Hey friends, 

If you’re in the US, I hope that you had an incredible Labor Day weekend and I hope that your brand crushed it. 

A lot of friends I know beat forecasts, which is an exciting trend as we head into Q4. Here’s what most people are taking for granted… the real winners during Labor Day weekend weren’t just scaling their ad spend, they were the brands that invested in their email capture and retention flows long before the sales opportunity occurred. 

The best brands I know have seen anywhere from 10% to 40% of sales come through win-back email campaigns that were perfectly timed for their end consumers. To put that into perspective, if you did $1M this weekend, $100k to $400K came from automated emails without brands having to lift a finger. And if you didn’t have these flows dialed in before LDW, you just made a super expensive mistake. 

And it wasn’t luck for these companies. It was the product of brands investing early, building retention into their acquisition stack, and using AI to supercharge their flows with timing, personalization, and creative in a way that just humans couldn’t replicate.

Here’s why this matters: As everyone knows, at least 95% of paid traffic doesn’t buy on the first visit. That means the majority of visitors bounce with no purchase and no opt-in, so you can’t message them again. 

Even your existing shoppers, the ones you spent months and tons of money acquiring, come back for your big sales, browse a few products, add something to their cart, and then they bounce. Without the right system in place, they disappear. And the past customers you’re desperate to re-engage? It’s the same story. They pop back in months later, poke around, and leave without making a purchase. 

That’s the blind spot for most brands, and I believe that AI-powered email is the connective tissue between acquisition, repeat purchase, and reactivation to solve it. It’s the best way to turn a one-time click into a long-term customer. And this Labor Day, it was the brands who nailed that link who succeeded the most. 

I’ve seen it firsthand with my clients at Sharma Brands. And I’ve seen the data from Liam and his team at Instant, who’ve quietly been powering this shift for hundreds of brands. 

That’s what I want to dive deeper into today. 

Most DTC brands think they’re doing email well. They hire an agency or a freelancer, spend a few weeks perfecting a “beautiful” set of flows, drop $10-30K on design that matches their brand guidelines, and then… they never touch it again.

And on paper, it looks fine. The welcome flow has some nice copy. The cart abandonment sends a polite “you forgot something” note with a photo of the product. They feel like they’ve checked the box.

But here’s the problem: that’s the exact same email setup that every other brand has. Every single shopper, whether they’re browsing your bestseller for 10 minutes or bouncing after 9 seconds, gets the same follow-up. And inbox providers hate that. When you blast thousands of identical emails at once, your deliverability tanks. Gmail starts filtering you into “promotions.” Apple Mail buries you. And the shoppers who do see it? They’ve already seen that exact subject line a hundred times from a hundred brands. They tune it out.

Now multiply that by tens of thousands of shoppers. That’s where you’re missing out on serious revenue opportunities. Every time you rely on a “good enough” template, you’re losing the chance to connect with someone in the way they need. Some shoppers need a fast nudge. Others want to browse twice before deciding. Some respond to a discount. Some respond to reviews. But when you send the same cookie-cutter message to all of them, you miss most of them. 

This is why open rates across DTC are plummeting. This is why CTRs are flat. This is why revenue per recipient (the only email metric that actually matters) is stagnating for so many brands. “Good enough” email doesn’t just fail to convert, it actively hurts your funnel. It lowers deliverability, wastes the contacts you already paid for with ads, and makes your brand look like everyone else.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Because if “good enough” email is the baseline, the next question is: what does great actually look like?

Great is when every shopper gets an email experience that feels like it was written for them, not for the 50,000 people on your list. Great is when your flows don’t just trigger because “24 hours passed,” but because AI knows this specific shopper is most likely to convert after 2 days and at 8:30pm. Great is when the copy, the product featured, even the discount code, adapts dynamically based on what that shopper was actually doing on your site.

I don’t care how talented your retention manager is, or how many hours your agency bills. Nobody can sit there and build hundreds of unique variations for every browsing session, SKU, or customer journey. But AI can. And that’s where the shift is happening.

When you plug in Instant, every shopper gets a bespoke experience:

• Deliverability goes up because no two emails are identical. Gmail can’t punish you when every subject line is unique.
• CTR goes up because people actually recognize the product they just viewed and feel like you’re speaking to them, not “to a list.”
• Conversion rates increase because the timing and offers are tailored to the exact behavior of that shopper.

And all of this compounds. More traffic → more opt-ins → more personalized flows → more revenue → higher LTV. It’s the unfair advantage that top brands are leaning on, and the proof is clear. 

I've been diving deep into the data with Liam on brands that cracked this code, and the numbers speak for themselves. 

Take July Luggage. For years, their browse abandonment flow was an afterthought. Then they turned on Instant AI and doubled their total abandonment revenue. The cart and checkout flows each increased by 80%. But the real unlock was browse abandonment, which jumped 3.8x and went from “second-to-last” to their #1 revenue flow by a wide margin, driving a big share of the $350K in incremental revenue they generated in just 60 days.

Then there are the merchants with thousands of SKUs, where manual campaign management is impossible. With Instant AI, price drop flows (flows many brands don’t even bother setting up) suddenly became a top-two performer, rivaling cart abandonment in total revenue. You simply can’t do that without automation.

And the results I’ve seen don’t stop there:

• Nakie tripled their retention revenue and unlocked $230K in incremental revenue in 30 days with Instant. 
• Karen Kane hit $1.1M in incremental revenue in 90 days with Instant. 
• And Pushas 4x'd their retention revenue in two weeks.

Across the board, the ROI is high. On average, Instant AI clients are seeing 61x ROI and 2-3x more incremental revenue from flows in the first 15-30 days. That’s a new standard for what retention should deliver.

The old way of doing email (before better software existed) was to have humans sit around and think about finding the "perfect" day and time to send out campaigns to their list (just like my Sunday email always goes out on Sunday at 7:15pm EST). They would sit there and say things like “Tuesday at 10am sounds about right?” but obviously this is wrong.

The reality is that timing emails for actual revenue conversion is very personal. Think about how the person who just spent 8 minutes browsing your site at 2pm on a Wednesday has a completely different purchase intent than someone who bounced after 9 seconds on a Sunday morning after seeing a TikTok ad. 

What I've learned from seeing the data is that behavioral timing beats traditional “cohorts” almost every time. Instead of asking "when do my past customers check their emails?" you should be asking "When is this specific person most likely to convert based on how they just interacted with my brand?"

This is where AI becomes the only viable solution. Obviously, people can't track that Sarah from Denver spent 3 minutes looking at your bestselling hoodie, added it to her cart, then got distracted by a phone call. But AI can remember that and it knows that Sarah typically converts after her first serious browsing session, usually in the evening. So it waits, then hits her with the perfect email at 7:30pm on Friday night and she buys. All without a human needing to take any action. 

This is what Instant has built and they have hundreds of brands killing it using this tech right now. 

Most email tools react. They wait for a cart to be abandoned or a product to go out of stock before sending the same cookie-cutter message. Instant AI flips that script by anticipating what each shopper needs next.

This is where Shopper Intelligence comes in. Instead of just knowing who visited, Instant AI understands intent: who’s hovering on a PDP, who’s returned for a second visit, who’s showing signals that they’re close to buying.

With that data, flows stop feeling like spam and start feeling personal. Smart Coupons are a perfect example: instead of blasting the same discount to your entire list, Instant AI can generate a unique code for a unique shopper at the exact moment it matters. For one person, it’s the nudge that gets them into checkout. For another, it’s the loyalty-building surprise that keeps them coming back.

When you anticipate instead of react, every touchpoint feels more intentional. It’s the difference between shouting into an inbox and speaking directly to the shopper who’s ready to buy.

So Instant has a few different products but it all starts with their visitor identification tech and opt in tools. I think the magic happens when you combine two things that most platforms keep separate, which is the hyper accurate audience identification and pop ups that capture more email addresses alongside the ability to generate and send out these highly personalized emails based on real browsing behavior that I’ve been talking about. 

From the testing I’ve done, here’s why it works so well:

1. Generic flows don’t convert. If you send the same message to everyone, your results aren’t going to be great. You want personalized copy and design for every identified shopper so it feels native to them. 
2. Smart timing and offers. Emails go out when that specific shopper is most likely to convert, not a random guess. And AI even knows when to layer in a personalized discount code to push someone over the line.
3. From setup to sending in minutes. Instant scans your site, your products, and your brand voice to generate 11 ready-to-launch flows: from cart, browse, and checkout abandonment to price-drop and back-in-stock. All editable, all live in minutes.
4. Brands can bring in their own templates if they want to. Their tools are easy to use and if you already have templates, Instants AI slots right in. Their AI can mimic your brand voice and it can improve on what you already have. 
5. Also, it’s very low risk so if you aren’t happy with something, just click pause and revert back to your existing Klaviyo flows. It’s super easy to turn on/off. 
6. The last thing I’ll say is that Instant is very transparent and does proper holdout testing to prove their results are incremental. They won’t double count your revenue from your existing Klaviyo flows so you know that their emails are actually moving the needle on revenue, retention, and reactivation. 

Another thing that is important to cover is that you really need to focus on measuring the right metrics that matter when it comes to email. 

Open rates are not the right metric. They make you feel good, but they don't pay the bills. Revenue is much more critical, and with Apple's mail privacy changes, half of those "opens" you’re seeing might just be Apple's servers pre-loading your email anyway.

Here’s what to measure instead: 

1. Revenue per recipient: Not revenue per email sent, but revenue per person on your list. This tells you if your list quality is improving or degrading over time.
2. Incremental revenue: This is the big one. You need proper holdout testing to know what revenue you wouldn't have gotten without these emails. 
3. Time to purchase: How long does it take someone to convert after joining your list? The best brands I work with can tell you that their average customer converts 2-4 hours after opt-in, and they use that data to optimize their nurture sequences.

In Instant’s case, you can see all 3 of these metrics, which tell you how much money you are actually making from these campaigns. You want to track dollars earned and revenue per recipient to see the true value over time. 

If you're serious about retention and reactivation (and you should be, because it's a lot cheaper than acquisition!) Here's what I’d say: Don’t overthink it. Don’t wait until October. Get this live now. Setting up Instant takes only a few minutes, and it’s very low risk to try. They are giving anyone who reads this 50% off your first 60 days if you want to take advantage of it by the end of next week. 

If you’ve got questions about retention, reactivation, or whether this is the right fit for your brand, just hit reply to this email and I’ll take a look. Or loop in Liam at instant.one: he’s been deep in the trenches with hundreds of brands already and can tell you exactly what to expect.

Thanks again for reading and I’ll see you on Sunday!

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