📧🧲 Adam Kitchen

Co-founder at Content Army 🪖 Helping B2B leaders scale thought leadership, creating world-class content engines in less than 1 hour per month to predictably grow sales | Klaviyo Elite Partner & D2C Agency Owner

I've been a DTC email marketer for over 18 years. Owned my own eComm brand for 2 years. Over the last 7 years, I've built Magnet Monster to be a global retention marketing agency that's created strategies for brands such as Wild, Waterdrop, Abbott Lyon & Laura Geller + 300 others. We've achieved Klaviyo Elite Status (top 0.2% of agencies) & continue to deliver exceptional work for our clients.

We pioneered many of the leading retention strategies commonly deployed today in our industry and have trained hundreds of other email marketers through our flagship course, Monster Email Marketing: https://magnetmonster.com/email-marketing-course

I also built my agency exclusively off the back of content marketing on LinkedIn. I built a course sharing the exact strategy I deployed to generate over $10m in sales: https://magnetmonster.com/b2b-content-that-converts

I publish two Newsletters weekly:

Weekly Retention Strategy: https://magnetmonster.com/newsletter
Personal Growth & Life: https://adamkitchen.kit.com/


I love meeting other entrepreneurs and great humans and learning from them. Schedule a call if you want to chat: https://calendly.com/adamkitchen

We help eCommerce brands to scale profitably with bespoke email marketing strategy and world-class design.

I've been running my email marketing agency for over 7 years now. After working with over 300 DTC brands & becoming a Klaviyo Elite partner, here are some of my biggest lessons about the current state of the industry.


> There is a ceiling limit on what you can charge for email/SMS that caps out around $10k in the Shopify ecosystem, irrespective of the size of the brand. Yes, you can charge more based on additional deliverables, but even high 8-figure brands are reluctant to spend more than this as the base fee.

> Servicing bigger brands is messier and often less profitable. It requires more senior strategists (less margin), and the amount of touchpoints increases significantly as you have to play politics with more role players to get things approved (CMO, coordinators, brand directors, etc). All of this erodes profitability.

> The biggest TAM is for SMBs between $1-10m per year in annual revenue. However, it's difficult to convince many of these brands to spend more than $4k per month. So the service has to be standardised accordingly in order to maintain profits.

> Design revisions are the biggest killer of profits in any agency in this space. You have need to be ridiculously strict or not allow them at all to maintain profitability.

> People sign with you to increase their revenue contribution from the channel. They may talk about UGC, zero-party data and qualitative research, but when it comes to the crunch, they simply want to send more emails & SMS that drive incremental revenue.

> Most clients don't read reports for more than 5 minutes. It's critical to assertively demonstrate the value of your work with proactive check-ins or another agency will poach your business.

> The beauty of this business is that it's an incredibly predictable channel that can guarantee most brands consistent results. The downside is the massive influx of competition because of this and the commoditisation of the work that has followed to maintain margin.

> Ecosystem & technical knowledge is one of the last differentiators and way to increase value to clients as well as increase margin for the agency. However, the addressable market that needs these services is considerably less than where the bulk of the work is.



Add some of your own thoughts in the comments section and let me know if you agree/disagree with mine 👇 



#emailmarketing #klaviyo #shopify

🧲 Adam Kitchen

Founder @ Magnet Monster 🧲 - Klaviyo Elite Partner & Retention Marketing Agency for D2C brands

We are rebuilding Magnet Monster in 2026 to reclaim our throne as the leading retention marketing agency in DTC.

I want to speak to the best strategists only.

We have 2 positions for strategists on our team.

Multiple 8-figure brands, heavy focus on DTC subscriptions, all waiting to be serviced by legendary strategists.

If you're an A-player with a minimum of 3 years experience in Klaviyo, comfortable speaking to senior stakeholders of companies this size and think beyond the confines of channel-specific strategy and holistically about eCommerce as a business, I want to speak to you.

Salary negotiable based on experience and you'll immediately be enrolled into the company bonus scheme (quarterly payouts).

Our sole focus is to provide the best level of service to the most epic brands in the space.

If this excites you, my DMs are open.

Apply here: https://lnkd.in/eWGyaG6Z


#ecommerce #emailmarketing #klaviyo

Adam Kitchen 🪖

Why do all my agency friends speak as though this is the worst business model imaginable and uniquely hard compared to other industries? 😂 

Maybe it's the time of year grinding all of us down, but...

Have you ever run a restaurant?

Worked in retail?

Slaved away in an office 14 hours a day in finance, being forced for "drinks in the city"?

There's even a guy who has to climb into my septic tank once a year.

His job is literally to clean up mountains of sh*t from holes in the ground every single day.

Let's stop pretending the agency model is somehow uniquely difficult compared to other industries.

ALL BUSINESSES ARE HARD!

I've never heard another business owner laughing about how easy it is to make money and how little they work.

We get to work from wherever in the world we want, run great cashflowing businesses that require nothing except a laptop and an internet connection.

Yes, there are headaches with managing people & client expectations.

But that's ubiquitous across every business: you manage people and serve customers.

Stop moaning or find another industry to invest your time in.

Shout out to all the parents out there trying to run a business or build their careers.

I thought the pressure and anxiety were intense before having kids, but it's amplified by over 100 times trying to balance being present and a great father at the same time.

It's a constant battle every day with exhaustion.

But there's no greater feeling or privilege.

Respect to you all. It's hard.

Always great to be back in New York.

Despite loving my farm boy life, there's something magnetic about this city that's impossible to explain.

You have to feel the energy being there.

Did my customary arrival walk to Times Square to soak it all in.

Now I'm looking forward to a busy week ahead meeting clients & partners.

Hit me up if you're in town and want to meet💪🧲

This screenshot right here tells the true story behind Klaviyo's incredible success as a business.

What is it?

It's Klaviyo Attributed Revenue.

You see it everywhere.

Agencies chase it.

Brands think it's important.

It's plastered all over social media as a badge of honour.

Yet amongst all of this... It's in no way indicative of a business's success.

For me, it's the epitome of the most paralysing debate in eCommerce: attribution.

But Klaviyo has revelled in that chaos.

And they've built an amazing business off the back of it.

Klaviyo aren't the first ESP to have attributed revenue built into its platform.

Practically all martech try to proclaim their worth by claiming credit for sales.

Yet Klaviyo have done an incredible job in branding their contribution and creating a powerful ecosystem flywheel off the back of it.

Yes, the software is best in class.

But don't understate the true genius in this marketing.


#klaviyo #ecommerce #shopify

If you think an email marketing agency is expensive, just wait until you try hiring in-house to fill all the positions that we do.

We regularly service brands for under $10k with a team that includes a dedicated:

> Strategist
> Project Manager
> Designer 
> Copywriter
> Engineer


These people do nothing except build strategies and execute ALL DAY.

They are true subject matter experts who have mastered their craft.

Now, break each of those roles down and figure out the cost in your country.

You'll be lucky to build a dedicated team on full-time salaries of less than $20k per month.

Yes, you can pull them from different departments and make them cross-functional in your business.

But why not utilise an agency's true expertise, predictable systems and aggregated insights across multiple brands?

If you think an agency is expensive, just wait until you hire in-house...

It's always bittersweet to say goodbye to America.

Just finished an amazing 5 day trip.

Meeting clients, partners and friends I haven't seen in years.

I love this country and its people.

All things considered, my personal opinion is  it's unquestionably the greatest in the world.

You can't beat doing business with Americans.

It's why 80% of Magnet Monster's book or business is this side of the globe.

They get it.

They're straight up and love to move fast.

It's an infectious way of doing business I fully embrace.

Already planning the next trip as I head to the airport.

I'll be back soon 🇺🇸

3 of my biggest agency lessons in scaling to 7-figures in revenue over the last 7 years.


1. Sell a predictable service that's directly correlated to revenue growth

I'm fortunate that my expertise (email marketing) is a non-negotiable part of the DTC marketing mix. You simply cannot sustain a business without it in this space. My friends who sell services like analytics, BI infrastructure or even operational expertise? They're often viewed as a 'nice-to-have'.

Clients will always prioritise what makes them more money and has follow-through tied to the service as opposed to problem diagnosis without a solution.


2. Having the right people is much more important than SOPs

SOPs and predictable operations are incredibly important - there's no denying that. However, even with great processes, many become obsolete quickly due to technological changes, AI and constantly evolving services. The one consistent that will pull you through? Great people, self-starters who roll up their sleeves and commit to getting the job done no matter what documentation is available. Very hard to find them though!


3. You have to choose between upmarket complexity and low market simplicity

If you go upmarket, you need to learn politics more than anything else and price for complexity, nuance and expanded scope. This requires higher opex and more senior people. If you go low market and volume, you'll have to standardise in order to make a profit. Both are viable paths with pros and cons to each, and very, very few agencies have been successful in making both work together under 1 roof. Choose your ICP carefully and diligently stick to it.

Shameful confession: the older I get, the more I deplore posting and participating in social media to maintain business.

It's no secret that Magnet Monster's success has been heavily predicated on my 'personal brand'.

Yet the longer I'm in this game, the more I have to acknowledge that the leverage it provides me is unparalleled.

It's afforded me the opportunity to work with some of the biggest brands in the world.

Meet amazing entrepreneurs whom I can call friends.

And financially provided for my family and me.

Frankly speaking, I can't think of a better use of my time than to create powerful content as well as selling & building relationships.

Could I have done this without building a personal brand and putting myself out there?

Probably - but at the time, this felt the most natural way and fastest route to achieve my goals.

It just so happens that along the way, I've become enslaved to posting.

And I'm now enslaved to that leverage I once built and can't abandon it.

Chasing algorithms; churning out content for the sake of content.

It's become a chore.

So next year, my focus will be very different.

I'll still be sharing, but I've been thinking a lot about how to make it fun again.

Excited to share what I've been working on :-)

A very simple rule I follow for email frequency: if my most engaged segment (i.e. 30 days) is declining in numbers MoM, I'm inevitably going to hit diminishing returns.

When this happens, you've got very little choice but to pull back.

And call on the acquisition team to ramp things up.

Now, what would be a safe ratio of subscribers to unsubscribers to ramp up frequency?

There's no arbitrary rule here, but I genuinely like to see a ratio of 2:1 growth in net new subscribers to unsubscribes.

If we're on this trajectory from consistent sources, then we can predictably scale email performance and pull the frequency lever.



#emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

"The perfect ratio between flow & campaign revenue is 50/50" - let's stop this nonsense.

The reality is it doesn't matter.

Yes, in a perfect world, flows would do a LOT more heavy lifting.

But there are too many variables for most brands to use this as a benchmark.

Examples:

🧲 Your traffic/ads are down MoM >> you'll now need to rely on campaigns to drive returning customer revenue since fewer recipients will be entering flows

🧲 Key sales periods >> BFCM being the obvious ones where you'll be sending a LOT of campaigns

🧲 Purchase latency of your product >> if you sell mattresses, you're not going to drive a lot of revenue from campaigns until you have a massive list; most of your revenue will come from first-time customers who enter flows


I think aiming for a generic split between flow & campaign contribution is utterly pointless.

Just drive more revenue overall through retention channels - that's what matters.


#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

There are only 2 key things you need to make BFCM email campaign strategy.


1. Plaster the offer above the fold - the bolder the better
2. Repeat winning offers which have worked well in the past


After 7 years of running these campaigns, I continuously see this playbook be the most effective for brands.

You don't need fancy designs.

You need to make the offer IMMEDIATEDLY visible and easily redeemable.

The inbox is a busy place at the best of times, but it's ridiculously crowded at this time of year.

You also don't need to get too clever with offers.

Simply pull up a report of the last 12-24 months of campaigns.

What drove sales?

Repeat those.

You want predictability to reach targets, and keeping it simple is often the best way to achieve those goals.



#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

BFCM email designs

These co-branded email marketing campaigns we designed during our partnership with Hiya -- Reimagining Children's Health were next level 🔥

If you are a DTC brand that hasn't yet leveraged these co-branded marketing campaigns, they need serious time investment as part of your strategy in 2026.

🧲 They drive CRAZY engagement (way above standard benchmarks)

🧲 Tons of cross-channel synergy (organic social in particular)

🧲 Great for increasing repurchase rates through novelty factor


Get them on the roadmap and start planning now 💪


#klaviyo #ecommerce #emailmarketing

Every DTC brand tells me they're interested in implementing these things when signing with us:


> Zero-party data to understand why people are buying
> Qualitative research to understand why they don't repurchase
> UGC from their database to fuel their ad performance


Yet how many follow-through and implement what we suggest to them?

I'd say less than 20%.

Why?

Because when it comes to the crunch, what people say they want vs what they actually do is very different.

Most DTC brands want to generate as much revenue from email/SMS as humanely possible.

And what's the number 1 lever you end up pulling to achieve that objective?

It's increasing email frequency.

Therefore, a lot of the value we've invested into at our agency is in operationalising production into a fine-tuned machine that predictably generates revenue.

I hear the way many other agencies sell email services:

"8 campaigns and 1 flow per month" etc.

We have many brands on our roster sending between 20-40 email campaigns per MONTH (some even more).

Does this mean the former strategies aren't valuable?

No - they absolutely are.

But a good email strategist is only as good as the brand is willing to let them be.

It takes two to tango, and if you don't have true alignment and buy in, most of your due diligence should lie in vetting your agency partner in their ability to churn out a high volume of creative with the right segmentation strategy.



#emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

95% of DTC brands think they need to spend money on quiz apps, loyalty programs & "machine learning" software to increase their retention. They don't.

After working with over 300 brands, I've seen better results by revisiting 4 critical components and doubling down on the fundamentals.


1. Deliverability 🏗️

If emails don't hit the inbox, you don't have a strategy.

> Authenticate: DMARC, DKIM, and SPF are mandatory.
> Dedicated Domain: Non-negotiable for serious senders.
> Monitor: Track inbox placement by ISP (Gmail, Outlook). If reputation dips, immediately segment and send to your high-engagers only until restoration.

This is the foundation upon which your strategy is built.


2. The Big 4 Flows 🚀

These 4 generate over 90% of your flow revenue and are incremental at scale.

You only need to test and update the creatives in these and ignore the rest when it comes to revenue.

> Welcome Flow: most customers convert within 24 hours of signing up. Be aggressive.
> Abandoned Cart/Checkout: High-intent offer, fast timing. Use CoCo AI if on WhatsApp to initiate 2-way conversations (shoutout Jeremy Horowitz')
> Browse Abandonment: High-intent offer, fast timing.
> Post-Purchase Journey: This is your LTV secret weapon. Focus 80% on Activation (how to use the product), collecting UGC, and then proactively incentivising the second sale at the optimal repurchase window.


3. Campaign Strategy 📧

Your true leverage comes from campaign sends.

& this may be controversial... but you MUST find ways to send MORE.

While purchase latency will guide your frequency, without impressions, you don't get the opportunity to sell.

The key to not fatiguing your audience? 

Make your emails exciting and include competitions, UGC, tutorials & gamified concepts to keep them opening/clicking.

& when it comes to selling, keep designs simple so you can easily scale production.


4. List Growth & Data 🧲

Don't overcomplicate list growth - just implement these 3 things.

> Make the offer appear quickly (within 3 seconds) and CLEAR
> Collect consent across other channels from day 1 (SMS/WhatsApp) as email engagement plummets post 60 days
> Use social channels to expedite list growth (IG stories, influencers, etc - shocking how many don't do this)


_________


Go back and revisit this list. I can guarantee at least one component is fundamentally broken, causing a bottleneck across your entire retention ecosystem.

Fix it, and watch the momentum return.



#emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

Something I'd love to see more brands do that rely on habit formation to drive repeat sales:

Set your customers a challenge 👇

When we worked with waterdrop®, this was something we worked on with their team to hold customers accountable.

There was a series of check-ins for first-time buyers designed to hold them accountable.

It included collecting UGC, surveying and daily tips to maintain motivation.

Not only were these emails highly engaged with, we also noticed a marked uplift in 21-day repurchase behaviour for people who took the challenge.

If you're selling supplements, food products or even cosmetics, running these challenges is one of the most powerful tactics you can deploy.

Drop me a message if you need help setting one up for next year 👊



#emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

There are a lot of DTC email marketers at the moment pushing the strategy that more emails = more revenue. This may be true, but it's also dangerously misleading to simply suggest this.

If that were the case, we could simply send any old AI slop and there would be no limit to how many times we could email a customer.

But unless you're actually making more customers buy to justify the additional resources you're spending on creating those emails and the cost to send them, all you're probably doing is damaging your deliverability, eroding subsequent months' profits and expediting your road to diminishing returns from the channel.

So yes, sending more emails DOES result in more revenue - in the short-term.

But in the medium to long-term, you could be doing irreparable damage to your subscriber base.

The key to unlocking high email frequency? Acquiring more customers.

The more people coming into your database, very often, the more you can afford to lose.

That's why I always track active subscriber count and segment growth to make sure it's trending positively.

Because ramping up email frequency will always expedite churn.

Short-term gains, yes, but very often at the expense of long-term results.

That's why you need great content, relevant offers/context, and consistently healthy acquisition.

Be careful taking advice without context to it.


#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

Why do most survey emails fail miserably?

I'm talking sub 3% response rates.

That's pitiful when you're sending to tens of thousands of people.

There are 2 reasons this happens.


1. Your request came far too late in their journey

2. There's no context or benefit to the user


Let's deal with the first one.

If somebody buys a product and doesn't buy again, you'll want to find out what's holding them back from purchasing to improve your feedback loop.

Most people will send out a generic campaign to a segment at random who meet this criteria.

But at that time, they've already received probably dozens of campaigns and their engagement has plummeted.

The solution: message them much sooner to increase response rates.

Don't wait until it's 60 days after their purchase.

Secondly, the harsh truth about survey emails >

Without an incentive (or context), response rates will always be low.

You see it in SaaS all the time - free gifts or rewards for filling out forms.

Will it produce biased results?

Probably.

But is some form of response better than no response?

I'd argue yes, despite the efficacy of the data (it depends on how the survey is structured).

The bottom line is: most of these survey emails are well intended, but produce zero practical results.

The only way around this is to send them much sooner, with context, and incentives tied to them.



#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

Up to 40% of marketing budgets are wasted because decisions are made on bad data.

Dashboards don’t drive growth but analytics-ready data does.

Most teams stop at viewing dashboards and in over 80% of cases, that doesn’t lead to actionable insights.

But the truth is, a shiny dashboard alone doesn’t solve your problems.

It’s just a visualization of raw data.

If your data from Shopify, Klaviyo, Google Ads, or Meta isn’t clean or standardized, you’re not optimizing — you’re guessing.

And every guess costs money.

The real shift happens when you focus on the foundation:
Clean Data: garbage in, garbage out.

We’re using a tool that makes our data clean and consistent — automatically.

Structured Data: unify data from all platforms to make it analytics-ready.

Actionable Insights: turn data into strategies for email and SMS that drive real growth.

Forget dashboards for a second.

Focus on getting your data right, and the insights (and growth) will follow.

Want the tool that turns messy dashboards into decision-grade insights?

Comment “DATA” and I’ll send it your way.

taplio

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