Formtoro.com - Zero Party Data Ecommerce Strategy

I run a software company called Formtoro which is purpose built to collect and analyze customer data in combination with ad and sales data for ecommerce brands.

I also run marketing and strategy for Krakatoa Underwear, a mid-7 figure ecommerce Direct to Consumer high end men’s underwear company.

Prior to Formtoro and Krakatoa Underwear I ran marketing and customer support for LIFX leading to acquisition.

I’ve been involved in marketing for 20+ years.

My motto is work smarter, not harder, and let data lead.

Always up for a chat about the industry: calendly.com/jonivanco

I've open sourced my entire strategy at ecomwithjon.com

I love zero party data and data analytics and a good debate around them.

🏌🏼‍♂️Jon Ivanco

When was the last time anyone questioned the financial outcomes of retention marketing activities?

Going by the logic:

Every action you take must have a future expectation of results...

Nothing should be left to best practices or "experience".

This is the baseline of all good marketing.

And no one should ever settle for less.

Yet this is pretty typical for many agencies...

Trust-me-I'm-an-expert "strategy".

Nurturing customers, meeting the customer where they're at in the journey, personalisation.

Makes sense in theory, but what’s the incremental lift?

Is it the most efficient use of your limited resources?

At the 7-figure mark, trying to break 8-figures, this is an ever more crucial time.

That's what CTC's Global Accelerator Program solves for.

1. Better alignment with traditionally siloed growth <> retention teams.
2. Better agility to support a very dynamic marketing calendar.
3. Better analysis of activities that impact your P&L.

Together with Growth Strategists, Retention Strategists make this work.

At CTC, we always sign our names on the bottom line.

Because we know that’s what it really means to win.

If this speaks to you, let's chat and see if we'll be a good fit for each other.

Josh Tay

How's your email forecast doing?

Question: do you even have an email forecast?

Sending a bunch of emails without an expectation of revenue is dumb.

All forecasts need to be set from top down.

Based on business goals.

Contribution Margin > New vs Returning Rev > Email Rev

Your email contribution must roll up into the big numbers that matter.

Then track the daily and MTD forecast vs actuals.

So you know if you're behind.

If you're behind, bridge the gap ahead of time.

Any email strategy not tied to daily, weekly, monthly goals is not a strategy.

It's probably fluff.

Director of Retention, Common Thread Collective | Building the world’s strongest retention program for 7 & 8 figure DTC brands

4 things you're missing when forecasting email/sms campaign revenue:

When forecasting, you should bias for recency.

But you must also consider seasonality.

Forgetting these will result in revenue expectations being wildly missed. 

That's why we have these built into Statlas:

- Event Effect
- Day Of the Week Effect
- Week Of the Month Effect
- Then a seasonality factor applied on top of it.

And each of these is applied onto our campaign types and subtypes, for us to anticipate revenue for each specific campaign.

Only with accurate revenue expectations can you execute reasonably.

We hold our team to a high standard.

That also means that you can take credit for success.

Because you did everything possible to meet the number you promised.

And no one can take it away from you.

Whoever's ready, step up and DM me your interest to join us at CTC.

When it comes to campaigns, there needs to be a level of offense.

Yes, list fatigue is real.

Yes, deliverability is important.

Yes, content diversification is necessary.

But what's important also is supporting other channels to ensure the business hits targets set.

For far too long, email marketers have been trying to "protect" their channel.

Not realising that the sole existence of these channels is...

To contribute to business growth.

If the mentality is always to hedge downside (and there's merit in that), other channels end up building around the constraints of your email program.

Which doesn't make sense.

All the mitigating factors should already be built into the bigger strategy.

Not about pushing back and saying "no we can't, because it will hurt the list".

But aligning at the beginning of every month on what is reasonable.

To hit channel targets.

So the business can still hit CM goals.

And if not possible, reallocate resources.

Then decide what the gameplan is and how else to support.

Your emails, SMS, direct mail, push notifications, these are levers.

As much as they're not meant to be drivers of growth, they're meant to contribute to growth.

Which means you need to have a clear expectation of financial outcomes.

After which, follow through and uphold the promise.

This might not be a philosophy that every email marketer believes in.

Few agencies are ever built for this model, and they'll fight the change.

But this is the reality of what makes a marketing unit work.

And why we're pushing so aggressively for this shift.

You can't just optimise for your channel.

It's the entire reason why Statlas is built with the ecommerce pyramid of success.

Where everything is viewed top down, not bottoms-up.

In the case of retention...

Every brand must demand their teams be held accountable to targets.

Otherwise that's not a marketing team, it's a very expensive production factory.

So what are you going to do?

Do what's necessary for growth, or live by the old siloed playbook?

With hundreds of active stores in Statlas, our team's got a good enough sample size to come up with benchmarks by business model.

Which we've distilled down into three main types:

1️⃣ Continuity
2️⃣ Cycle
3️⃣ Event

How we balance short term rev goals with long term LTV requirements is a completely mathetical approach.

1. Customer churn rate
- Active customer repeat rate vs Non-active customer repeat rate

2. Natural repurchasibility
- One-time order vs repeat order bias

3. First order value
- How much of your LTV does your FOV typically make up

This determines if you track 60-day or 180-day or 365-day repurchase rates.

Then there's a subset of levers within each of those sections.

All of this is built into our methodology.

Whether you're a 7-figure brand or 8-figure brand working with our retention team.

Data integrity + tech enablement + department alignment

Acquisition : Retention aligment is the only way.

New rev expectation vs prev month > Pre-purchase flows

Factor in proportion of new and returning visitors.

Returning rev expectations vs prev month > Post-purchase flows

All actualised every month.

Without insight into Growth Plan, how do you know where you're going to land?

Where you want to be ≠ Where you're likey to be

The execution of bridging actuals and projections, against targets is what determines success.

Every brand must hold their agency or email team accountable to revenue.

And that's why at CTC, we build in an element called Ad Hocs.

This is flex resourcing every month.

Behind on email/sms actuals relative to targets?

Deploy ad hocs to meet the plan.

Behind on returning revenue and need to maintain CM?

Growth team liases with retention team to deploy ad hocs to meet the goal.

The success of your business should not be held hostage by the internal constraints of the email agency you hired, or the reactiveness of your email person.

Your team should be tracking daily, weekly, MTD revenue contribution.

Then proactively anticipating shortfall.

If you have a big marketing moment next week that you anticipate can make up for the shortfall?

Cool.

Otherwise, deploy ad hocs.

This is the way.

You should never look at a snapshot of a single month to make any inference on the strength of your retention program.

This is where your Net Active Customer Report is essential.

General rule of thumb:
Net active customers > Churned = Customer file size growth

But these come with caveats.

Example 1:
Don’t just prematurely celebrate success just because you have positive growth.

If majority of net active customers is NEW customers, you have not done a good job at retention.


Example 2:
Just because you have increasing churn # doesn't mean you’re doing a bad job.

If new customers are flooding in, it’s also natural that there will be larger # of churned customers. So look at churned as a % of total active.


Example 3:
If you recently implemented proactive winback campaigns (not just a winback flow), and see increased reactivated customers, that’s a positive sign.

Your next step is to prevent people from even churning, which means targeting the At-Risk customer segment


Example 4:
If you have high Active New + High Churn, Net Active might look flat. 

But your real audience is volatile and retention is actually very weak. 

Then you combine this with your churn prediction by percentile

Then next it's taking context from your customer churn prediction.

Which is based off your product cycle.

---
Some of these reports and tech enablement tools make a world of difference in understanding next steps on execution.

And having all the NECESSARY actionable tools built into one central platform.

Every tool will have different calculations.

Making tech consolidation ever more important.

To have a single source of truth, all with similar parameters for a more accurate understanding of how you're trending.

More emails = More money

True to a certain extent, with a few caveats.

First thing to consider is the impact of volume per week/per month, for each major segment type you're sending to.

Repeat for email and for sms.

And measure it against:

- Positive metrics like click rates
- Negative metrics like unsubscribe rates
- Revenue based metrics like your RPR

If all else remains constant, history is likely to repeat itself.

Scatter plot analyses help a great deal here.

With a regression line to determine the correlation between X and Y axis.

Then look at concentration and location on the chart.

This is step 1 in balancing impressions from more campaigns and balancing deliverability.

In step 2, you start looking at trends over time.

- Impact during marketing moments
- Impact during evergreen periods

Step 3, do your forecast and determine if your account can stomach the volume.

If no, other channels have to pick up the slack.

This is why cohesion of departments is so important.

It's 2026.

No one's got time for siloed marketing.

As much as being behind on forecasts is bad, being too far ahead isn't good too.

Sure, more money is good.

Definitely better than no money.

But too much email rev right now could mean squeezing the sponge.

Where you bring forward revenue that should have been realised at a later month.

This could mean a negative impact on returning rev in the future.

When you're pacing too far ahead, pull back.

You need to be ruthless in staying close to the forecast.

Not beating it for a dopamine kick now.

Because it very well might kick you in the ass real hard later.

Trying to winback churned customers is hard.

Save rate is low. 

And expensive to reacquire.

You have to go upstream.

Look at your at-risk customers.

Go multi-channel if necessary to reach out to customers.

Email, sms, direct-mail, web push, mobile push etc.

Based on our data model, we get our inputs.

This feeds into our net active customer report.

After executing, you should be tracking the impact on your customer file.

That pulls into a customer segment tracker to show % of reactivated, % one-time customers, % two+ customers etc, tracked bi-weekly.

Then observe trend line over time to see the downstream effects.

Why has no one questioned the incrementality of email and sms?

Or any retention effort to begin with.

There's so much focus on meta, tiktok, snapchat, applovin incrementality.

How many have looked into the real contribution of retention activities?

5 day open and click on klaviyo. 

Everyone complains how it's inflated.

If that's true, how and why are you reporting on them?

Not all products have LTV baked into them.

For these brands, you can't have the same LTV growth rate expectation over the next 60-180 days.

One of our clients sells furniture.

People who buy, buy during a new home reno or refurbishment.

After that, there's no real need to buy again.

Trying to use emails to upsell would be a futile effort.

Even if you gave 80% off, there's just literally no reason to repurchase.

So you need to start looking at frontloading the LTV by increasing first order value instead.

There were many things we wanted to do, and will be testing.

- Quiz finder with product recommendations
- Interactive "room builder" with AR features
- Bundle tests
- Cart drawer upsells
- free gift with threshold + progress bars in cart drawer

In this case, we worked on post-purchase upsell funnels first.

It’s important that retention teams work with growth teams on this.

Because you can’t magically make LTV appear from thin air. 

Definitely not by sending a few emails

This is one of the beauties of having your teams synced.

People who are going to buy, are going to buy however they want to.

You can influence it to a certain extent.

But you don't control it as much as you think you can.

We see 3 product highlight campaigns.

Of which, you realise that the actions taken on your target product has a much lower response rate than you'd expect.

And we see this remain consistent across different product/collection focused campaigns.

This isn't just peculiar to this one brand.

It's across our entire portfolio of clients.

So there are three things you can do:


1️⃣ Only send to people who have shown interest before

Tactic: Hypersegment with tight product interest definitions

Pro: Max engagement, likely higher RPR

Con: Miss out on potential rev from other profiles


2️⃣ Send to people who have broad similar interests

Tactic: Engagement window-based collection interests, frequently purchased together

Pro: You get more impressions, high degree of insights from audience breakdown

Cons: Mid engagement


3️⃣ Continue sending to general engagement segments

Tactic: General engagement window, product interest segments added on

Pro: Max recipients, likely higher total campaign rev

Cons: Engagement lowest, likely lower RPR

*Note: You can choose to split further into prospects vs customers etc, but that's not the purpose of this post.
---

Here's how I think about it.

I'd be most hesitant to go with option 1.

While there is merit in content relevancy, we also lose out on opportunity from profiles who aren't "logically" in-market.

I usually go with option 2.

Email is very much also a top-of-mind game.

People will buy whenever they want to, just like how they will buy however they want to.

You have to balance resource efficiency with revenue generation.

And for most, you have limited bandwidth.

Unless you have capability to send 4 campaigns per day to micro segments, that is.

Otherwise, keep volume high (within reason), and just ship it.

Honestly, you don't need another email/sms audit done.

Neither do you need a design refresh because it's not meeting "best practices".

What you need are 3 things:

1. Alignment

Your channel goals must come from your CM and revenue targets.

Your retention team must know how you're pacing every day and week.

2. Accountability

Your team must set an expectation of future financial outcomes.

You must hold them accountable to the number. No excuses.

If they're unwilling to commit, that's not partnership.

3. Agility

Your team – growth, media buying, retention, all must be flexibile.

This comes also with alignment, but the ability to reallocate quickly and efficiently whenever you're too far ahead of behind.

All three are quantifiable.

And that's the fairest way to gauge performance.

No finger-pointing at other departments.

You just make it work.

Talking about strategy is one thing.

Ruthlessly executing so you achieve the modelled outcomes is another.

Reschedules and skips are your early warning signs of churn.

We find that a subscriber taking either of these actions, results in ~23% churn risk.

And when someone cancels, save rate is only 2-4%.

While winbacks make sense, it's often too late.

You should be going upstream too.

This combined with your existing MoM subscription retention drop-off...

Tell you that you need something bigger.

Bigger than just setting up more emails in a flow.

Backend subscription offers and "streaks" are the solution.

- deeper discount on big drop-off month(s)
- freebie on big drop-off month(s)
- stack offer with loyalty program to create "switching barrier"

Build them all into your:

- subscription confirmation emails, to pre-empting
- upcoming order emails, reminding of what's to come
- customer portal, gamified with progress bar

This is the same for subscription programs and membership programs.

Aggressively test your offers.

Offers impact your retention rates more than anything.

Test with front-end subscription offers too and do cohort analysis comparisons.

Most marketers don’t have a strategy problem.

They have an execution + accountability problem.

Everyone has “ideas.”
Everyone has “tests.”
Everyone has a “framework.”

But is this the best use of your limited resources right now?

That's why we have ADmission:

> Weekly coaching calls with the CTC team
> 100+ deep-dive training videos
> 50% off 1:1 consulting with specialists
> Discounts on Statlas + partner bonuses
> 30-day money-back guarantee

This is the closest thing to CTC-level support without paying the agency price tag.

BUT...

CTC is shutting down open enrollment on Jan 28.

After that, it’s invite-only.

If you join now, you lock in the lowest price it’s ever been:

$247/mo (down from $347/mo) — for life.

What you’re really buying isn’t “mOrE CoNtEnt.”

It’s access to the same operators and systems that power the agency.

That allow our growth, media buying, creator content, retention, search teams to win time and time again.

28 Jan.

Get in here:

Open article: ADmission Membership is Closing Soon! Secure Your Spot by bit.ly

ADmission Membership is Closing Soon! Secure Your Spot

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The Battle

🏌🏼‍♂️Jon Ivanco

Josh Tay

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The Battle

🏌🏼‍♂️Jon Ivanco

Josh Tay

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Josh Tay's LinkedIn Performance

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