Retain.
Win-back messages go to customers who never left, and three automated messages can land on one person in a day. Retain builds a single rule set for who gets which message, so your retention program runs on what you already know about the people who bought: what they ordered, when, and how often.
What your repeat customers are worth.
Most ecommerce brands pour the bulk of their marketing budget into acquiring new customers while existing buyers quietly slip away. Chasing acquisition alone is an uphill battle.
One customer record
- Orders
- Last purchase
- Products viewed
- Preferred channel
- Consent
When someone…
- Browses, doesn’t buy, the flow is Browse recovery
- Places a first order, the flow is Second purchase
- Due to run out, the flow is Replenishment
- Goes quiet, the flow is Win-back
One rule set: who gets what, how often
- SMS
- Push
- Of email revenue comes from automated flows, which make up only 5.3% of sends. Source: vendor benchmark data, 2026.
- Nearly 41%
- Of customers place a second order within a year. Of those who do reorder, about three in four do it within 90 days. Source: agency data across 156,110 customers, 2026.
- 18.8%
What a growth agency does in retention.
A single rule set for who may receive what, built around the data you already have.
What we actually build: one rule set for who may receive what. Second-purchase, replenishment, and win-back journeys. Subscription save flows. A cap on total messages per person, so nobody gets three offers in a day. For brands with enough order history, a data layer that scores every customer nightly and logs every decision it makes.
Customer support and fulfillment stay with your team. We build what decides who gets which message, not who answers the phone.
It starts with the data: your own customer data gets segmented by purchase recency, reorder frequency, product interest, and spend, so every message afterward is aimed at someone specific, not the whole list. Those flows run across email, SMS, and mobile push together, so the channels back each other up instead of hitting the same subscriber three times in one afternoon, and the loop closes through your support and review tools, so a critical review routes to support while a strong one earns a spot in a loyalty tier.
Why hire a growth agency for retention?
Retention is not a campaign, it is a rule set, and that is the hard part. In-house teams get pulled toward generic batch-and-blast newsletters, or reach for ad spend on a slow day, because those are the moves you can make this afternoon. An engine that runs itself off customer behavior has to be designed deliberately, and building it is real work.
It also takes a stack that agrees with itself: your storefront, your email and SMS platform, your helpdesk, and your review and loyalty tools, connected instead of left as six separate sources, each holding its own partial idea of who your customer is. Six half-pictures do not add up to one customer.
And it takes a way of keeping score that ties back to the numbers we move directly: repeat purchase rate, time between purchases, and cohort retention, read at every monthly review rather than promised in advance.
The Tarsus Retention Strategy.
Our retention strategy starts with what you already have: the flows that are live, the segments in use, and the data moving between your store and your messaging tools. Before we build anything new, we find where repeat purchases come from today and where they're being lost.
Next comes the data. Retention depends on clean, connected customer data, so we map what you collect, fix what doesn't match up, and define the segments every message will be aimed at.
Then we build: the flows, the messages inside them, the segment logic behind them, and the connections between the tools that carry them. We roll it out in stages and test each piece on a smaller audience before it reaches your full list.
After launch, the work keeps going. Buying behavior shifts, the catalog changes, and new patterns show up in the data, so we keep adding flows, refining segments, and moving the program along with your customers.
Helpful resources.
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