The retention journal
The Retentionist is a working journal on customer retention in ecommerce. We read the platform benchmarks, take the flows apart and write down what actually brings buyers back: email and SMS, loyalty, win-back and the numbers behind repeat purchases.
Merchants asking what a loyalty point should cost usually reach for an industry rule of thumb, but the honest answer is that the question cannot be settled with a loyalty number at all because no dataset here measures loyalty points, so what actually settles is which platform tier and theme foundation you build the program on.
The usual answer treats deliverability as a theme setting you can toggle, but the actual requirements live in sender authentication rules from Google, not in any Shopify theme's code, and confusing the two wastes time a store owner does not have.
Eleven real browse abandonment emails from a documented public roundup, read for patterns instead of pretty screenshots. The good ones share four moves, and almost none of them lead with a discount.
Omnisend published conversion data from 1.24 billion form displays, which means list growth advice no longer has to be folklore. Eight tactics with a measured lift, one with a measured penalty, ranked by what the data says.
No vendor publishes a headline list growth benchmark, but the inputs are all on the record: capture converts at 2.1% on popups and 6.47% on landing pages, and every campaign send costs about 0.2% of its audience in unsubscribes. The formula does the rest.
It fires earlier than cart recovery, reaches a far bigger audience, and opens at 42%. The published data on browse abandonment explains both why stores skip it and why the ones that build it keep it running.