In this segment, Jimmy Kim and a colleague discuss the critical practice of establishing clear retention and revenue goals before engaging with a new brand. They emphasize the need for an upfront onboarding document that captures client objectives, which is then distilled into a kickoff presentation that hyper‑aligns the team on a single, measurable goal—whether it’s first‑purchase conversions, churn reduction, month‑one repurchase rates, or list growth. The conversation stresses prioritizing customer‑behavior metrics that drive revenue, rather than chasing short‑term revenue spikes. They contrast sustainable email practices that protect list health with aggressive promotional tactics that cause high unsubscribe rates, illustrating that true revenue growth stems from nurturing long‑term customer engagement.
Chapters
When you guys are working with a new brand especially, it sounds like retention goals and being able to align. And I think this is not just a good lesson for just as an agency, but as a marketer. Anything you do in life, regardless if you're not even in retention marketing, you're listening to this thing right now, you should be setting those goals upfront. Not only is it good for you, but it's also good for the client or the end person or your boss or your business, you know, whatever it might be.
Dude, you're spot on. So before we even kick off with a new client, we have an onboarding doc and there's a lot of questions in there about, you know, goals and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then we create a deck from that. And then we have like a kickoff presentation and all this stuff. The number one most important thing, the output of that presentation, very simple. What is your goal and where are we measuring it? And what is the immediate next steps to get there? Like we hyper-align on that. Is it just first purchase conversions? Is it the reduction of churn? Is it month one repurchase rates? Is it list growth? Is it what? And then we prioritize these things, right? And of course, like here's the reality, Jimmy, and you know this, it all boils up into revenue at some point. Reducing churn is revenue. Repurchase rate is revenue, right? But it's focusing on the customer behavior that we're intentionally trying to drive to get to that revenue. Because you could send— you could have 2 brands, both with 35% email attributed revenue at a period of time. One could be doing it in a sustainable way where they're not draining their list, and the other one could be sending out promos every other day, cooking their list, and getting a ton of unsubscribes, right? So there's better ways to get to your goals.
