Stefan Stefanov

Making magic happen through Email 🦅👁️

You know retention should be a growth engine.
But instead, it’s mostly a source of stress.

👉 If you’re an agency, you’re juggling more accounts - but the systems behind them are patched together and breaking.
👉 If you’re a brand, in-house retention sounds smart… until you’re buried in clunky ESPs, missing data, and slow handoffs.
👉 Or maybe you're running retention - but something feels off. Results are flat. Ops are messy. Team’s flying blind.

You’re not alone. And the pain is real.

Fragmented flows.
Campaigns delayed.
No clear ownership.
And every “quick fix” breaks something else.

You know it could run smoother. Perform better. Without the constant drag.

Now imagine this:

✅ Your lifecycle automations just work - logic is tight, handoffs are seamless
✅ Campaigns go out on time, on brand, without bugs or bottlenecks
✅ Your team knows what to do, and when - without Slack chaos or last-minute scrambles
✅ Strategy, tech, and execution are finally aligned

That’s what I help agencies and brands build:

→ Retention systems that grow without fires
→ Flawless backend ops across email, SMS, and CRM
→ Consulting that turns scattered teams into calm executors

Whether you need a deep audit, help structuring your in-house retention ops, or a partner who knows what “done right” really looks like:

Send me a DM.
Let’s make retention flow again.

Email Production Manager

Looking at the comment sections on LinkedIn… It’s getting crazy!

AI convos ftw lol 🤖

Even making them look more “natural”. with a small letter at the start of a sentence here and there. Long ass comments too.

Sh*t… it’s funny what this has turned into and I’m not questioning the authenticity of anyone but are you? 😆

Retention systems that run without you | Precision-built ops for growing teams | C.E.G. (Certified Email Geek)

Most marketers are addicted to quick wins.

Results this week. ROI this month. A/B tests that must show something by EOD.

But most meaningful progress compounds.

Take Zero-Party Data.

It takes time to collect.
Even more time to analyze.
But once it clicks, it can reshape:

• How you segment and message
• How your flows convert
• Who you attract in the first place

Delayed gratification isn’t a flaw in the system.
It 𝘪𝘴 the system.

What long game are you playing in your marketing right now?

The most misunderstood thing in email?

You tell me 🫵 

IMHO, thinking it’s all about sending emails.

Treating email like a send button means:
Write copy → hit send → tweak subject lines → optimize opens.

Staying top of mind is a big part but don’t get me wrong.

Email isn’t purely a channel.
It’s a system.

And when that system is broken, no amount of clever copy or AI will save it.

What breaks most often?

• Chasing “winning” metrics that lose money
• Testing popups, flows, and campaigns in isolation
• Prioritizing output over structure
• Chasing retention on the expense of acquisition and quantity over quality

Email only works when you build for 𝗲𝗻𝗱-𝘁𝗼-𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀, not isolated tactics.

What’s the most common email misconception you keep running into - with teams, clients, or leadership? Let’s make a list in the comments 🗒️

AI will save you time... until it doesn’t.

Here’s what I keep seeing:
• AI-generated SOPs missing key steps
• Summaries that include made-up “facts”
• Action items based on information that doesn’t exist

Why?
Because the person using AI hit copy/paste... and never checked the output.

We 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 the speed AI offers.
But unless you build internal guardrails, you’re just speeding into chaos faster.

What’s worked for us:

✅ Teach the team how to prompt 𝘢𝘯𝘥 QA
✅ Never use output without reading every line
✅ Create a simple AI-use policy (summaries, docs, outlines - what’s okay, what’s not)

AI isn’t the problem.
Undefined usage is.

Does your org have an internal AI playbook? Or winging it for now?

Most walls are made of paper.

If there’s one belief I’d want to build into every team I work with - it’s that.

That just because something 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘴 fixed, doesn’t mean it is.

That constraints often aren’t real.
That policies can be rewritten.
That “we’ve always done it this way” is the weakest argument in any meeting.

The teams that move fast?
They poke at the wall.
They ask better questions.
They assume improvement is possible.

It’s a mindset thing.
Not ego. Not rebellion. Just... forward energy.

That belief is contagious.
And it spreads fastest from leadership down.

Do your people feel like they can push boundaries?

P.S. Shout out Steven Bartlett for the phrase. Love it!

Do you know your numbers?

Most leadership teams think this just means financials.

But what about the 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 deliverables?

• How many emails did you actually send?
• How many versions, translations, and last-minute clones?
• How much troubleshooting and app setup work quietly piles up?

Not everything needs to be counted as a single “unit.” But if you don’t have a way to scope the invisible work, it’s going to cost you - in capacity, morale, and retention.

A quantifiable scope = predictable workload = less chaos.

And everything outside that scope?

Well… there's no free lunch (as we say here).

How do you track the “untrackable” in your team?

Been thinking about this lately:

Agency roles used to feel... fixed.

Account manager does this. Copywriter does that. Strategy stays over here.
Clean boxes. Clear swim lanes.

But lately?

I’m seeing the opposite.

More fluidity.

And it could work - as long as two things are true:
1. Boundaries are clear enough to avoid chaos
2. Redundancy is avoided (no one’s tripping over each other)

The old rigid structure?

Might be holding teams back more than it’s helping so I'm curious... What are you seeing inside your org or with agency partners?

“𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘦?”

Everyone loves the idea of “surprise and delight.”
But when you’re managing client work, it’s not that simple.

So here’s the question I’ve been thinking about:

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗽𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘂𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗰?

You know the kind:
• A quick dive into an analytics tool to explore something adjacent
• A one-off Loom with a strategy tweak
• A deliverable they didn’t expect - but actually needed

Small moments.
High leverage.
Zero expectation.

But if you’re not careful, these turn into scope creep.
Which means they either stress your team…
Or train clients to expect more than they’re paying for.

So here’s how I’ve started approaching it:

A 3-part framework to protect margin and enable surprise:

1. Baseline clarity - lock down what’s in scope, clearly and early.
2. Buffer zone - build 10-15% bandwidth into your process for “discretionary effort.”
3. Use it intentionally - don’t throw extras randomly. Use them to reinforce trust or momentum when it matters most.

This way, surprise is a strategy - not a burnout driver.

Curious how you approach this.
Do you intentionally leave room for “unscoped value”?

Stop chasing shiny tools. Start asking better questions.

I’ve seen teams throw money and time at new tech stacks…
Only to realize the real issue wasn’t the tool.
It was their thinking.

❌ “Tool X will fix our lifecycle”
❌ “Let’s just buy Y - it works for [cool brand]”

But pause. Ask:

✅ What core problem are we solving?
✅ Is this helping the customer experience?
✅ Could we do this with what we already have?

Because 80% of the time?
You can.

You either already have the feature,
Or a workaround exists - if you’re willing to dig.

Before the next big purchase or “urgent” implementation:
Ask how it improves what’s already working.

Optimization beats overhaul.
Systems over novelty.

Your turn:
What’s a tool your team bought… just to optimize (the lately so popular buzz word) “vanity metrics”?

Incrementally getting better in any (ideally all) of these will bring you the highest ROI.

Not talking about money and work but what fuels them and being the best version of yourself.

Not only for you but for the people around you.

And this might be the best post on LinkedIn ever cause all the work strategies and "hacks" don't matter if you feel like crap.

Master these 10 habits in 2026. 
Feel amazing, reclaim agency + self-respect. 

1. final food 4 hr before bed 
2. screens off 30 min before bed 
3. avoid blue light 2hr before bed, use red/amber
4. book in hand 10 min before sleep 
5. go to bed same time every night 
6. light in eyes when waking (sun or 10k lux)
7. walk for 10 min immediately following eating 
8. daily exercise (even if for 20 min)
9. eat good stuff, ditch the junk 
10. foster friends, family and love 

They read as simple. I promise they'll change your life. Make them non-negotiate life habits. Do them every_single_day.  Once you establish the habits, it is very easy to maintain. Stick with it for two weeks and start getting the dividends.

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.

Novelty is one of the biggest purchase drivers.

We're leveraging this with a few brands.

- Site takeover
- New popup design
- Email design update
- Reuse email heros as static ad creative
- Automated direct mail winbacks with seasonal designs

Within a year, you should have your 4 peaks.

But you should have mini-peaks within each month, if not season.

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:

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The Battle

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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);}Stefan Stefanov's LinkedIn Performance

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