How we'd take a sleep brand from 11% to 30% email revenue

Concept project: fictional brand, built to show our process. We won't invent client results, so we show the whole process instead. No client data was used. Every brand number below is invented and labeled as such, every benchmark is sourced, and every outcome is a target, never a claimed result.

Meet Hushwell

Hushwell is an invented DTC sleep-supplement brand: magnesium glycinate gummies, capsules and a drink mix, positioned as the anti-melatonin. We don't knock you out, we wind you down. It runs on Shopify, Klaviyo and Recharge, with about $4.2M in annual revenue, 38,000 profiles and 26% of orders on subscription. Email brings in 11% of revenue, and the open rate fell from 42% to 29% in six months.

What we found

The audit is the product. These are the eight findings we would hand this brand.

1. Deliverability decay is self-inflicted. Full-list sends to 13,500 never-engaged profiles, no DMARC enforcement and no sunset flow. The drop from 42% to 29% opens is inbox placement, not email fatigue.

2. The best flow in the category doesn't exist. Supplement replenishment flows earn about $4 to $8 per recipient, the highest of any flow (Gosh Digital flow benchmarks). Hushwell has none, while thousands of buyers pass their reorder window with no trigger.

3. The subscription is a leaky bucket. Monthly churn is 8.9% against a 7.4% benchmark, 61% of cancels come in the first two renewals, and cancelling is one click with no pause, skip or swap.

4. The welcome flow sells a discount, not a ritual. Two emails, discount first. The category's best (AG1) runs an eight-email education arc with no discount in the welcome.

5. One segment: everyone. No RFM, no subscriber split, and subscribers who paid full price get 25%-off blasts days later.

6. No habit-compliance drip. A sleep product needs five to seven nights to show value, and nothing teaches the routine.

7. Campaigns are noise, not a program. Random promos, no calendar, no reorder prompt on content emails.

8. Quiz data is buried. 13,500 quiz-takers shared their sleep goal, and no email uses it.

What we'd build

A 14-flow program in place of the current four: an eight-email education welcome (no discount until the last email), sleep-quiz follow-up split by goal, browse abandon, rebuilt abandoned checkout, a four-email compliance drip, SKU-based replenishment 5 to 10 days before run-out, a subscription nudge, a reason-mapped cancel flow, post-cancel win-back, sunset, back-in-stock, cross-sell, VIP recognition and lead re-engagement.

Segmentation layers engagement tiers, RFM and quiz sleep goal, with recent buyers suppressed from discount campaigns. The calendar is two sends a week at most: education on Monday, social proof or a product spotlight on Thursday, and one promo a month capped at 20%.

What we'd measure

All of these are targets, not results.

• Email share of revenue: 11% to 30% (Benchmark: supplements and wellness run 28 to 35% email-only, top performers 40 to 48%)

• Monthly subscriber churn: 8.9% to 6.5%

• Second-order conversion: 58% to 75%

• Open rate recovery: 29% to 38 to 42%

• Subscription mix: 26% to 40%

• Replenishment revenue per recipient, tracked against the $4 to $8 benchmark

Closing the gap from 11% to 30% on $350K a month would be worth about $66.5K a month, or $798K a year, at current revenue. Klaviyo's own data shows flows producing about 41% of email revenue from 5.3% of sends, which is why the build is the return.

How to read this

Three kinds of numbers appear on this page. Invented numbers are part of the fictional brief. Benchmark numbers come from published sources and are attributed. Target numbers are what we would design toward. When we have real client results, they get their own pages, held to the same standard.

What a real engagement looks like

A real engagement runs in three steps: the audit, the foundation build, then a monthly retainer. The audit is free for a limited time, and you keep the written report either way. It covers deliverability, flow gaps, segmentation, list health, and what closing the gap is worth in revenue.

Get the audit