Customer retention automation for ecommerce brands

Where does an ecommerce brand lose repeat orders?

The first order is the expensive one. You paid for the click, the page and often a discount. The second order costs one well-timed message, and it only arrives if someone remembers to send it.

• A customer buys once and hears nothing until the next sale email goes to the whole list.
• Products that run out on a known cycle get no reminder near the reorder date.
• Review requests go out when someone has a spare hour, so they are irregular.
• Orders sit in the store, spend sits in the ad accounts, and nobody can see the repeat rate without building a spreadsheet.

None of these is a traffic problem. They are follow-up and reporting problems, so that is what we build. Our retail and ecommerce page covers the wider picture.

Which three solutions fit an ecommerce brand?

You do not need all three at once. The order depends on which leak is biggest in your store, and that is what the audit measures.

What is it worth? Do the sum

The leak, in an owner's words: "People buy once and we never see them again." This is what the follow-up system does about it.

1. An order is placed. The customer and the product are recorded against it.
2. After delivery, a review request goes out.
3. Near the date the product is due to run out, a reminder goes out with a link straight to reorder.
4. If a set period passes with no new order, the win-back sequence starts. It stops the moment the customer buys or opts out.
5. The dashboard shows how many second orders each sequence produced, so you can cut the ones that do nothing.

The sum for this lever is customers, multiplied by extra purchases, multiplied by value.

What to count	Example figure
Customers who bought once in the last year and not again	3,000
Share who place one more order after a reminder or win-back	1 in 20
Extra orders a year (3,000 ÷ 20)	150
Average order value	£60
Worth (150 × £60)	£9,000 a year

Example figures. Swap in your own. These are made-up round numbers that show the method. They are not a result, an average or a benchmark.

To get your own number, count three things in your store: customers who ordered once in the last 12 months, your average order value, and how many of them already come back with no prompt. Bring those to a call. The paid audit then prices each leak in its written report.

When your store's built-in emails are enough

• You sell something people rarely buy twice. Retention has little to work on. Put the money into the first order.
• Your store platform already sends reorder, win-back and review emails, and you can see the repeat rate. Keep them. Improve the wording before you pay for a build.
• You take a small number of orders a month. The sum above will come out small. Run it before you call us.
• Your range changes every few weeks. Settle it first, then time reminders to it.

A custom build earns its place when timing depends on your products, when your data lives in several tools, or when the standard reports cannot answer your questions. Our guide to custom software vs SaaS goes through that choice. If a build is not right for you, we will say so on the first call.

What does it cost?

Every build starts with a paid audit at £3,000 plus VAT. The written report arrives within 10 working days. The fee is credited against the build when the build deposit is paid within 14 days of the report. Details are on the audit pricing page.

Scoped builds run from £5,000 to £20,000. Before the audit we give a range, never an exact price. Sequences on top of a store that already holds clean order data sit low in that range. A dashboard across several ad accounts, or new pages, moves it up. The timeline is agreed in the written scope.

Running costs such as email and text sending, hosting and software are paid directly to the providers from your own accounts. Ongoing changes are optional under Run & Improve, from £1,000 a month.

What have we built that works this way?

We keep proof to what we can show. MRM Group is a UK property development and investment company, a different industry from ecommerce, but the mechanism is close. We built a public funnel connected to its CRM, task workflows and reminders, and operational reporting, with human approval at sensitive points. That describes the build only. Read the MRM Group case study.

Your build follows the same rules. It sits in your accounts, and you own the code and the data. Any message sent in your name is approved by you before a sequence goes live. Each stage is set out in our approach.