#75 - Popups, Deliverability and CX Fires

Hello! It’s been awhile since I wrote one of these.

Been super busy with working on a couple of interesting ‘problems’ we ran into for our accounts, and wanted to share with you what ‘alerted’ us as well as how we fixed it.

As you’ve seen from the title, there’s 3 in total - a popup, deliverability, plus a CX fire.

Let’s dive into it.

1) Pop-Up (The Freebie Everyone Stopped Caring About)

We had a brand that had been running the same pop-up offer all year:
‘Free towel with your order’.

Reason behind it was simply because margins were thin, and it was unsustainable to continue providing discounts.

In theory, it was a good offer. Who doesn’t like free products right?

But because much of the 2024 strategy relied tapping on this angle, we were seeing submission rates start to drop.

Our theory was:
- returning customers had already received it
- first timers didn’t see it as a strong enough reason to act

Our fix? Replacing the freebie with a more universally appealing offer - free shipping on all US orders.

Opt-in rates jumped:
📱 +139% on mobile
🖥️ +171% on desktop

Turns out, not all incentives are created equal.

The “gift” wasn’t compelling enough.

Free shipping felt more immediate, more valuable (even if it cost less).

And that’s why we always test our pop-up offers.

2) Deliverability’s Slow Decline

One of our clients saw a slow decline in campaign engagement across March and April.

- Open rates dropped from ~50% to 44%
- Click rates dropped from 1% to 0.4 - 0.6%

No major changes.
Litmus and Postmaster looked clean.
Creative and cadence were solid.

Still, something felt off, so we took a look.

Turns out, the dip was coming from Gmail/Outlook, and that they were 'probably' pushing emails into spam, despite everything looking 'fine' on paper.

So we swapped campaign sends to plain text for those two ISPs.
Left HTML for the rest.

Within 2 weeks:
📫 Opens climbed back to 50%+
📫 Clicks up past 1%

I know open rates are not incredibly accurate right now with all Apple’s shenanigans. But it’s a great north star metric you should always look out for, because it almost always starts there.

3) Shipping Delays (CX Nightmare)

Wouldn’t wish this on any brand, but if you’ve been in the game long enough, I’m certain you’ve ran into this one point or another.

One of our brands had their fulfillment pipeline get messy, orders piled up and complaints started rolling in.

Their initial plan was to send a quick apology email to ease tensions.

We agreed, but we suggested to really lean into the moment to give customers another reason to engage.

We did this by writing the apology, but also pairing it with a free shipping voucher, good for one week only.

Result:
👉 Click-through rate: 6.54%
👉 Conversion rate: 1.48%
👉 Highest attributed revenue campaign email of 2025 to date

It turned a negative moment into a high performing retention moment.

Sometimes, empathy + going above and beyond really helps the brand.

And that’s a wrap!

Hope that was a helpful, and we’ll see you next week.

p.s. if you’re searching for a retention agency that actually knows what they’re doing, you know where to find us :)