Your agency might be improving your dashboard while emptying your bank account
Blasting promotional campaigns at subscribers in the middle of onboarding makes the dashboard look great and quietly costs you LTV.
The reason I'm writing this post is because I got triggered several times during my latest retention audits.
I'll be honest: most subscription brands have a crappy post-purchase experience.
They either don't have one at all, or they have a founder "thank you" email, 1-2 flashy Figma emails about benefits timeline, and maybe 1-2 cross-sell emails that make 0 impact.
That's the reality.
But I did come across a few brands lately that had a damn good automated post-purchase experience:
- Proper pre-delivery experience
- Excellent product onboarding
- Habit-forming content
- Zero-party data collection
- Strategic and well-timed upsells
- Optimized billing reminder
Whether the flows were set up by their current agency or someone else, I don't know.
But I do know one thing: their current agency had 0 regard for people sitting inside that post-purchase experience.
You simply can't do this
Here's what I noticed:
The agency was sending weekly promotional campaigns to their entire engaged segment of people, including active product subscribers on Recharge or Skio, who were in the middle of the automated post-purchase experience.
The automated post-purchase experience was excellent. Every touchpoint had its own purpose, doing its own job.
And then - promotional weekly campaigns to those same subscribers, with a CTA to buy the very product they're already subscribed to...
Imagine what that feels like for the customer.
One day they receive an "order delivered" email. The next day they receive a gamified email educating them on how to use the product properly.
Then all of a sudden, a flashy campaign with a CTA to buy the exact product that's already shipping to them every month...
How does that make any sense?
Why would you diminish the effectiveness of an automated post-purchase experience you paid to build?
Oh wait - I know why
The reason is super simple.
Some agencies do it because it makes the dashboard look better. Which makes their work appear more valuable to the client.
You send to active subscribers -> attributed revenue goes up automatically, because you're just putting emails in front of people who were going to buy anyway on autopilot.
It's the same piggybacking problem I keep writing about. The renewal was happening with or without that campaign.
But you're actually doing more harm than good
You're literally sending this message to your product subscribers:
"We don't give a f*ck where you're at in your journey. Yesterday we sent you a personalized onboarding email with a survey in it because we pretended to care for your experience. Today we sent you a product campaign designed for non-customers, inviting you to buy the thing you bought 8 days ago. We did it because we could. You don't actually matter to us that much."
That is the message you send to people who gave you their hard-earned money when you drop a random promotional campaign in the middle of their onboarding phase.
How customers actually react
1. Some don't react at all
- They genuinely don't care, especially if they love your product.
2. Some will just unsubscribe from your mailing list.
- Not the worst scenario, but now even when you have an important announcement to send them - a new product drop, for example - you won't be able to, because they unsubscribed. You're not allowed to message them anymore.
3. Some will cancel their product subscription out of frustration after being bombarded with random promotional emails.
- These are the people who kind of like your product - maybe aren't its biggest fans - but would have stayed for 1-2 more months if you showed just a little bit of regard for their customer journey. But you didn't, so they left.
You shouldn't care about the first category.
But you should absolutely care about the second and third one, because it has a direct, measurable negative impact on your LTV.
And here's the part that stings: the subscribers you burn this way are the most expensive customers you own. You already paid CAC for them. You already got them past the first order. They're the ones your entire retention curve depends on.
You're not "generating revenue" from them by sending them a bunch of promotional campaigns. You're eroding the trust they already have in you.
So, what's the solution?
The solution is simple: don't do it.
- ✅ Exclude active product subscribers from weekly campaigns promoting your products
- ✅ Let the post-purchase flows own that customer until the journey says otherwise
- ✅ Point manual weekly campaigns at your non-custoimers and OTP buyers, where staying top of mind actually does something, and where you have nothing to lose by messaging them
- ✅ If you want to talk to subscribers in a campaign, give them something that fits where they are - relevant education, community, a reward, an add-on that pairs with what they already get
If you're currently blasting subscribers with no regards to where they're at in their customer journey, stop. It makes 0 sense.
If your agency is doing it, tell them to stop. And if they push back because "it performs well," you now know exactly what that sentence means.
Stop treating your product subscribers the same way you treat your non-customers and OTP customers.
They need a totally different approach.