Happy Thursday!

I've said for years that good retention means your brand is a top-five thought in someone's mind. I sat down with Joseph Siegel, former head of retention at Feastables, now running his own fractional retention practice — to actually break down what that looks like in practice. I pulled the most useful pieces below.

Vendor of the Week

Postscript - a free AI playbook written for a soda brand that doesn't exist.

Every operator I talk to right now is stuck on the same question: "where do I even start with AI?" Not the think pieces. Not the LinkedIn frameworks. The actual what-do-I-do-Monday-morning part.

Well, Postscript answered it in a fun way. They invented a fake soda brand called “Fizzzy Soda” and built out its entire AI strategy, start to finish. The brand is made up. Every strategy in the guide is real.

So instead of another "10 ways AI will change ecommerce" post, you get the actual their whole process. The prompts, the workflows, the SMS and retention moves, all written for a brand that looks a lot like yours. Copy what fits, swap in your own product, and you have an AI strategy by lunch.

Oh and because Postscript is always for-the-marketers it's completely free. No email gate, no demo call hiding behind the download button. Just the guide. If "figure out AI" has been sitting on your list since January, this is the fastest way I've seen to cross it off.

Grab Postscript's free Fizzzy Soda guide here.

What Retention Actually Is (And Why Your Email Program Is Doing It Wrong)

Most DTC brands treat retention like it's a Klaviyo dashboard. Flows, open rates, click rates. But retention is really a question of mindshare. Does your customer think about your brand between purchases? Does it come up at the dinner table? Is it the first thing they reach for when the problem comes back?

The brands that get acquired for 9-figure numbers — Gruns is the most recent example — don't just have subscriber counts. They have genuine loyalty at scale. That kind of LTV doesn't come from email sequences. It comes from building a system that makes customers feel like they made the right decision every single time they interact with you.

Joseph breaks retention down into a few core areas that most brands either underinvest in or execute badly.

Listen here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

The Biggest Takeaways

• Flip the upcoming order email. Lead with what the customer unlocks, not what they're being charged. This single change is one of the highest-ROI retention moves a subscription brand can make. If your upcoming order email makes people reach for the cancel button, rewrite it this week.

• Retention is mindshare, not email metrics. The goal is to be a top-five thought in your customer's head. Open rates tell you if the email worked. Mindshare tells you if the brand worked. Design every touchpoint around the second question.

• Transactional emails are free retention real estate. Order confirmed, shipped, delivered — these have your highest open rates. Most brands waste them on logistics copy. Use them to reinforce the decision, add value, and deepen the relationship. Get them out of Shopify's default template.

• Onboarding is where loyalty is built or lost. The first 14-30 days after someone subscribes determines whether they stay. Surprise and delight in the first email. Load the portal with content. Give them a reason to feel like they joined something, not just bought something.

• Product inserts need a job. A founder note with no trackable action isn't a retention strategy. Every insert should have a clear next step — referral link, review request, community invite, companion product recommendation — and a way to measure if it worked.

That's all for today

It's Thursday, and it's all downhill from here. Pull your upcoming order email right now and ask yourself honestly: does this make a customer feel excited or anxious? That's your homework.

Nik