Ecommerce retention strategy: email, SMS and repeat purchases

Brian Tate runs Oats Overnight, a DTC breakfast brand. In a May 2025 Modern Retail focus group (members only), he said the team watches month-one reorders and the share of buyers who order twice. "We try to get the earliest signal possible," he said. The brand even picks flavors by how well they retain: "We optimize our product mix by retention."

In the same piece, Knix's Nicole Tapscott said her team looks at "repeat purchase rate in a 90-day window." Neither shared a number. Both run the business on the second order. This playbook builds that ecommerce retention strategy, stage by stage, as part of our growth playbooks by business type.

What stage is your store's retention at?#

An ecommerce retention strategy is the plan that turns first-time buyers into repeat buyers, judged by the extra margin it brings.

These bands are my rule of thumb.

What's at stake? A study of more than 156,000 DTC customers by Beauchamp Sullivan & Co., cited by Shopify, found an average repeat purchase rate of 18.8% (Shopify). So about four in five buyers never order again.

The five moves of an ecommerce retention strategy#

1. Fix the flows that catch near-buyers (any stage)#

What to do: Set up a welcome flow and an abandoned cart or checkout flow, two or three emails each.

Why: These two flows do most of the automated selling. In Omnisend's 2026 report, abandoned cart and welcome emails drove 76% of automation-generated orders. Automations were about 2% of email sends but about 30% of email revenue. That's 2025 vendor data from 150,000 brands (Omnisend). Klaviyo's 2026 benchmarks put the average abandoned-cart email click rate at 6.0%, and text at 10.3% (Klaviyo).

Cost: Shopify Email covers basic flows. Expect 6–10 hours.

Time to revenue: Days. These flows reach people already close to buying.

The setup is in our Shopify store growth playbook. The same trigger-based logic for SaaS is in trial follow-up emails that turn sign-ups into paying customers.

2. Time the post-purchase flow to the reorder cycle (1,000+ customers)#

What to do: Find the median days between first and second order in Shopify. Send a how-to-use email after delivery. Then send a reorder reminder a few days before the typical reorder date. Add a winback email for buyers who pass twice that gap without ordering.

Why: A reminder sent after the customer already bought elsewhere is wasted.

Cost: 4–8 hours, plus the margin cost of any winback discount.

Time to revenue: One reorder cycle. For a 30-day product, about six weeks. For a 90-day product, a quarter.

3. Add SMS, with consent done right (1,000+ customers)#

What to do: Collect phone numbers with a separate, clear opt-in. Use SMS for abandoned carts, shipping updates and restocks. Keep promotions rare.

Why: Omnisend found automated SMS earned about $0.74 per send, versus $0.15 for SMS campaigns (Omnisend).

The rules are strict. Marketing texts sent by automated systems generally need prior express written consent under the TCPA. Since April 11, 2025, the FCC lets people revoke consent by "any reasonable means." Words like "stop," "quit," "cancel" and "unsubscribe" count. Businesses must honor the request within 10 business days (National Law Review). Carrier guidance from CTIA also expects a clear call to action with message frequency, rates and STOP instructions (Infobip summary). This is not legal advice; have counsel review your opt-in.

Cost: SMS tools charge per message. Plan 4–6 hours for setup and consent copy.

Time to revenue: Weeks, once the list grows past a few hundred subscribers.

4. Add subscriptions or loyalty only if people already reorder (10,000+ customers)#

What to do: If one product sells on a steady cycle, offer subscribe-and-save. If buyers spread across many products, try simple loyalty perks.

Why: Both lock in a habit; neither creates one. Hard-to-cancel plans also draw chargebacks and regulators. Recurly's 2026 data, cited by Shopify, puts ecommerce subscription churn at 4.25%. About a third of that, 1.38%, is involuntary churn (Shopify). So payment recovery matters as much as the offer. Shopify also cites a Deloitte 2025 survey: 72% of consumers say loyalty programs make them likelier to spend with a brand.

Make cancellation easy. In May 2026, Shutterstock agreed to pay $35 million to settle FTC allegations, including making it "difficult to cancel subscriptions" (FTC).

Cost: App fees, plus the discount, which comes straight out of contribution margin.

Time to revenue: Two to three reorder cycles before you can judge it.

5. Prove what retention adds with a holdout (1,000+ customers)#

What to do: Hold back 10–20% of eligible customers from one flow at random. After one or two reorder cycles, compare repeat rate and margin per customer in Shopify.

Why: Email and SMS platforms credit orders placed within a window after a send. Many of those buyers would have reordered anyway. Our marketing incrementality test guide covers sizing and timing.

Cost: The revenue you give up from the held-out group, plus 2 hours to set it up.

Time to revenue: None directly. It shows where your next hour should go.

What to measure in revenue#

Use contribution margin for CLV, not revenue. A $60 order at 35% margin leaves $21 to repay acquisition. That sets what you can spend on ads, as covered in our DTC marketing strategy for Meta and Google.

What should you stop doing?#

Stop putting a discount in every flow. Buyers learn to wait for the code. A 15% code on a 35% margin order gives away well over a third of your margin. Cost: margin on orders that would have come at full price.

Stop blasting the whole list. Mailing people who stopped opening drives spam reports. Gmail asks bulk senders to keep complaints below 0.3%, and suggests under 0.1% (Google). Yahoo also requires one-click unsubscribe, honored "within 2 days" (Yahoo). Cost: more of your mail lands in spam, including the flows that pay.

Stop judging flows by platform-attributed revenue. It counts orders that would have happened anyway. Cost: more emails that add little margin.

Stop texting people who never opted in to texts. A delivery phone field is not marketing consent. Cost: legal exposure far larger than any SMS revenue.

How to do this in Kratly#

1. Connect Shopify, Google Ads, Meta Ads and your site. Kratly ties each first order to the campaign or page behind it.
2. Tag email and SMS links with UTMs. Kratly then credits the Shopify orders from each email or text.
3. See revenue by campaign, page and email. Compare first-order revenue from ads with the repeat revenue those same customers bring later.
4. Approve suggested changes. Kratly suggests budget shifts toward campaigns whose buyers come back. You approve them, and each change is logged and reversible.