This thing about CPG brands is really pissing me off.

One of the things that pisses me off the most is when I see subscription-based CPG brands following the same email marketing frameworks and "best practices" that almost entirely apply to one-time purchase products.

"Welcome flow is the most important flow."

"Send 2-4 campaigns per week to your entire engaged segment."

"No need to personalize. It's a waste of money and effort."

Reality check.

Email marketing for subscription-based CPG brands is entirely about retention.

Email marketing for OTP products is almost entirely about pre-purchase, and maybe only slightly about retention (if there's anything to cross-sell or upsell to)

Two completely different games. And conflating them is the mistake I keep seeing.

One-time purchase email marketing is f*cking easy

Let's clarify this first: email marketing for one-time purchase products is much easier.

It's incomparably easier.

The typical advice, "set up the core flows and send 3-4 campaigns per week," applies almost perfectly to these brands.

There is pretty much nothing else you can do with emails. There is no product adoption, no retention and no post-purchase education and top of mind awareness.

There is almost nothing you can f*ck up.

What you can f*ck up with email marketing for subscription brands

A lot of things. But I'll just point out the 2 biggest ones.

1. Emailing vs. not emailing product subscribers

There's a trade-off between emailing and not emailing your product subscribers. It's one of the biggest challenges for every retention agency out there.

You could have the best email in the world, with the cutest copy and design, but if it's not relevant to the product subscriber, they could literally cancel their subscription out of frustration after they open the email. (Especially if your product is not world-class good, which most products are not realistically)

At the same time, if you're not emailing your product subscribers at all, you're risking churn due to lack of product adoption. You're also missing out on potentially upselling them to a higher subscription plan or cross-selling them to another product.

And in the CPG niche, you can't afford not to retain the customer at least for a little while, given that most CPG brands are not profitable, or barely profitable on the first order.

LTV maxxing is everything for these brands. Thus, post-purchase communication is very important.

2. Sales

One of the biggest challenges for every subscription brand out there. If you're running a site-wide sale, how do you do it properly considering your existing product subscribers?

Should you email them or not?

• If yes, they'll likely cancel their subscription and rebuy with the new offer, which erodes your profitability.
• If you decide not to email them at all while running the sale, they'll still likely find out if they're on the website, and cancel their subscription anyway.

There's no clean answer. That's the point. This is a problem that doesn't even exist for OTP brands.

What you can f*ck up with email marketing for one-time purchase brands

Almost nothing. I am being honest.

The most you can do is ruin your deliverability if you spam people with too many emails.

But you don't have to worry about:

• Subscription churn
• Retention
• Upsells / cross-sells

You just send emails and try to convert as many people as possible by tackling pre-purchase objections.

You don't even have to worry about spamming them. You have nothing to lose.

If you send them more emails, they might either:

• Buy from you
• Not buy from you and unsubscribe from your list

The upside is an extra sale you otherwise wouldn't get.

The downside is losing an email subscriber that wouldn’t have never bought from you anyway.

Easy as it is.

So, why are subscription brands playing the wrong game with their emails?

Out of 6 subscription brands I've audited in the last 2 months:

• All of them had the perfect welcome flow with fancy Figma design (oftentimes segmented into 5-6 different paths)
• All of them had the perfect checkout abandonment flow with cute design and infographics.
• Some of them ran A/B tests, and those that did, those tests revolved around subject line testing (mainly in the welcome flow)
• 5 out of 6 had 0 post-purchase onboarding flows in place, except for the "thank you for your purchase" email.
• 4 out of 6 were spamming their existing product subscribers with promotional weekly campaigns sent to the entire engaged segment of people.

Read that last two again.

They nailed the easy stuff that barely moves the needle for their model and completely ignored the part that decides whether the customer ever makes it to the second (let alone third or fourth) order.

For CPG brands, email marketing has a minor impact on non-customers

Your welcome flow "revenue"? It's almost entirely a byproduct of your ads and your offer.

If you don't believe me, go analyze your own data. You'll likely notice that 80%+, or in some cases 90%+ of all first purchases happen on day 0, when people subscribe through your popup form.

They don't buy because your welcome flow has great storytelling and cute design. They buy because the decision was already made before they signed up in the popup.

The part that actually pisses me off

It's not that these brands are bad at email.

It's that they pour their best effort into the game with almost nothing to lose, and treat the game where everything is at stake like an afterthought.

If you run a subscription-based CPG brand, your welcome flow and your Figma-perfect checkout abandonment flow are not your highest leverage. They're table stakes borrowed from a completely different business model.

Your leverage is in the post-purchase journey. In product adoption. In the two tradeoffs above that have no easy answers.

Stop copying the OTP playbook. It was never built for you.

So be honest with yourself: are you spending your energy on the flows that look pretty in a case study or your Linkedimn post, or the ones that decide whether your customer sticks around long enough to become profitable?