St. Galler Kantonalbank

Coming from an immigrant family, with an 81 year old father who is a 2-time war refugee, I was hardwired as a child to be conservative and adopt a scarcity mindset. This is not the right way to approach life or business, but when harnessed and controlled, it can instill a healthy level of paranoia. That feeling that I'm always behind or that everything can disappear will never go away, but it fuels me to be extreme in my scenario mapping and bias towards action. One of the most powerful things experience teaches you is that it's incredibly important to know yourself. If you can't clearly identify your strengths, weaknesses, and biases, then the marketplace (and life) will.

We lost two clients back to back at the beginning of last year. We talked about both of them in front of the entire team, by name, with the full diagnosis. Not because I enjoy it. Because the team needed to see what the warning signs looked like before they became a decision. Both situations had the same pattern in the 60 days before the relationship ended. Slower email response times from the client side. Shorter calls. More junior contacts showing up to meetings where senior stakeholders used to be. None of these things individually mean a client is leaving. Together they almost always do. The mistake we made in both cases wasn't the work. It was not escalating fast enough when the communication behavior changed. By the time it felt urgent, the client had already made up their mind. We now have a formal process for accounts showing these signals. Proactive touchpoints, not just standard weekly calls. A direct conversation about how the relationship is feeling before it gets to the point where they're having that conversation without us. Most agency churn isn't about the deliverables. It's about a gap between what the client expected and what they felt they got. And that gap almost always has a 60-day tell if you're paying attention.

669% year-over-year increase in flow deliveries. 16% revenue growth month over month. $33,000 increase in post-purchase flow revenue from testing alone. When we took over this account the email program had minimal flows, no systematic testing, and no cohort data available. The baseline was close to zero which is part of why the percentage looks the way it does. But the principle holds regardless of where you start. The $33,000 post-purchase lift didn't come from building new flows. It came from better targeting inside flows that already existed. We improved the logic, tightened the timing, and ran structured tests on the first one to two emails in each sequence. That's it. No new technology, no platform migration, no creative overhaul. This is what compounding looks like in email. Every improvement you make to a flow pays forward for the next 18 months across every customer who enters that sequence. You're not just fixing one email. You're improving the economics of every future send. Most brands treat flow optimization as a one-time setup task. The ones winning treat it as a continuous discipline with no finish line.

We ran an A/B test on an abandoned checkout flow and got a 122% lift in revenue per recipient. Not from a better subject line or a discount. From removing options. One variation kept the original email with multiple CTAs, several products, a few different paths. The other stripped it to a single message with a single action. The focused version won by 122% RPR. Decision fatigue is real everywhere else and it's real in your inbox too. Every additional choice you give someone is a reason not to choose anything. Most email A/B testing never gets here because subject line tests are easier to set up and the results come back clean. Subject line tests are usually worthless. Structural tests move revenue. The output from a good structural test isn't just a better email, it's a principle you apply across your entire flow library. We let this one run two full weeks before calling it. The instinct to call tests early is one of the most expensive habits in email marketing.