The three levers most brands miss

Happy Wednesday!

Most "my retention isn't working" calls I take come down to the same three checks. I run them in the same order every time, before I touch a single campaign report or open the segmentation tab.

Signup form conversion rate, whether double opt-in is turned on, and the architecture of the welcome flow itself. Ten minutes total, in that order, because each fix makes the next one matter more.

I opened a Klaviyo audit last week and walked through the same sequence. The first thing I always look at is the form, and this one was converting at 0.5%, which isn't catastrophic, just the kind of number a founder glances at and assumes is fine because it's running.

The signup form is lever one

A great signup form converts at around 5%. That's a 10x gap in how many people enter your retention program, and a 10x gap in flow revenue, campaign revenue, and basically every downstream lever you have.

The signup form is the cheapest thing in the account to fix, and the multiplier on a fix is brutally in your favor. Going from 0.5% to 5% means 10x more subscribers from the exact same traffic you already paid for.

Most underperforming forms share the same pattern. A static popup, a generic discount code, too many required fields before the offer unlocks, and no second step to capture phone separately.

When the form is the bottleneck, no downstream tactic saves you. You can have the best welcome flow in your category and it doesn't matter, because almost nobody is entering it. Fix the form first. Everything compounds from there.

Double opt-in is quietly killing your funnel

The second check is whether double opt-in is turned on. I'm still surprised how often it is.

Double opt-in sounds responsible on paper, a cleaner list, fewer bots, a better deliverability story to tell yourself. In practice, when I've measured it across accounts, about half the people who click the original opt-in never actually confirm and never receive the first welcome email.

Half the funnel dies in the gap between intent and delivery, and the subscriber doesn't even know they've been dropped. If you have a real deliverability problem, double opt-in can earn its place, but nine times out of ten you don't have that problem and you just inherited the setting on the list from whoever set up the account two years ago.

Go check it right now if you haven't in a while. It takes thirty seconds and it's worth the trip.

What your welcome flow is missing

The third check is the welcome flow itself, because in most accounts I open it's the single highest-revenue-generating flow in the program. If it's underbuilt, it isn't a small leak, it's the main one.

There are three things I want to see in a welcome flow, and most accounts are missing at least one.

1. Two emails in the first 24 hours

Founders are scared of looking annoying, so they wait two or three days for the second send, and they leave real revenue on the floor because of it. When I actually pull the data, unsubscribes and spam complaints don't spike on a second day-one email.

The second send converts at a lower rate than the first, sure, but it still converts, and you only get one shot at the moment somebody is paying attention to your brand.

2. Every email needs a distinct angle

I see flows where email one, two, and three are basically the same message with different subject lines, all leading to the same product grid. That isn't a flow, that's the same email sent three times.

Every email in the welcome series should have a job, whether it's social proof, the founder story, bestseller recommendations, or product education. If you can't say in a sentence why a specific email exists and why a subscriber should care, cut it or rewrite it.

3. Urgency at the end, when there's an offer

If your welcome flow gives somebody a code, that code is the lever that gets them to actually buy, and the forcing function on the lever is expiration. Most brands give the code on email one and then never mention that it expires, so subscribers sit on it forever, which functionally means never.

Tell them the code expires. Push that line in the last email of the sequence. A specific deadline converts better than a vague "limited time only" because the reader actually has a reason to act now.

The order matters

That's the audit. Signup form, double opt-in, welcome flow architecture, in that order every time, because each one compounds the next.

Or just reply to this email. I read every one.

Have a great week. Go check your form before you trust the rest of the account.

- Raymond