The First Step to Real Improvement in Your Email/SMS Program

Why an outside audit is the cheat code most retention teams never use.

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You're inside your retention program every day. You know the flows. You built the segments. You've run hundreds of campaigns.

And that's exactly why you can't see what's wrong with it.

This isn't a criticism—it's just how it works. When you're deep in the day-to-day of managing email and SMS, you develop blind spots. The flow you built 18 months ago that "works fine" stops getting questioned. The segmentation approach you inherited becomes the default. The integration you set up once and forgot about keeps running with settings no one has revisited.

You're too close to see the gaps. And the gaps are where the revenue lives.

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The Problem With Improving From the Inside

Most retention teams try to improve their programs incrementally. They read a blog post about welcome series best practices, so they tweak their welcome series. They see a competitor doing something interesting with SMS, so they test something similar. They attend a webinar on deliverability, so they check their authentication settings.

None of this is wrong. But it's scattered. It's reactive. And it's limited by what you already know to look for.

The biggest opportunities in your program aren't the things you're actively thinking about. They're the things you don't know you're missing.

Maybe your browse abandonment timing is off by 12 hours and it's costing you 15% of that flow's revenue. Maybe your post-purchase sequence is firing before customers receive their orders, killing your review request conversion rate. Maybe you have 100 data points on every customer profile and none of them are being used in a single message.

You won't find these by optimizing what you already have. You find them by having someone from the outside look at everything with fresh eyes.

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The Cheat Code: Pattern Recognition at Scale

Here's what changes when you bring in someone who has audited hundreds of retention programs: they've seen your problem before.

Not a problem like yours. Your actual problem. The exact same gap, the exact same missed opportunity, the exact same configuration mistake—across dozens of brands in different industries.

That pattern recognition is the cheat code.

When you've audited 400+ email and SMS programs, you stop guessing. You know where the revenue hides. You know which flows are almost always under-optimized. You know which integrations cause problems and which data points actually change messages. You know the difference between a segmentation strategy that looks sophisticated and one that actually drives results.

This isn't something you can learn from a course or replicate with a checklist. It comes from thousands of hours inside other people's accounts, seeing what works and what doesn't across every vertical, every platform, every team size.

An experienced auditor walks into your account and sees things in minutes that would take you months to discover on your own—if you discovered them at all.

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What "Sparkplug Moments" Look Like

Every audit surfaces what I call sparkplug moments—the specific insights that ignite real improvement.

Sometimes it's obvious in hindsight:

"You're sending your post-purchase sequence based on order date, not delivery date. Your customers are getting cross-sell emails before their first order arrives."

Sometimes it's a missed opportunity hiding in plain sight:

"You have browse abandonment turned on, but it's only firing for logged-in users. 80% of your site traffic is anonymous. You're capturing almost none of them."

Sometimes it's a strategic gap no one thought to question:

"Your welcome series treats every subscriber the same. But 40% of your signups come from a specific product page. You could 2x this flow's revenue by splitting on entry point."

These aren't abstract recommendations. They're specific, actionable, and often shockingly simple once someone points them out. That's the nature of blind spots—they're invisible until they're not.

The sparkplug moment isn't just identifying the problem. It's showing you exactly which buttons to click to fix it.

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What a Real Audit Actually Covers

Not all audits are created equal. Most "audits" in the retention marketing space are thinly-veiled sales tools—30 minutes of surface-level observations followed by a pitch for a retainer.

A real audit is different. It's a standalone service designed to give you everything you need to improve, whether you ever work with the auditor again or not.

Here's what a comprehensive retention audit should cover:

List Growth & Opt-in Strategy Where you're losing potential subscribers—on-site capture, landing pages, checkout opt-ins, and the gaps most teams don't know exist.

Every Automated Journey Welcome series, browse abandonment, cart abandonment, checkout abandonment, post-purchase, winback, and any custom flows specific to your business. Not just "do they exist" but "are they optimized, properly timed, and correctly triggered."

Segmentation Practices How you're dividing your audience, whether those segments are actually being used, and where better targeting could multiply your revenue per message.

Campaign Execution Your sending calendar, content patterns, retargeting strategy, and the operational habits that either compound growth or silently limit it.

Deliverability & Inbox Health Authentication, domain reputation, list hygiene, and the technical factors that determine whether your emails actually reach the inbox.

Apps, Plugins & Integrations The tech stack behind your program—what's connected, what's misconfigured, and what's collecting data you're not using.

A proper audit takes time. At minimum, 8 hours of deep analysis before you ever get on a call. Anything less and you're getting a skim, not an audit.

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Who Should Actually Do Your Audit

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most audits are performed by junior team members following a checklist.

They open your account, fill out a scorecard, flag the obvious issues, and package it into a PDF. It's efficient for the agency. It's not particularly valuable for you.

The best audits are done by people who have personally managed retention programs, built flows from scratch, solved deliverability crises, and seen what actually moves revenue across hundreds of accounts. People who can look at your data and immediately know what's normal, what's exceptional, and what's a red flag.

Seniority matters here. Not because junior people aren't smart—but because pattern recognition requires reps. Lots of them.

When you're evaluating an audit, ask who's actually doing the work. If it's not someone senior who's been in the weeds across many programs, you're paying for a checklist, not expertise.

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The Output That Actually Helps

An audit is only as good as what you can do with it.

The best audits don't just tell you what's wrong—they tell you exactly how to fix it. Button by button. Setting by setting. With the technical specs your platform team needs to execute without guessing.

You should walk away with:

A prioritized list of opportunities. Not 50 things to fix, but a clear hierarchy—what to do first, what can wait, and what's not worth the effort.

Implementation guidance. Not "improve your welcome series" but "here's the exact URL rules for your popup, the display logic for your platform team, and the trigger timing for each message."

A strategic roadmap. Quick wins you can execute in 30 days. Longer-term initiatives for the next quarter. A plan you can present to leadership that shows exactly where the growth will come from.

Documentation you can share. The audit shouldn't live in your inbox. It should be something you can hand to your Klaviyo or Attentive rep, your internal team, or your CMO—and have them immediately understand the plan.

The best test of an audit: can someone who wasn't on the call read the deliverables and execute the recommendations? If yes, you got a real audit. If no, you got a sales pitch with a PDF attached.

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The ROI Question

Audits aren't free—the good ones, anyway. So the natural question is whether they're worth it.

Here's how to think about it:

A comprehensive audit routinely uncovers 20-30% performance lifts from low-hanging fruit alone. Not from massive overhauls or months of work—from fixing the things that were broken or missing all along.

If your email/SMS program generates $100K per month, a 20% lift is $20K in monthly incremental revenue. $240K per year. From a one-time investment that typically runs a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

The math works. But only if the audit is real—deep, comprehensive, done by someone with genuine expertise, and delivered with enough detail to actually execute.

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The First Step

If you want to improve your retention program—really improve it, not just tinker around the edges—start with an outside perspective.

Not because your team isn't capable. But because you can't see your own blind spots. Because pattern recognition from hundreds of programs will surface opportunities you'd never find on your own. Because sometimes the fastest path to growth is having someone tell you exactly which buttons to click.

That's what a real audit does. It's the sparkplug. The cheat code. The first step.

Everything else gets easier once you know where to focus.