Yesterday I told you that email doesn't retain customers. Outcomes do.
Today I want to show you why.
At any given moment, every customer lives in one of three internal states …
1. "This is working."
2. "This isn't working."
3. "I'm not sure if this is working."
That's it. One of those three.
And whichever state they're in determines what happens next.
State 1? They stay. They reorder. They tell friends.
State 2? They leave. Sometimes loudly. Sometimes with a refund request.
But State 3?
State 3 is the silent killer.
These customers don't complain. They don't ask for refunds. They just ... disappear.
They disengage before they ever "churn" in your dashboard.
By the time you see the churn number, the decision happened weeks ago. You're reading the autopsy report and calling it a diagnosis.
This is why starting your retention strategy with churn data puts you behind. You're already late.
The real question isn't "How do we reduce churn?"
The real question is …
"How do we move more customers from 'not sure' to 'this is working'?"
That's a completely different problem. And it requires a completely different solution.
Not more emails. Not more discounts. Not more loyalty points.
It requires what I call Results Architecture.
That's a fancy way of saying: you design the customer's path to success ... instead of hoping they figure it out.
There are four pillars to this. And over the next few days, I'm going to walk you through each one.
Tomorrow we start with the first pillar ... and it's the one most brands skip entirely.
See you tomorrow,
Jeremiah
P.S. Here's a quick gut check: If your support inbox is full of "Is this working?" or "Is this normal?" questions ... you have a State 3 problem. More on that soon.
100% Typo Guarantee … This message was hand-crafted by a human being … me. While I use AI heavily for my research and the work I do, I respect you too much to automate my email content creation.
There was no review queue, no editorial process, no post-facto revisions. I just wrote it and sent it … therefore, I can pretty much guarantee some sort of typo or grammatical error that would make all my past english teachers cringe.
Anonymous Data Disclaimer … Most of my clients prefer that I not share the inner workings of their businesses or the exact details of the marketing strategies we develop. In order to be able to share my own proprietary intellectual property without violating the sensitive nature of my relationship with them, I often anonymize what I share with you. This may include changing the specifics of their industry, what actually happened, or what we developed together. When I make these changes, I work to preserve the success principle I want to convey to you while obscuring sensitive data. This is necessary.