Services · Growth
Retention is where
the profit lives.
Most paid acquisition is loss-making on the first sale alone. The payback only arrives when the customer comes back, and that decision is made by what happens after they buy, not by what got them through the door in the first place. Lifecycle CRM is the work that earns the second sale. It's the highest-ROI channel in most brands' stacks because it doesn't pay the acquisition tax again.
The work
Bog-standard best practice. Consistently applied.
Six workstreams. None of them clever. All of them done properly. The discipline is the whole game.
Segmentation
RFM, behavioural, value-tier, lifecycle stage. Real segments that change how you talk to people, not '90-day openers' that everyone ignores.
Journeys
Welcome. Browse abandon. Cart abandon. Post-purchase. Replenish. Winback. Reactivation. The boring list that, when it actually runs, recovers more revenue than most acquisition campaigns generate.
Offers & testing
Come up with the offer. Test it. Read the response. Drop what didn't work. Repeat. Most of the upside in CRM is sitting in this loop being run honestly instead of half-heartedly.
Channel orchestration
Email, SMS, push, orchestrated, not blasted. The customer sees one coherent stream, not three platforms competing for their attention.
Creative & copy
Template build, accessible markup, channel-native copy. The kind of work that decides whether the open turns into a click and the click turns into revenue.
Reporting that survives finance
Revenue per recipient. Cohort retention. Contribution to LTV. The numbers that explain whether the programme is working, not the opens and clicks you can already see in the platform.
The platform myth
Half the CRM vendors will set the software up for you.
None of them will run it.
There's a particular type of CRM sale where the vendor bundles in "managed onboarding", they configure the platform, hand you a clean dashboard, and walk away. Twelve months later you're paying for a platform that nothing is running on, wondering why retention metrics haven't moved.
The platform is one part of CRM. The rest, by far the harder part, is the work. Coming up with offers. Testing them. Looking at responses. Making decisions. Doing it again next week. Doing it every week for years.
We use platforms. We don't worship them. Recommendation depends on your stack, your team and your spend tier, not on which vendor's rep sponsored last week's webinar.
Platforms we run
Most of the names you've heard of.
Plus a few you haven't.
Channels
One coherent stream, six surfaces.
- EmailThe workhorse. Where most lifecycle revenue lands. Treat it well.
- SMSShort windows, high attention. For the moments email won't be opened in time.
- PushApp and web push for in-product moments where relevance matters more than reach.
- WhatsAppWhere the audience and the geography support it. Permission-first. High-trust.
- In-appNative messaging inside the product surface, for users who are already engaged.
Customer service intersection
Sometimes the most important touchpoint is a complaint.
CRM doesn't end at the email send. The customer relationship is also: what happens when a buyer messages you on Instagram. What the call-centre agent says when the line is on hold. What the help-desk reply looks like when someone is asking for a refund.
All of those are CRM events even when no automation fires. We work with internal teams and outsourced call centres to optimise the workflows around them, scripts, escalation paths, sentiment tagging, and the link back to the CRM record so the next touchpoint knows what happened on the last one.
The customer doesn't see the join between the email programme and the support inbox. They shouldn't have to.
When to talk to us
Briefs we actually want.
- → You're running high-volume paid campaigns and the LTV maths only works if customers come back.
- → You're sitting on a list of 50k+ that hasn't been mailed properly in years.
- → Your platform was set up by the vendor and nothing has happened since.
- → Your journeys exist on paper. None of them are running.
- → You need a team to run the programme, not another consultant to write a playbook.
- → You have a call centre or support desk and the CRM record doesn't know what either of them just said to the customer.
Where this plugs in
CRM is half of growth. Here's the other half.
Sitting on a list nobody's pressing the buttons on?
Tell us your platform, the size of the list and roughly how long it's been since the last properly-run programme. We'll come back inside a day with a recommendation and a rough size.
Start a conversation