The first 30 days are the greatest leverage you have as a retention marketer for a DTC brand.

I’d go as far as to say that 80% of your work should be focused on optimising and meticulously testing this window of opportunity to maximise repeat sales.

What’s the logic behind this thinking?

There are 3 compelling reasons why:

Repurchase rates fall dramatically post-30 days for most DTC brands (and by day 90, off a cliff for many!)
Email (and SMS) engagement plummets post-30 days as the user encounters message fatigue from the brand
The customer determines whether the product is valuable or not (which drives the repeat purchase) during the first 30 days

Here’s an exaggerated chart from one of our clients that illustrates this critical period to make an impact:

Granted, not ALL charts are this extreme, but most illustrate the opportunity we have to make an impact during this period.

If you look at cohorts for brands that sell 1-time purchase items, it becomes even more evident of the main period to focus on:

No matter the industry or utilisation of the item being sold, most repeat sales happen either within the first 90 days or due to seasonality trends and big promotional events (i.e. Black Friday).

Now, I’m not suggesting to not bother with people who fall outside of this window – far from it.

But we must be pragmatic about where to focus the majority of our efforts and also what is best for cashflow for most brands.

We know when customers first buy, they’re very warm and “in the market” for our solutions (95:5 rule).

Depending on the purchase latency of your product, they may not be back in the market for a long period of time.

We also know that they’ll start paying less attention to your messages after the first 30 days as they become lost in the noise (or they churn over the communication channel).

Practically speaking, it’s also evident that unless the customer has a great experience with the product and customer service during this period, our marketing efforts to bring them back are going to be like pushing a boulder uphill.

With all this being said, here’s how I approach this period to drive the most incremental impact for a brand’s retention efforts.

A 3-Pronged Retention Approach

Taking into account all of the above, I believe we need to focus on 3 objectives during this period. These are:

Upselling
Providing an amazing customer experience
Driving product activation

Let’s dive into some specific strategies for each.

1: Upselling with Email & SMS

There are two obvious touchpoints you can implement to drive repeat sales during this period of time.

The first is with an immediate order bump that’s delivered to people in the form of an exclusive offer over email or SMS to capitalise on their intent.

Here’s an example of this:

The second is based on when the item is frequently repurchased (for example, if it was a consumable that lasted 28 days, you would want to try to start a replenishment upsell around day 25 as the user neared the end of their product).

Here are some examples of how you can leverage timing to drive this:

Ideally, these should be sent after the customer has an amazing experience with the product. Which leads us onto number 2.

2: Amazing Customer Experience

When we think about delivering an incredible customer experience for shoppers, there’s a myriad of options that spring to mind.

However, in keeping things simple, there are really two key areas you need to focus on before the rest is left to fate:

Ensuring the customer is aware when their order is going to be shipped and where it’s up to during the delivery process
Proactively checking in to ensure they’re getting the most out of their experience

Both of these options can be easily automated and enrich the customer experience.

For number 1, get all your main order tracking touchpoints set up via a 3rd-party app linking to your ESP like Wonderment.

These emails & SMS drive incredible click-through rates and often lead to more revenue via customers landing back on your website and browsing again, not to mention reducing customer support tickets.

To ensure we’re proactively taking care of the customer, we’ll also want to send in a quick check-in as well (plain text) from customer support like this:

Not only does this show that we care and potentially initiate an upsell opportunity, but it can also help to mitigate negative reviews by encouraging the customer to flag any concerns they have here.

This email also serves as an excellent qualitative touchpoint to help you gather feedback to improve the product formulation and positioning of what you’re selling in general.

Mine the insights, summarise them periodically with chatGPT, and act upon the feedback to strengthen the customer journey.

3: Driving Product Activation

Customers need accountability in order to drive a repeat sale.

If they don’t get value from the product, why would they ever consider buying it again?

SaaS companies have known this for a long time but in DTC, product activation is done very poorly.

We must dedicate a significant amount of attention to driving usage from the customer in order for them to see the product's value, otherwise, we reduce our chances of a repeat sale ever happening.

One of my favourite examples of this was when we worked with Waterdrop, and their “Drink More Water” challenge: