Retention marketing for people doing the work
Guides to retention marketing and the email marketing tools you run it on, including where AI is starting to change the job.
- What retention rate, churn and lifetime value measure, and how to calculate each one.
- Email marketing tools compared on price, plan limits and who each one suits.
- How AI is used in retention today, from churn prediction to picking the next offer.
Latest
Hard bounce vs soft bounce: should you resend the email?
Learn the difference between hard and soft email bounces, read the full failure reason, and decide when to retry, suppress an address or investigate your sending setup.
SPF vs DKIM vs DMARC: what does each one do?
Understand SPF, DKIM and DMARC, why passing checks can still fail alignment, and how to audit authentication on an actual marketing email.
Should you use a subdomain for email marketing?
Separate marketing, transactional and staff email with a practical sending-domain plan. Check authentication, actual routing and the limits of reputation isolation.
What is one-click unsubscribe, and does a footer link count?
Understand Gmail and Yahoo's one-click unsubscribe rules, then audit message headers, request handling and the contacts your marketing sends exclude.
Can you trust email open rates?
Understand how privacy loads, blocked images and bots affect email open rates. Check report settings before judging a campaign or resending to non-openers.
Single vs double opt-in: which should you use for email?
Choose an email opt-in method, audit confirmation and welcome-message failures, and compare usable subscribers without mistaking a higher rate for more customers.
Everything so far, grouped
The basics
What retention marketing covers, and where the numbers most often used to justify it come from.
The numbers
Most of these metrics have more than one published formula, and the answer can move a lot between them. Each guide sets the versions side by side.
Email flows
The automated emails a store sends, what starts each one, and where the published guides disagree about how to set it up.
Segments and targeting
Splitting one list into groups that each get a different email, and the scoring methods used to decide who goes where.
AI in retention
How churn prediction, predicted lifetime value and next-best-action work, and how to read what each model gives back.
Choosing a tool
Email platforms compared by the reason you are looking, with prices and plan limits dated to the day they were read.
Three ways in
Pick whichever sounds most like where you are.
New to retention marketing
Start with the numbers retention teams report on. Each guide explains what the metric measures, how to calculate it, and where the definitions differ.
Start readingWorking with the tools
Choosing an email platform, or leaving one? The tool lists sort the options by why you are looking, with prices and plan limits from each vendor.
Tool lists and comparisonsKeeping up with AI
AI is turning up in churn prediction, lifetime value forecasts and offer selection. These guides explain what the models do and which decisions are still yours.
Start with AI in email marketing