The brand was spending $120K/month across Google, Meta, and TikTok at a blended 1.5 ROAS , technically generating revenue but at margins too thin to scale. Email marketing was nearly non-existent: a single welcome email with no automation, a customer list of ~4,500 contacts, and no segmentation. There was no SMS program, no affiliate strategy, and GA4 was misconfigured, producing unreliable attribution data across all channels. Leadership was making budget decisions based on platform-self-reported numbers that conflicted with each other and overstated actual performance.

The mandate: rebuild every growth channel from scratch, connect them into a unified system, and scale revenue without a proportional increase in marketing spend. The starting point before touching any campaign was a full audit of attribution infrastructure , because you cannot optimize what you cannot accurately measure.

The brand ran car giveaway sweepstakes , a model that naturally builds an excited, engaged audience around the dream of winning a vehicle. The email and SMS list was real and genuinely warm. People who sign up for a car giveaway want to hear from you. The problem was not the audience , it was what was being done with it.

Sends were happening roughly once a week, sometimes less, with no schedule and no strategy. There was no segmentation , every send went to the entire list regardless of engagement level, purchase history, or entry behavior. There was no differentiation between highly active entrants who opened everything and cold contacts who had not engaged in months. Both groups received the same message at the same frequency. The result: a 50% open rate that , while seemingly high compared to industry averages , was being dragged down by the unengaged segment, and the genuinely excited portion of the audience was being dramatically undercommunicated with.

Revenue from email and SMS was inconsistent and reactive rather than systematic. Good days happened when someone sent a particularly compelling campaign. Bad days happened when nothing went out. There was no architecture, no consistency, and no plan for extracting maximum value from a list that was primed and motivated.

The 50% open rate looked decent in isolation. But when the list was segmented for the first time , separating highly engaged contacts (opened 3 of the last 5 sends) from medium engagement (opened 1–2 of the last 5) from unengaged (opened 0 of the last 5) , the picture was very different. The genuinely engaged segment was opening at rates well above 50%. The unengaged segment was pulling the average down significantly. And more importantly: the engaged segment was being sent exactly the same cadence as everyone else , one email a week, occasionally , when they would have happily received and opened 3–4 per week.

The diagnosis was clear: the problem was not the audience quality. The problem was undercommunication with the engaged audience and the absence of any system for managing the list differently based on behavior. Fix the segmentation, fix the cadence, and both the open rate and the revenue would follow.

The 82% open rate was not achieved by sending better subject lines to the same audience. It was achieved by sending to a better-defined audience. When sends to the unengaged segment were stopped and sends to the Highly Engaged segment were increased in frequency , with content specifically calibrated to what that segment responded to (urgency, prize reveals, countdown timers) , the open rate reflected the actual engagement level of the people being reached, not the diluted average of mixing motivated and cold contacts in the same send.

The lesson: open rate improvement comes primarily from audience discipline, not creative optimization. Sending better emails to a poorly defined audience produces modest improvement. Sending relevant emails at the right frequency to a well-defined engaged segment produces step-change improvement.

Wrath & Remedy had built a real skincare brand , a distinctive product line with a clear identity, a growing customer base through their Shopify store, and genuine market traction. What they did not have was any system for communicating with that customer base after the initial acquisition. The Klaviyo account existed but was essentially empty. No welcome series had been built. No abandoned cart flow was in place. No post-purchase sequence existed to drive repeat business. No segmentation had been applied to distinguish between new customers, returning buyers, lapsed contacts, or engaged browsers.

The consequence was predictable and significant: a substantial volume of revenue that should have been captured automatically was simply not being captured at all. Every customer who abandoned a cart left without a recovery attempt. Every new subscriber received no brand introduction, no product education, no incentive to make a first purchase. Every buyer completed their order and received no follow-up to encourage a second one. The entire lifecycle layer of the business , the part of e-commerce that generates revenue without additional ad spend , was absent.

The engagement was a full build: design the architecture, build every flow, write the content and copy frameworks, implement the segmentation, connect the Shopify integration correctly, and optimize each flow based on performance data after launch.

Revenue per recipient (RPR) measures how much revenue is generated for every contact a flow email is sent to. A $1.00+ RPR means that for every single email delivered within the flow system, one dollar or more of revenue is attributed. This is a demanding benchmark , it means the flows are reaching the right people with the right message at the right moment, and those people are converting at rates that justify the infrastructure. For a skincare brand with a mid-range AOV, achieving $1+ RPR requires flows that are well-timed, well-segmented, and well-written. It cannot be achieved by generic batch-and-blast automation. It requires an architecture that treats different customer behaviors differently and communicates accordingly.

Skincare is one of the highest-lifetime-value categories in DTC e-commerce for two reasons: products are consumable (they run out and need replenishing), and results take time (customers who see results become loyal buyers). Both of these characteristics make lifecycle marketing particularly high-leverage. A customer who buys a cleanser once and sees results over 6–8 weeks becomes a repeat buyer for years if the brand stays in communication at the right moments. An automated email sent at the product replenishment window , exactly when the customer is running low , captures that repeat purchase without any additional acquisition cost. For Wrath & Remedy, building the lifecycle infrastructure was not just about the immediate revenue generated by the flows. It was about building the retention engine that makes the brand's unit economics compound over time.

Hartville Potato Chips had built something worth being proud of. A real product, made with care, with an existing fan base in northeast Ohio. But the brand's reach had a ceiling. They were not in the major grocery chains. They had no presence outside of their immediate market. And they had no structured plan for how to get there.

The goal was clear: get on more shelves, in more stores, in more states. But retail expansion is not as simple as calling a grocery chain and asking for a spot. It requires knowing where consumers expect to find a product like yours, understanding how shelf placement affects purchase behavior, building the right online presence to give buyers and category managers something to look at, and having a social media footprint that shows the brand is real and growing.

Our team came in to build the foundation for all of that. Online marketplace strategy, in-store placement research, pop-up and display positioning, and an organic social media plan designed to support the retail push with brand visibility and credibility.

Getting a local food brand onto regional grocery shelves is one of the harder problems in consumer packaged goods marketing. The brand has to appeal to two different buyers at the same time: the end consumer who will actually pick the product off the shelf, and the category buyer or store manager who decides whether to carry it at all.

Category buyers at grocery chains want to see that a brand has traction. They want evidence of consumer demand before they commit shelf space. They look at things like social media presence, online reviews, sales velocity at current retail locations, and whether the product is positioned in a way that fits the category expectations of their shoppers. For a small brand trying to scale, this creates a real challenge: you need retail presence to build credibility, but you need credibility to get retail presence.

Our approach was to build the credibility infrastructure first, run the research to understand where Hartville Potato Chips belonged in the store environment, and then use that foundation to support the retail conversations that followed.

Retail expansion for a local food brand is a long game. The research, strategy, and positioning work we delivered did not produce results overnight. What it did was give Hartville Potato Chips a credible foundation to have better conversations with grocery buyers, a clearer sense of where they belonged in the store environment, and a digital presence that supported those conversations rather than undermining them.

The results that followed, placement in every Giant Eagle and Heinen's location in Ohio and surrounding states, and expansion into three states outside of Ohio, came from executing against that foundation. The brand had always had a great product. They now had the strategy and the infrastructure to match.

Pull Tab Palooza is a fundraising event run by Ronald McDonald House Charities. The organization provides housing and support to families with seriously ill children receiving hospital care. The event raises real money for a cause that genuinely matters, and it already had a loyal audience. The challenge was growing it, year over year, without the budget to run paid ads.

The goal coming in was straightforward: make the 2024 Pull Tab Palooza the biggest one to date, spend as little as possible, and leave the organization with something more durable than a single successful event. A list. An owned audience they could reach directly the next time, and the time after that, without relying on a platform algorithm to do it for them.

Ronald McDonald House had a social following. People engaged with their content. Posts got seen, shared, liked. But every time someone liked a post and kept scrolling, that attention was gone. The organization had earned it and immediately lost it. They did not own those people. They could not reach them again for free tomorrow. They were entirely dependent on the platform deciding to show their next post to the same people.

This is the difference between earned media and owned media. Earned media is attention you get on someone else's platform. Owned media is attention you have captured into your own system: an email list, an SMS list, a database of people who have said yes to hearing from you again. The strategy for Pull Tab Palooza was to use social media as the engine that generated attention, and then convert that attention into owned contacts at every possible step.

Most event marketing stops when the event ends. The attendance numbers go in a report, and the organization starts from scratch next year. This approach was designed differently. The list built through content, website capture, and the on-site giveaway does not reset. It carries forward. Every person who gave their contact information in 2024 is a warm contact for the 2025 event before the organization has published a single post.

For a non-profit without an ad budget, this kind of compounding owned audience is the most valuable marketing asset possible. Email and SMS reach does not cost money to send. It does not depend on an algorithm deciding to show your message. It goes directly to people who have already said they are interested. That is what was built here, and it will keep delivering value long after 2024.