Which flows should carry product recs?

Happy Wednesday (or Thursday, this week, calendar got the better of me).

Every retention flow has the same job. Push the subscriber further down toward a purchase. The question that quietly leaks revenue is whether product recommendations belong inside that push.

I audited two accounts this week where this exact problem was costing real money. Both brands had clean designs, decent copy, and flows that had been "on" for over a year. The leak was the wrong kind of product content sitting in the wrong flow.

Browse abandonment

Browse is the one flow where related products belong. The subscriber was window shopping, they left without picking anything specific, and showing them three more items in the same category still pushes them down toward a purchase.

If someone bounces from your hydration serum page, showing them three more serums in the same family is on-brief. They hadn't picked their lane yet, so widening the lane is the right move.

Add to cart

The minute a subscriber adds something to a cart, the rules change. They picked. The job of every email in this flow is to get them back to that specific item, not lateral to a different one.

One of the audits this week proved it cleanly. ATC Email 2 carried product recommendations alongside the cart-contents block and earned $0.44 in revenue per recipient. ATC Email 3 dropped the recs, went cart-only, and earned $5.64.

The recs were not helping Email 2. They were taxing it. Every product tile next to the cart contents is a tiny invitation to navigate away from the only action that matters.

Abandoned checkout

If add-to-cart is close to converting, abandoned checkout is closer than the subscriber will ever be. They have entered their email, sometimes their shipping, sometimes their card. A "best sellers" row at this point pulls attention sideways into a decision they already made.

The other audit this week was a $124K abandoned-checkout flow over 13 weeks. The flow had product-suggestion blocks layered on top of cart contents in three of the four emails.

The fix is not optimization. The fix is deletion. Remove the suggestion blocks from cart and checkout flows entirely and let the cart speak for itself.

Cross-sell (post-purchase)

Cross-sell is the one flow where product recs are the email's only job. The catch is timing. The subscriber has paid, but they have not yet received, opened, or used the product they paid for.

Asking them to spend again before they have experienced any value from the first purchase is the wrong recommendation at the wrong moment. Cross-sell works, but only after delivery signals and usage windows have fired. Anything earlier is a discount on the trust they just gave you.

Winback / reactivation

Winback is the flow people get backwards most often. The relationship is cold, the subscriber has not opened in months, and the brand sends them the highest-AOV bundle or a complicated cross-sell, and the flow earns nothing.

A cold subscriber gets a small ask. Entry-level price point, single product, low friction. Not the hero SKU and not the bundle.

The hygiene check

For every flow in the account, ask one question of every block. Does the product content inside this email match where the subscriber is in the funnel?

That is the entire audit. It is not a strategy session, it is a 30-minute pass through the flows in order, with a finger on the "remove block" button.

You look at a flow, block by block, and reason out what each one's job is and whether the product content matches. That's the thinking I see lacking most in retention work.

Every flow points down. The leak is what kind of product content sits inside. Zero technology, zero new emails, zero new copy. Just a 30-minute review of which blocks appear in which flow, and the leaks close themselves.

If you want me to find these exact leaks in your account, book a time below.

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

Go run the matrix on your own account.

- Raymond