A strong eCommerce retention strategy should help more subscribers become customers, give first-time buyers a reason to return, and guide existing customers towards the next product that makes sense for them.
Maker’s Clean already had something many brands spend years building: attention and trust. Backed by Clean My Space and an audience of 2.1 million YouTube subscribers, the brand had significant reach. The bigger opportunity was turning more of that visibility into consistent eCommerce revenue.
That required a wider view of performance.
Traffic and top-line sales still mattered, but they did not tell the whole story. Maker’s Clean needed a stronger system to monetize existing demand, improve lifecycle marketing, increase customer value, and create a clearer connection among paid media, retention, content, and the online experience.
That’s where 1 At Bat Media stepped in. And the results were significant:
- A 41% increase in returning customer revenue
- A 24% increase in average order value
- A 38% increase in email revenue contribution
Here are 9 ways we helped Maker’s Clean turn retention into a stronger growth engine.
Key Takeaways
- A large audience creates a valuable opportunity, but the brand still needs a clear path from attention to purchase and repeat purchase.
- Retention works best when email, paid media, content, segmentation, and the online experience support the same customer journey.
- Lifecycle marketing should help each customer take the next logical step based on their behaviour and relationship with the brand.
- Higher returning-customer revenue, stronger average order value, and greater email contribution indicate healthier revenue quality.
- Acquisition and retention need to support each other. Paid media becomes more valuable when the business can generate revenue beyond the first order.
- Commercial outcomes matter more than email activity alone when measuring retention performance.
- The goal is to go beyond sending a larger volume of messages and create a more relevant, useful, and dependable customer journey.
The Retention Opportunity Behind Maker’s Clean
Maker’s Clean was not starting from scratch.
Through Clean My Space, the brand had already built strong awareness, credibility, and audience trust. People knew the brand, understood its expertise, and were interested in the wider cleaning category.
The challenge was turning more of that attention into repeatable online revenue. That’s why they approached 1 At Bat Media.
Many eCommerce businesses see slower growth and immediately assume they need more traffic. Sometimes that is true. In other cases, the business already has meaningful demand but lacks the systems needed to capture and monetize it well.
That gap can show up in several places:
- Visitors arrive but do not join the email list.
- Subscribers receive very little after signing up.
- First-time customers complete an order, then hear nothing useful from the brand.
- Returning customers receive the same messages as everyone else.
- Paid media, email, content, and the website focus on different priorities.
- Campaigns carry the email program while automated lifecycle messaging remains underdeveloped.
- The brand reports on blended revenue without a clear view of how new and returning customers behave.
Maker’s Clean had already earned attention. The next phase was making that attention more commercially valuable.
1. It Started With the Demand the Brand Had Already Earned
A bigger acquisition budget is not always the first answer.
Before spending more to create demand, it is worth asking how well the business is monetizing the demand already in front of it.
Maker’s Clean had access to a substantial audience through Clean My Space. That reach created a strong foundation, but an audience does not automatically become a customer base. Customers do not automatically return. Revenue does not become predictable on its own.
Each step needs a system behind it.
The first opportunity was to improve the brand’s ability to convert existing attention into eCommerce revenue.
That meant asking more useful questions than, “How do we get more traffic?”
For example:
- What happens after someone discovers the brand?
- Is there a clear reason to join the email list?
- What does a new subscriber receive next?
- How does the brand follow up with someone who browses but leaves without purchasing?
- What happens after the first order?
- How are previous customers encouraged to return?
- Are high-intent and high-value customers treated differently?
- Does the website make the next purchase easy to understand?
These questions move the focus from audience size to audience value.
Traffic creates an opportunity. The broader marketing system determines how much of that opportunity translates into revenue.
For Maker’s Clean, retention offered a way to make better use of the trust and visibility already in place. The brand could build more value from its current audience without placing the entire burden of growth on a constant stream of new attention.
2. Retention Became a Commercial Growth Lever
eCommerce retention marketing is sometimes treated as part of marketing responsible for newsletters, promotion announcements, and the occasional reminder that the brand still exists.
That leaves a lot of potential on the table.
A strong eCommerce retention strategy should influence several commercial outcomes:
- The percentage of first-time customers who return
- How long it takes them to make another purchase
- How frequently existing customers buy
- How much customers spend per order
- Which products they purchase next
- How much revenue comes from owned channels
- How much value the business generates from each acquired customer
With our retention strategy, Maker’s Clean approached retention as part of its broader digital growth strategy.
The focus was on strengthening customer lifecycle performance, improving repeat purchase behaviour, and generating more value from the audience the brand had already built.
Once retention is viewed this way, it moves from a support function to a clear source of growth. It also changes how the program should be measured.
Open rates and click rates can help diagnose email performance, but they cannot explain the full commercial picture. A retention program may generate healthy engagement while doing very little to increase repeat purchases or customer value.
The more useful questions are:
- Are more customers returning?
- Are existing customers spending more?
- Is email contributing more revenue?
- Is the business becoming less dependent on isolated promotions?
- Is each acquired customer becoming more valuable over time?
For Maker’s Clean, the answers became visible through stronger returning customer revenue, average order value, and email revenue contribution.
3. The Brand Strengthened Its Lifecycle Marketing
Their email marketing strategy was underdeveloped relative to the size and quality of the Maker’s Clean audience.
That created a clear opening.
Lifecycle marketing gives a brand a way to communicate with people based on where they are in the customer journey. Instead of treating every subscriber as though they have the same needs and level of intent, the brand can shape its messaging around the next step each person is most likely to take.
A new subscriber may need an introduction to the brand and its products. Someone who viewed a product may need more education, proof, or reassurance. A recent customer may need help getting the most from their purchase. A returning customer may be ready for a useful complementary product. A lapsed customer may need a relevant reason to come back.
These are very different situations. Sending the same message to each person is unlikely to produce the strongest result.
A mature eCommerce lifecycle marketing program will usually consider journeys such as:
- Welcome and subscriber nurture
- Browse abandonment
- Cart and checkout abandonment
- Post-purchase education
- Product recommendations and cross-selling
- Review requests
- Replenishment reminders
- Customer win-back
- High-value or VIP customer communication
The right program depends on the brand’s catalog, customer behavior, purchase cycle, and current commercial priorities. Adding more flows for the sake of filling an automation map rarely fixes the real issue.
The better question is: where can a useful, well-timed message help the customer move forward? For Maker’s Clean, stronger lifecycle marketing added more structure to what happened after discovery, subscription, and purchase.
Email became a more active part of the revenue system rather than a channel that came to life mainly when the brand had a campaign to send.
4. Better Segmentation Made Retention More Relevant
A list of thousands of subscribers is still made up of people at very different stages of the buying journey.
Some may have joined recently.
Some may have purchased once.
Some may be frequent customers.
Others may care about one product category and have little interest in another.
A portion of the list may have stopped engaging months ago.
Sending the same message to everyone may be easier, but it also limits how relevant the eCommerce retention marketing strategy can become. We identified stronger segmentation as part of the opportunity to increase customer value over time.
Useful segmentation can help a brand distinguish between groups such as:
- Subscribers who have never purchased
- First-time customers
- Repeat customers
- Recent purchasers
- High-value customers
- Customers interested in specific categories
- Engaged subscribers
- Lapsed or disengaged customers
The aim is not to build dozens of complicated segments that sit untouched inside the platform. Segmentation should help the team make a better commercial decision.
That may mean choosing a more relevant product, changing when an email is sent, adjusting the offer, excluding recent purchasers from an acquisition message, or speaking differently to a loyal customer than to someone who discovered the brand yesterday.
Relevance matters because customer attention is limited.
People are more likely to engage when the message reflects something they have viewed, purchased, needed, or shown a genuine interest in. They are far less likely to care when every email feels like another broad promotion sent to the entire database.
Better segmentation can also give the business more control over discounting.
A discount may be useful, but it should not become the only reason customers return. Product education, smarter recommendations, stronger timing, and clearer merchandising can all create a reason to purchase without teaching the list to wait for the next sale.
5. Paid Media and Retention Worked as One System
Paid media and retention are often managed as separate parts of the business.
One team focuses on acquiring customers. Another sends emails to the people already on the list. Each channel has its own dashboard, targets, and reporting.
Customers do not experience the brand through those internal divisions.
Someone may first see a video, search for the brand a few days later, visit the website, join the email list, leave without buying, receive an email, return through a paid ad, and eventually purchase.
After the order, they may receive post-purchase communication, discover another product through content, and return several weeks later. No single channel owns that entire journey.
We strengthened paid media and lifecycle marketing as part of the same digital program. This matters because acquisition becomes more valuable when there is a clear system in place to continue the relationship beyond the first click or order.
Paid media can help:
- Introduce the brand to new audiences
- Capture active demand
- Retarget interested visitors
- Bring previous customers back
- Promote priority products and offers
Retention can then help:
- Capture visitors who are not ready to buy
- Educate new subscribers
- Recover abandoned shopping sessions
- Support customers after purchase
- Recommend the next relevant product
- Re-engage customers before they lapse
This creates a stronger relationship between customer acquisition cost and customer value.
6. Content and Influencer Activity Supported the Customer Journey
Maker’s Clean had a clear advantage: an established content ecosystem through Clean My Space.
That audience relationship was built through useful, relevant cleaning content. People were often discovering the brand with an existing sense of its expertise and credibility.
The opportunity was to connect that trust more directly to the eCommerce journey. Content and influencer activity can support several parts of that journey:
- Introducing a customer problem
- Demonstrating how a product is used
- Explaining what makes the product different
- Answering common objections
- Building trust before the sale
- Giving existing customers more value after purchase
- Creating reasons to return to the brand
This becomes especially important for products that benefit from education or demonstration.
A paid ad may create the first moment of interest. A product page can explain the core features. An email may answer another question. A piece of content can show the product in a real setting.
Each touchpoint handles part of the sales job.
Content works harder when it supports the same customer needs, product priorities, and commercial goals as paid media, email, and the website. Otherwise, the brand may generate plenty of attention without giving people a clear next step.
For Maker’s Clean, broader content and influencer support formed part of the system designed to turn existing attention into revenue.
The trust was already there. Better coordination gave that trust a clearer path towards action.
7. The Online Experience Helped More Traffic Become Revenue
Customer retention strategy does not live entirely inside an email or SMS platform. A strong campaign can bring a customer back to the website, but the website still needs to finish the sales job.
That experience affects whether the customer understands the product, trusts the brand, sees enough value to purchase, and knows what to buy next.
We worked to improve the online experience, so more traffic could translate into revenue. This is an important part of retention because returning customers can encounter many of the same conversion barriers as first-time visitors.
They may need to:
- Find a product quickly
- Understand the difference between available options
- See how products work together
- Confirm whether a product suits their needs
- Reorder something they previously purchased
- Discover a logical next product
- Complete checkout without unnecessary friction
Email cannot compensate forever for a confusing website, weak product merchandising, a poor mobile experience, or an unclear offer.
This is also why a drop in email revenue does not automatically mean the email team caused the entire problem. The issue may sit elsewhere in the system.
For example:
- Website conversion may have declined.
- A popular product may be out of stock.
- The product mix may have changed.
- Traffic quality may be weaker.
- An offer may feel less compelling.
- Customers may already have purchased during a recent promotion.
- The campaign may be sending people to a page that does not match the message.
Strong retention analysis looks beyond the channel dashboard. The goal is to understand what the customer experienced from the first message through to the completed purchase.
8. The Strategy Increased Customer Value, Not Merely Order Volume
More orders can look encouraging while still creating a weaker business. If those orders rely on heavy discounting, low-value purchases, rising acquisition costs, or customers who never return, the top-line number may hide poor revenue quality.
We helped Maker’s Clean focus on increasing the value generated from each customer over time. One of the clearest outcomes was a 24% increase in average order value.
Average order value is not a complete measure of customer health, but it does help show whether the brand is creating more valuable transactions.
There are several ways an eCommerce business can work towards a stronger AOV:
- Presenting complementary products more clearly
- Creating relevant bundles
- Improving product education
- Merchandising higher-value options effectively
- Using free-shipping thresholds carefully
- Recommending products based on past behaviour
- Making the next logical purchase easier to find
The right approach depends on the business. A higher AOV still needs to make sense for the customer. Pushing extra products into the cart may increase short-term revenue, but it can also weaken trust or hurt conversion.
The better aim is to help customers build a more useful order by ensuring the products work together, address a broader need, or deliver clearer value.
For Maker’s Clean, the increase in AOV was accompanied by growth in returning-customer revenue and email contribution.
Taken together, those results suggest the wider program improved more than order volume. It strengthened how much value the business generated from its audience and customer base.
9. Success Was Measured Across the Whole Revenue System
No single retention metric can explain the full story. Repeat purchase rate is useful, but it does not show how much returning customers spend. Average order value is useful, but it does not show whether customers return. Email revenue contribution is useful, but it can become misleading if the wider business is declining or if attribution gives the channel too much credit.
A clearer picture comes from looking at several connected outcomes.
With 1 At Bat Media, Maker’s Clean achieved:
- A 41% increase in returning customer revenue
- A 24% increase in average order value
- A 38% increase in email revenue contribution
Each result answers a different question.
Returning Customer Revenue
This shows whether previous customers are contributing more money to the business. It may increase because more customers are returning, purchasing more frequently, spending more per order, or a mix of all three.
Average Order Value
This shows whether each transaction is becoming more valuable. AOV can be influenced by product mix, merchandising, bundles, pricing, promotions, and customer behavior.
Email Revenue Contribution
This shows whether email is playing a larger role in generating revenue. It should still be read alongside total revenue, campaign performance, automated flow performance, list growth, deliverability, and customer mix.
Together, Maker’s Clean’s results point to stronger revenue quality.
The brand generated more revenue from returning customers, increased the value of each order, and built a larger commercial contribution from email. That tells a more useful story than one blended number ever could.
Breaking performance into its component parts makes it easier to see where growth is healthy, where the business is vulnerable, and where the next opportunity may sit.
What Other eCommerce Brands Can Learn From Maker’s Clean
The Maker’s Clean case study is relevant because its starting point is common.
Many established eCommerce brands already have valuable assets:
- A recognisable brand
- Existing customers
- Website traffic
- Social followers
- Content
- An email database
- Product reviews
- Paid media history
- Retail or marketplace awareness
The issue is often that these assets are working in isolation.
The brand may keep spending to create more demand while failing to capture enough of the demand already present. Email may be generating revenue, but the program could depend too heavily on campaigns. Returning customers may be growing, yet nobody is separating them from new-customer performance. Content may attract attention without creating a clear next step.
One more disconnected tactic is unlikely to fix that. A stronger customer retention strategy looks at how each part of the customer journey supports the next.
Conclusion: Retention Works Best When the Whole System Works
Maker’s Clean had already built one of the hardest assets to create quickly: audience trust.
The growth opportunity was building a stronger system around that trust. That’s where 1 At Bat Media’s services made the difference.
By improving paid media execution, lifecycle marketing, segmentation, content and influencer support, and the online experience, Maker’s Clean became better equipped to turn visibility into repeatable eCommerce revenue.
The larger lesson is that an eCommerce retention strategy should play an active role across the customer journey rather than sitting quietly in the background as a collection of automated emails. It should connect attention, purchase, the post-purchase experience, and the next order.
That is how retention becomes a growth engine.