DTC Brand Increases Repeat Purchases 40% Through Weekly Emails
Bootstrapped, 8 employees, $2.4M annual revenue
The Challenge
A specialty coffee brand had a strong first-purchase funnel through Instagram and paid social, but repeat purchase rates were stuck at 22%. Their email marketing consisted of sporadic promotional blasts -- discount codes and new product announcements sent whenever someone on the team remembered to. They knew email should be their highest-ROI retention channel but lacked the content strategy and production capacity to run a real newsletter program. Their customer LTV was below the threshold needed to profitably scale paid acquisition.
The Solution
WrittenByTed was deployed on the Growth plan. Ted built a content strategy combining editorial content (coffee education, brewing guides, origin stories) with product content (new releases, seasonal offerings) and community content (customer spotlights, barista interviews). Ted wrote twice-weekly newsletters: a Tuesday editorial issue focused on coffee culture and education, and a Friday product-focused issue with subtle purchasing prompts. The key insight was reducing promotional content from 100% to 20% of total email content while increasing email frequency from sporadic to twice-weekly.
The Results
- Repeat purchase rate increased from 22% to 31% (40% improvement)
- Email-attributed revenue grew from 8% to 24% of total revenue
- Customer lifetime value increased by $47 (from $112 to $159)
- Unsubscribe rate dropped from 1.2% per send to 0.18% per send
- Newsletter subscriber base grew from 8,400 to 14,200 in 6 months
Content strategy deployed in week 1. Measurable repeat purchase improvement by month 2.
“We were sending discount codes and wondering why our margins were shrinking. Ted flipped the script -- 80% valuable content, 20% product. Our customers started buying more frequently because they felt connected to the brand, not because we bribed them with coupons. The 40% increase in repeat purchases changed our entire unit economics.”