How to Improve Email Marketing Performance: What Ecommerce Brands Should Fix First

To improve ecommerce email marketing performance, fix the program in this order: deliverability, signup capture, campaigns, then flows. Deliverability comes first because nothing else counts if your emails do not reach the inbox. Flows come last, not because they matter less, but because they take the longest to build. Judge the result on first-to-second purchase rate, LTV by cohort and contribution margin, not on the share of revenue your email platform attributes to email.

Over the last seven years, we have built the retention back end for more than 150 ecommerce brands.

Brands doing $500K a year. Brands doing $20M a year. Fashion, skincare, supplements, food, home goods.

The surprising part is not how different those accounts are. It is how similar the problems are.

The same six or seven issues show up almost every time. And most brands work on them in the wrong order, which is why they can spend a year optimizing and see very little change.

This guide gives you the order we use, what to fix at each step and how to tell whether it is working.

By Emiel Dingemans, Founder of Magicianly

What Should You Fix First in Ecommerce Email Marketing?

Start with deliverability, then your signup form, then campaign frequency, then your flows. Each step makes the next one pay back faster.

Then it becomes a loop. You keep testing and you keep improving. This is not a project you finish.

In our experience, if a brand did only the first three steps properly, most would see a real difference within about six weeks. Not because any single step is magic. Because they compound.

Why Does the Order Matter So Much?

Because each step depends on the one before it, and because some fixes pay back in days while others take weeks.

A better popup does not help if new subscribers never see your emails. A stronger campaign calendar does less if hardly anyone new is joining the list. And a full flow rebuild takes weeks, while the traffic you paid for keeps leaving without giving you an email address.

Fix the pipes before you turn on the water.

Most advice puts flows before campaigns. For an account that is already running, we usually do it the other way around. Step three explains why.

This is the order of work, not a ranking of importance. How the four parts depend on each other once everything runs is covered in The Complete Ecommerce Email & SMS Marketing System.

How Do You Know Whether Your Email Marketing Is Improving?

Watch three numbers: first-to-second purchase rate, LTV by cohort and contribution margin. If those improve, the program is improving. If only attributed revenue improves, it might not be.

If you measure the wrong thing, you will optimize the wrong thing for years.

1. First-to-Second Purchase Rate

This is the percentage of customers who ever come back for a second order.

We would argue it is the single most important number in an ecommerce business, and very few brands have it on their dashboard.

When it is low, you are renting your customers: you pay to acquire someone, they buy once, and you pay again for the next one, while ad costs keep rising. When it is high, you are compounding. Same ad spend, completely different business.

It is also the hardest step. Once someone has bought twice, the third and fourth orders get much easier. So put your retention energy into that one conversion, not into perks for people who have already bought eight times.

2. LTV by Cohort

Not blended LTV. Group customers by the month they first bought, and track what each cohort is worth at 30 days, 90 days, 6 months and 12 months.

Blended LTV smooths everything out and hides whether your changes are working. If your June cohort is worth more at 90 days than your January cohort was, whatever you changed is working. If it is not, it is not.

That is your feedback loop.

3. Contribution Margin

This is the actual profit. Revenue that costs you your margin is not growth.

What About Attributed Revenue?

On its own, the share of revenue your email platform attributes to email tells you very little.

We could make that number go up tomorrow: send discount emails to the entire list. The report looks great. Meanwhile, your margin is gone, customers have learned to wait for the next sale and the list is worn out.

The number went up. The business got worse.

We report it too, because clients ask for it. It is useful context. It is not the scorecard. We explain the full set in Email Marketing Metrics for Ecommerce: The 7 Numbers That Actually Matter and the attribution problem in Klaviyo Attribution: Can You Trust the Revenue Number?

Is Email Actually Your Problem?

Not always. If customers do not like the product, no email program will save it.

People do not reorder things they did not like. If your repeat rate is low and your reviews are poor, fix the product first.

When the product is good, email and SMS are usually where the leverage is. They make every other retention lever work: they tell customers a subscription exists, remind them they have loyalty points and help them actually use what they bought. And they are the only channels where you control the timing, know exactly what someone bought and reach them again for a fraction of what an ad costs.

We cover the wider retention picture, beyond email, in Customer Retention Marketing for Ecommerce.

Step 1: Why Should You Check Deliverability First?

Because if your emails are not reaching the inbox, every improvement you make afterwards is invisible.

You can build a strong welcome flow, fix your popup and run a great campaign calendar. If those emails land in spam, none of it happened.

Deliverability problems are also sneaky. They rarely announce themselves. Revenue slowly drifts down, and the team blames the creative, the copy or the design.

How to Run a Quick Deliverability Check

1. 1Open the reports for your last five campaigns in Klaviyo or Omnisend.
2. 2Look at bounce rate, spam complaint rate and unsubscribe rate.
3. 3Break the results down by inbox provider. This is the most important part. A brand can have a problem at Outlook and Hotmail and none at Gmail, or the other way around.
4. 4Treat Apple Mail opens with caution. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflates opens, so a high open rate from Apple users proves very little.
5. 5Run a seed test. A tool such as GlockApps sends your test campaign to a list of seed inboxes and shows what share lands in the inbox, the Promotions tab or spam, along with your IP reputation and whether you appear on any blocklists.

Do this check every month, not only when you suspect a problem. The goal is to catch issues before they cost you revenue.

The Biggest Fix Is Usually the Simplest

Stop emailing people who never engage.

Send campaigns to your engaged segment. Run a proper sunset flow. Clean your list regularly.

Every inactive subscriber you keep emailing lowers the odds that your real customers see you. And you are paying your email platform for those profiles, so you are paying money to hurt your own inbox placement.

Judge engagement on more than opens, for the Apple reason above. Our email deliverability checklist and our guide to email list cleaning cover the details.

Step 2: Why Is the Signup Form the Fastest Win?

Because it is one of the highest-leverage parts of any ecommerce account, and almost nobody touches it after launch.

Most brands set up their popup once, when the store goes live, and never look at it again. Years go by.

In the accounts we open, most popups capture around 2 to 3% of visitors. We regularly get brands to 8 to 12%, and sometimes above 20%.

Run the math on 1,000 visitors a day:

Same traffic. Same ad spend. Four times as many people you can market to without paying to reach them again.

Every day you leave this unfixed is a day of paid traffic you lose for good.

What Moves the Signup Rate?

• The offer. This is the biggest lever by a mile. Most brands settle for the default 10% off, and visitors have seen that same offer on almost every other store. Look at the fastest-growing brands in your niche and you will usually see different offers: higher discounts, fixed dollar amounts, free gifts, bundles or mystery discounts. Test offers continuously, within what your margin can sustain.
• The ask. Do not open with "give me your email address." Open with a question. Once someone has answered, they are more likely to finish what they started, and you learn what they care about, which your welcome flow can use straight away.

You can build these forms in Klaviyo or Omnisend. For Shopify brands, we tend to prefer Alia, because it makes question-first, multi-step forms easy to build and test. Our Alia setup guide covers the build.

Affiliate link: we may earn a commission. We recommend Alia because we use it, not because of the commission.

What counts as a good rate, how to measure it and why the highest rate is not always the best one: What Is a Good Popup Signup Rate for Ecommerce? For timing, triggers and form structure, see our Shopify email popup guide.

Step 3: Why Do Campaigns Come Before Flows?

Because campaign frequency is the fastest revenue increase available to most ecommerce brands, and you can change it this week. Flows matter just as much, but they take far longer to rebuild properly.

Rule 1: Frequency Beats Cleverness

The biggest driver of campaign revenue is usually not your copy or your design. It is whether you send enough.

Our default is 3 to 4 campaigns a week to your engaged segment. For most established ecommerce brands, that is the sweet spot.

The objection we hear every week: "I do not want to annoy my list."

Sending less is not more respectful. It is less memorable. If a competitor shows up four times a week and you show up once, they are the brand that exists.

The other extreme is a problem too. Sending every single day, indefinitely, burns the list down: some short-term revenue, and a long-term problem.

Then get the reach right. Send to a solid engaged segment and do not over-engineer the targeting.

We like segmentation. But we regularly see brands spend hours building hyper-specific segments, send to 3,000 people out of a 50,000-person list and make almost nothing. Not because the targeting was wrong. Because they did not send to enough people.

Get frequency and reach right first. Then get clever on top of that.

Rule 2: Stop Depending on Discounts

Cap it at roughly one real sales event per month.

When you discount constantly, customers learn to wait. Full price stops being a real price. Your margin gets thinner every quarter. And your best customers, the ones who would have paid full price anyway, start holding out for the next sale.

You end up paying people to buy what they were already going to buy.

Instead, lead most emails with something other than a discount: education, one customer objection handled properly, a story, social proof, a look behind the scenes. Your product is still in the email. You are just leading with value.

One idea per email makes this much easier to execute. One objection, one benefit, one thing. An email with ten reasons to buy usually leaves people remembering none of them.

We go deeper in How Often Should Ecommerce Brands Send Marketing Emails?, Email Marketing Campaign Strategy for Ecommerce and our guide to email segmentation.

Step 4: What Should You Fix in Your Flows?

Flows are where we see the most expensive mistakes. Five fixes cover most of them.

These are fixes for flows that already exist. If you are building flows from scratch, start with The 5 Ecommerce Email Automations to Prioritize First.

Front-Load the Welcome Flow

In account after account, the overwhelming majority of welcome flow revenue happens in the first 72 hours after signup. Not the first two weeks. The first three days.

A new subscriber just found you and is probably comparing you with other brands right now. If they do not buy in that window, they either bought somewhere else or lost momentum.

So the old advice of stretching a welcome flow over 14 or 21 days leaves money on the table. Put your strongest emails early, while intent is fresh. Our welcome email series guide shows how we structure it.

Mix In Plain-Text Founder Emails

Across our accounts, plain-text emails that look like a real person wrote them in Gmail are consistently among the best performers. In an inbox full of designed image blocks, they break the pattern, and they make the brand feel human. People buy from people.

Use them as the first and last email of a flow, and in your campaigns too. More in HTML vs Plain-Text Email: Which Should Ecommerce Brands Use?

Time Winback to Your Real Repurchase Cycle

Most guides say to trigger the winback flow 90 days after the last purchase. For most brands, that is wrong, because every brand has its own natural repurchase cycle.

These are examples, not ranges to copy. Your own data decides.

If your customers naturally reorder every 30 days and your first winback email goes out on day 90, you have missed two entire purchase cycles. That customer did not go quiet. They bought somewhere else two months ago.

Find your actual average time between the first and second order in your analytics. We use Hiro for this, but any analytics that reports time between orders will do. Then trigger the winback shortly after a customer passes that window without buying. If the cycle is around 35 days, that means roughly day 40 to 45, not day 90. The setup is in How to Build a Klaviyo Winback Flow.

Map Your Flows So They Do Not Collide

Your customers do not see flow names. They just see emails from your brand.

In Klaviyo, the post-purchase flow and the winback flow are separate automations. But if your post-purchase flow runs for 40 days and your winback triggers at day 40, both can reach the same customer within days of each other.

Add 3 to 4 campaigns a week on top, and that customer could get three campaigns, a winback email and a post-purchase email in the same week.

That is when the unsubscribe rate spikes and everyone blames the copy. The real problem is timing.

Draw out when every flow and every email fires, and see where they land on top of each other. It takes an afternoon. Almost nobody does it. Our guide to ecommerce email flows covers flow hierarchy and exclusions.

Put the Cross-Sell Where Second Orders Happen

Place the cross-sell in the window where second orders usually happen. For many brands that is roughly 20 to 40 days after the first order, but check your own data first. Our post-purchase flow guide explains how to find that window.

Flows are fourth on this list because they take the longest to build. Not because they matter less.

What Does This Order Assume?

Two things.

First, that customers are already coming in and you are trying to keep them. Everything here is about retention, not acquisition.

Second, that the product is good enough to buy again. If it is not, start there.

There is also a wall many brands hit somewhere around eight figures, where growth stops being an optimization problem and becomes something else. Founders often misdiagnose it as a traffic problem. We explain it in The Real Reason 8-Figure Brands Stop Growing.

So How Do You Improve Email Marketing Performance?

Fix it in order.

Make sure your emails reach the inbox. Capture more of the traffic you already pay for. Send consistently to people who want to hear from you, without leaning on discounts. Then rebuild the flows so they fire at the right moment and do not collide.

Judge it on whether more first-time buyers come back, whether newer cohorts are worth more and whether you keep more margin.

Then repeat. If you want the frameworks, flow structures and timing in more depth, our free ecommerce email marketing course goes further than one article can.

Knowing what to do is the easy part. Doing it every week while running a business is the hard part.