had strong traffic and Klaviyo flows in place, but Instant unlocked a layer of incremental revenue we simply couldn't access before. The impact was immediate, measurable, and scalable." – Charlotte Hamrin, Head of E-Commerce, Kind Patches

I think it’s pretty hard not to get excited when a ton of great operators have such good things to say like this.

Across the accounts I manage, I install Instant before recommending any Q2 budget increase. I’ve recommended dozens of companies I work with to use it and the results have been so strong that they all wish I had gotten them on Instant sooner.

The retention infrastructure needs to be ready to capture what the acquisition spend delivers.

​If you use this link, you can get 50% off your first 60 days of Instant. ​​​I want you to see your own results before you make a full commitment. Now that I’ve shared the full retention infrastructure, are you going to be the one person who reads this email and lets your competitors use this tool before you? I didn’t think so, the time to act is now.

If you want a growth partner who is invested in helping you build a profitable business, someone who is going to push you to make changes that focus on profitable growth. Book a call - let’s chat.​

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Disclaimer: Thank you to Instant for sponsoring today's newsletter.