A recommendation without a number is a wish

Happy Wednesday!

I got on a call this week with a brand's CRM lead and their founders. The CRM lead said "let's build out that flow," and honestly, it made sense in the moment. The founder needed it, everyone was nodding along, and the whole thing sailed through on agreement.

That's the moment most retention work goes sideways. If the person recommending the flow can't put a number next to it, they're hoping, not projecting. I don't recommend anything I can't back with math, and the math is simpler than most people make it sound.

Here's the thing audits get wrong. You get handed a document full of "add this, fix that," ten or fifteen line items deep, and nothing in it tells you which fix is worth a designer's afternoon and which one is worth a quarter of your revenue. Everything is listed at the same weight, so everything feels equally urgent, which means nothing actually gets prioritized.

The fix starts before you ever look at what's broken. It starts with knowing what could exist.

Start with the menu, not the mess

I keep a running picture in my head of every flow a healthy Klaviyo account could run. Welcome for first-time buyers, abandoned checkout, browse abandonment, post-purchase, win-back, replenishment, and a handful of others depending on the brand. Call it the menu, the full set of flows that should be on the table for a DTC product brand.

You read a leak by laying the live account down next to that menu and finding the gaps. Most accounts I open are running four or five flows out of a possible dozen. Each thing that's missing isn't a vague "opportunity," it's a specific hole, and the next move is putting a number on it.

Once you can see the holes, the next move is pricing them.

The math is one line

The math is one line: net new revenue equals recipients times blended average order value times conversion rate. Recipients is how many people would enter the flow, counted over a full year so the output is annual. Blended average order value (AOV) is what that cohort spends per order on average, and conversion rate (CVR) is the share of those recipients a well-built flow actually turns into buyers.

Walk it in plain English. Count the people who'd enter the flow over a year, multiply by the blended AOV, multiply by a realistic CVR, and you've got a defensible annual revenue figure for that one gap. A seven-figure operator should be able to redo it on a napkin.

Let me run round numbers so the shape is clear. Say about 2,000 people a month browse and leave without buying, which is 24,000 recipients a year, at a blended AOV of $80 and a CVR of 2%. That's 24,000 times $80 times 2%, or roughly $38,000 a year from that one flow, and depending on how good the flow is you'd call it somewhere between $30,000 and $55,000.

Those are illustrative numbers, not a client's results. The point isn't the dollar figure, it's that the method is legible. Anyone you're working with can see exactly where each number came from and check your work.

What it adds up to

A recommendation without a number is a wish. One with math behind it is a plan. The menu tells you what's missing, the formula tells you what it's worth, and the data is what you stand behind.

That's the whole method. Steal it.

If you want every gap in your account sized this way, I'll run you a free deep-dive audit. It's 100% free and yours to keep even if we never work together, roughly a 20-to-25-page audit plus a 15-to-20-page recommendation doc, every projection backed by the math above.

- Raymond