Outdated flows and broken data are costing you 30–50% of holiday revenue. Here’s how operators are fixing it fast.

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

Retention has quietly fallen behind the rest of eCommerce.

Flows are outdated, data visibility is shrinking, and most brands are running 2025 businesses on 2019 systems.

Part of the issue is technical. Browsers like Safari and Chrome forget who your shoppers are after a day or two, which breaks the core of how email and retention platforms identify returning customers.

But the larger challenge is strategic. When that memory disappears, so does the foundation of every abandoned cart flow, browse reminder, and lifecycle trigger you’ve built. Your entire retention engine starts to erode.

We recently sat down with Liam Millward who built Instant at 17 to solve this problem head-on. His mission is simple: help brands reconnect with shoppers long after traditional systems forget them.

Since then, he’s raised more than $30 million and works with hundreds of brands, including Liquid IV, Neuro Gum and Karen Kane.

His work highlights a simple reality: the next phase of growth for eCommerce won’t come from better campaigns, but from smarter infrastructure.

As BFCM approaches, we’re breaking down how brands are rebuilding retention from the ground up through cleaner data, AI-driven personalization, and systems that remember what others forget.

🍽️ On the Menu:

Let’s get into it.

You can watch the whole conversation with Liam here:

Listen on Spotify 🎧 and Apple 🍎 as well.

Most brands send the same email to every customer. Same subject line. Same 10% off. Same template their agency made two years ago.

Meanwhile, the way customers shop and engage has completely changed.

They browse across multiple devices, leave carts open for days, and expect every message to feel like it was written for them. 

But most email systems haven’t evolved with them.

A typical retention email still looks like this: “Hi [Customer], saw your abandoned cart. Come back for 10% off.”

No mention of what product they viewed. No reminder about free shipping or the gift with purchase live on their site. Just generic content that doesn’t convert.

Retention tools were built for a time when shoppers converted in a single session and data was easy to track. Those rules don’t hold up anymore, and the cracks are showing; low open rates, poor engagement, and flat revenue growth.

AI tools have been closing that gap. Instead of relying on one version of an email for everyone, it learns from how each shopper behaves and adjusts what they see:

When brands start layering these capabilities into their retention programs, results compound fast. 

Some are seeing in 30 days what used to take three months with the same traffic, the same products, and a smarter system doing the heavy lifting.

This is what modern retention looks like: emails that learn, adapt, and earn more from every shopper.

Heading into BFCM, the brands that master this will turn their inboxes into a growth channel again while everyone else keeps recycling the same old flows.

We loved getting to know Liam and hearing how he built Instant. Since then, we keep running into founders who can't stop talking about their results. Brands are adding $50K, $100K, even $350K in incremental revenue without “rebuilding email,” just leveraging AI and fixing who actually receives it.

Naturally, we had to understand what was happening. The answer was surprisingly simple: these brands found a way to remember shoppers that everyone else misses.

Think about your best-performing email flow. It probably crushes with maybe 30-40% conversion. But what if that flow was only reaching a tiny fraction of its potential audience?

That's exactly what's happening. Tools like Klaviyo, Meta and your Shopify checkout have what people call “short-term memory loss.” Once someone leaves your site, you’ve got a few hours, maybe a day, before the data on that visitor disappears.

95% of the shoppers that abandon cart never actually get an email from you. The cool thing about Instant is that they remember every opted-in visitor indefinitely. Whether someone subscribes to your newsletter, checks out with Apple Pay, or abandons a cart two weeks before BFCM, Instant remembers them. 

When they come back, you now know who they are, what they browsed on your website and exactly how to bring them back into your funnel to convert. Now the same flow triggers for up to 10x more high intent shoppers and the message itself adapts to what they actually did on your site.

And that’s just the start. What's driving insane results is what happens next:

This approach transformed July Luggage's browse abandonment flow from an afterthought into their #1 revenue driver, generating $350K in 60 days. And Thirdlove drove $180K in incremental revenue in 120 days.

You don’t need new flows. You need the same ones to work smarter, reaching the right shoppers with messages that actually adapt to them. That’s how Instant has been tripling email revenue for hundreds of brands, and yours could be next.

Your flows don't need rebuilding, they just need better reach. Instant identifies 10x more high-intent shoppers so your proven flows finally perform at scale. That's how users average 21.7x ROI backed by a 4x minimum guarantee or your money back.

Every day you wait is another day of missed revenue. Book a demo by November 12th and get 50% off your first 60 days. You’ll be live before BFCM and ready to see the lift for yourself.

Every retention system depends on one simple assumption: that your site knows who your customers are. 

But over the past few years, that foundation has quietly started to disappear.

The result is invisible revenue loss: flows can’t trigger, abandoned cart emails never send, and returning customers end up starting from zero.

For operators, that’s more than a tracking issue. It throws off performance data, inflates CAC, and makes it harder to understand what’s actually driving repeat purchases.

And during BFCM, retention flows drive 30-50% of revenue.

You're literally watching money evaporate.

You pay to acquire traffic → They don't convert immediately → You can't retarget them → Your CAC explodes → You need more money to grow → Repeat until dead.

That cycle is why so many brands keep scaling acquisition but can’t make retention move. It’s not just a data loss issue; it’s a visibility gap. When browsers forget who your shoppers are, your retention tools lose the memory they need to do their job.

The good news: fixing that gap doesn’t take a massive overhaul. Most brands are solving it with two simple shifts.

1) Predictive opt-in

Most sites trigger popups too early. Shoppers close them before they’ve even loaded.

Predictive opt-in waits until a visitor shows real intent, like adding a second item to their cart or spending extra time on a product page. We’ve seen firsthand how that small change in timing can increase email capture rates by 2X+.

2) Infinite memory

Once a shopper opts in, you should be able to recognize them every time they come back. Infinite memory extends how long that recognition lasts so your site doesn’t forget loyal customers after 24-48 hours. 

Platforms like Instant help brands maintain visibility for opted-in customers even after browsers clear their cookies. It’s not about tracking more data, it’s about remembering the shoppers who already raised their hand.

Once those systems are in place, retention channels start working the way they were meant to. Flows reach the right people, campaigns stay consistent, and performance data becomes reliable again.

A recent study of 167,000 brands found that teams who focused on list growth between Q1 and Q3 saw far higher Q4 conversion rates than those who waited until November.

If your systems can’t remember who your customers are, every campaign starts from zero. The brands getting ahead right now are the ones rebuilding that memory before the busiest season of the year.

Fixing your email flows and improving visibility is just the start. 

The real shift is how you deliver messages: not as blasts, but as curated experiences that evolve with every shopper based on what you know about their behavior.

The next era of retention isn’t about adding more automations.It's about rebuilding the infrastructure underneath them so every customer gets treated based on their actual shopping patterns: the products they viewed, their purchase history, how they interact with your site.

The old approach treated retention like a campaign. You’d set up something once, plug in a pretty template, and hope it holds. 

But as customer behavior gets more fragmented, retention has to run more like a living infrastructure system that remembers each shopper and delivers personalized experiences at scale.

That means clean, connected data that updates in real time. Feedback loops that teach your system what's actually driving engagement and conversion for each individual. And technology that learns from every open, click, and purchase so every interaction gets smarter and more relevant.

For operators, it’s worth asking three questions:

The teams building the future of retention already know the answer. They're not layering new tools on top of broken foundations; they're rebuilding the core so AI can craft emails that reference the exact products someone viewed, include the specific offers that matter to them, and send at times when that individual shopper is most likely to convert.

When retention runs as a self-improving system that treats each customer based on their unique behavior, you stop fighting for incremental gains and start compounding growth. It’s how brands are turning email from a side channel into their most profitable engine heading into 2026.