Built a £243K email channel for a UK brand that couldn't run paid ads.
A UK Shopify e-commerce brand in a paid-restricted category — Meta and TikTok wouldn't touch their ads. The list was already there. Nobody was working it. Twelve months later, email is the single biggest revenue channel in the business.
The product category was restricted on every paid platform — Meta, TikTok, Google, Pinterest. No ads. No retargeting. No paid acquisition at all. Either the existing customer list paid the bills, or nothing did.
A list of 40K. A revenue line of zero.
When the brand brought me in, the Shopify store was healthy on paper — strong organic traffic, a loyal repeat-purchase base, a list of around 40,000 subscribers built up over years of pop-ups and post-purchase opt-ins.
The problem: email revenue was effectively zero. They were sending one campaign a month, the same template every time, the same audience every time. Open rates were okay. Click rates weren't. Conversion was rounding error.
The list was an asset gathering dust. The job was to turn it into the growth engine.
When you can't buy traffic, you have to earn revenue from the traffic you already have.
Email rebuilt as a revenue system.
Email isn't a newsletter. Done right, it's a sales floor — segmented, automated, working 24 hours a day for free.
- Audited the list. Removed 6,000 dead subscribers — bouncers, spam-traps, unengaged for 12+ months. Painful in the short term, essential for deliverability long-term.
- Built six core flows. Welcome series, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, win-back, replenishment. Each one tested for 30 days, then optimized on data.
- Rebuilt segmentation. Replaced "send to everyone" with seven engagement-based segments. Different cadences, different offers, different copy for each.
- Two campaigns a week. One promotional, one editorial. Opening tied to the editorial — useful, not always selling. The trust earned by the editorial campaign sold the promotional one.
- Deliverability monitoring. Daily checks on bounce rate, spam complaint rate, inbox placement. Caught two warming-period dips early, before they became deliverability problems.
- Mobile-first design. 70% of opens happen on phones. Templates rebuilt in a single-column responsive layout, all CTAs above the fold, no images required to read the email.
Within 60 days, the flows alone — without a single campaign — were generating more revenue than the previous monthly campaign cadence had managed.
What goes into the monthly retainer.
Twelve months of monthly email revenue.
Each bar represents one month of attributed Shopify revenue from email. Numbers approximated and rounded for confidentiality.
If you have a list, you have a business.
Most e-commerce founders treat email as the third or fourth priority — paid first, social second, SEO third, email last. That order is backwards in nearly every case I've seen.
Email is the only channel you own. The platform can't change the algorithm on you. The ad rejection emails don't apply. The list doesn't disappear if you stop spending. It compounds.
If you're running a Shopify store and email is sending one campaign a month to one segment, the gap between where you are and where you could be is — usually — the difference between this case study and your invoice.
Want a result like this?
Got a Shopify list that isn't earning? That's the kind of problem I solve. Book a 20-min intro call.