Not Every Second Order Is Retention

Conversion is down, CPMs are up, ROAS softened, and everyone in the meeting has a theory. Your analytics can tell you what happened to your business. They can't tell you whether it happened to everyone else too. This week: Market Pulse, now live in Ret...

Contribution margin by customer order number — and the question it answers: as your customers become more loyal, do their orders actually become more profitable? This week: the two curves that look identical in every retention report, why mature orders...

Most eCommerce brands plan every quarter as if the whole number has to be earned from scratch, even though customers who replenish, reorder or subscribe will already deliver part of it. This week we walk through Future Revenue Coverage, which is the sh...

Most brands book all their acquisition spend as growth, but part of it is maintenance capex: the cost of replacing customers who stop buying, and it has to be covered before the business grows at all. We split acquisition into maintenance and growth, a...

A brand can add 40% more customers, increase total customer equity, and still lower the average economic quality of the customer base — all in the same quarter. This episode covers customer equity dilution: how to measure the quality of a new cohort ag...

If you stopped acquiring customers today, how long would it take for half your existing customer revenue to disappear? This episode makes the case for Customer Base Half-Life as a CEO-level number, what it tells you that revenue, growth and LTV don't, ...

Most loyalty reporting compares members to non-members and calls the gap proof the program is working, when a good part of that gap usually existed before anyone enrolled. This episode goes through how to separate the loyalty your customers brought wit...

Not every second order is retention. Some of it is your returns process finishing the first sale. This episode shows how exchanges and replacements inflate repeat rate, and what changes once you count only the orders that were real decisions.

Most brands spend weeks arguing over discount depth and thirty seconds deciding what free product goes in the box, even though the sample can lift the current basket and the next order without touching the price list. This episode covers how to pick th...

This week we're launching the AI Analyst, the biggest thing we've ever shipped at RetentionX: it reads your entire store overnight and lands a finished diagnosis on your phone by morning, telling you what changed, why it changed, what it's costing you ...