Jimmy KimCEO & Founder, Commerce Roundtable · Marketer of 17+ Years, 4x Founder. Former DTC/Retailer & SaaS Founder. Newsletter. Host of ASOM & Send it! Podcast. DTC Event: Commerce Roundtable

Retention Marketing Channels Beyond Email and SMS

9 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:14

In this discussion, Jimmy Kim and a co‑speaker explore how retention marketing extends far beyond the traditional email and SMS tactics. They outline a suite of additional levers that can be used to keep customers engaged and reduce churn, including loyalty programs, dedicated mobile applications, physical mailers, product inserts, subscription‑specific metrics, offer testing, and surprise‑and‑delight initiatives. The conversation also highlights the critical role of operational factors such as customer support, accurate shipping notifications, and fulfillment quality, noting that feedback from support teams often surfaces issues that can erode retention. Finally, they differentiate between levers that an agency can directly manage (e.g., loyalty programs, testing) and those that require the brand’s internal action (e.g., improving support and logistics), emphasizing the need for a coordinated effort across all touchpoints to sustain long‑term customer relationships.

Chapters

Email and SMS is important, but there's obviously other channels, which I think this is what you mean by look beyond email and SMS for retention. What channels are you guys operating? You mentioned it a little bit in the beginning of the show, but let's walk a little deeper into that.
Yeah, there's email, there's SMS, of course, there's loyalty programs, there's mobile applications, there's physical mailers, there's— I call it subscription metrics, right? So within the subscription ecosphere, there's a lot of things that you could do. There's the offer testing, there's surprise and delights, there's all kinds of stuff within the subscription. There's product inserts, right? So there's— it just goes so far. Beyond email and SMS. And that's kind of what I was talking about, which is like customer support. What is your customer support like? With the 8, 9, 10-figure brands we work with, we constantly get feedback from customer support. Hey guys, they're confused on this discount code. Hey guys, you know, their shipping notification was inaccurate, whatever. They always pass that information back. So like, again, looking at retention as not just email and SMS, but as all these different levers that you can pull, and some of them you can pull as the agency, which is all the ones I just talked about. But sometimes you You gotta push the brand to pull that one. Like, if you're constantly getting feedback about terrible customer support or slow shipping or unclear fulfillment or whatever, that's— they gotta keep their side of the street clean too.