Hey friends, Liam here.
I hope that you’re at work grinding out some emails, optimizing your campaigns, responding to a few Slack messages and sipping on an ice cold coffee or tea with a snack in the other hand.
Today’s playbook is a long-one, but is packed to the brim with helpful information on everything retention and reactivation and how it’s a critical part of your sales funnel.
IMO, retention is usually an afterthought for most brands and only becomes a bigger focus once you get past the $5M/year revenue mark. Unfortunately by then, you wish you would’ve started focusing on retention a lot sooner and ideally from the start.
At this point, you’ve probably already spent a few million dollars driving traffic, you’ve had hundreds of thousands or even 1M+ people visit your website but 98% of that traffic never bought, never gave you their email address or SMS number and now you have no way to follow up.
Yes, you got a ton of unique site visits and impressions but most of it was wasted without a better opt in flow and follow up campaigns. In general, when I think about customer acquisition today, I think about the full funnel journey, i.e the first ad someone sees, to the landing page they get to, to the welcome-series or site-abandonment email they get right after they have opted in. Everything there is a part of the acquisition funnel in my mind.
Email (like many might tell you) is not just a retention and reactivation tool. It’s what closes the loop from the first ad you ran to get them to your site and enter their info into a popup to ultimately making that sale (whether that happens 1 hour later or 1 month later) from your follow up campaigns.
I think in order to set yourself up for the best possible at-bat, you want to ensure that you have the necessary technology to successfully capture, track and message site visitors in order to get them to become customers over time.
Obviously, not in a way that’s spammy, but by using the best technology available to you to get these people to opt in so you can then sway them with your product education, social proof, and reasons why others have shopped before. So that’s what today’s email is all about.
Are you ready to dive in?
Let Me Paint a Picture For You
Like a lot of brands I know and work with, you’re probably spending a ton of money driving traffic to your site every single month. You have Meta ads, Google ads, native ads, CTV, influencer campaigns, PR, OOH, and more.
Your leadership team is wondering what the marketing team is doing and who all of these magical “visitors” are that are showing up in your Google Analytics each week.
The funny thing about marketing is that although you're generating tons of traffic, nobody knows who the hell these visitors actually are. Like I said above, these people see an ad, visit your site for a few seconds, bounce and then they disappear. Unless they buy on that first visit, many of these visitors are gone forever and never come back.
Imagine running a brick and mortar store where almost everyone who walks in refuses to tell you their name, where they are coming from and why they wanted to visit your store in the first place. After they leave, you have no way to follow up. It’s pretty insane but that’s exactly what’s happening in ecommerce and marketing more broadly today.
After raising over $30M, we’ve spent the last 12 months building one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the US and Australia by helping brands identify and remember who their shoppers actually are. 500+ brands now use Instant so I wanted to break down some of the compelling points and opportunities that I see.
Why We Should All Focus More on Retention
If you listen to Nik Sharma’s podcast with Ben Yahalom and Ryan from True Classic, they both told him why they view email addresses as just another asset on their balance sheet. The same way they have inventory, they have email addresses which have real monetary value to them. Why? Because each email address has a quantifiable value that they can rely on and if they send enough follow ups and campaigns, they know that some percentage will convert into a sale.
I also think during “hard times” in DTC (Like right now with all of the Tariff madness) when you have to dial back some of your ad spend, and you need to rely on these “cheaper channels” like email where you can send out 100K emails for a pretty reasonable monthly fee.
This means that whatever traffic you are driving, needs to opt in to fuel your email program so you can follow up without having to spend more on paid ads.
Why Remembering Shoppers Matter
In short, tools like Klaviyo, Meta and your Shopify checkout have what people call “short-term memory loss.” Once someone leaves your site, you’ve got a few hours, maybe a day, before the data on that visitor disappears.
Why Remembering Shoppers Matters
The cool thing about Instant is that they remember every opted-in visitor indefinitely. Whether someone subscribes to your newsletter, checks out with Apple Pay, or abandons a cart two weeks before Black Friday, Instant remembers them. When they come back, you now know who they are and exactly how to bring them back into your funnel to convert.
It doesn’t matter if your visitor comes back next week or next year, Instant still recognizes them as long as they’ve opted in and can serve them targeted, specific, and hyper-personalized emails based on their past browsing behavior at exactly the right time in order to drive a sale.
Predictive Opt-Ins. Timing Is Everything:
Most brands I know treat popups like a speed bump. Visitors come to your site, get hit with a lazy discount code with no context and then they bounce. But Instant does this a bit differently.
They use what they call a point system to assess visitor intent. Someone who scrolls for 5 seconds? Maybe that’s worth a point. Someone who adds to cart? That’s a big one and worth a lot more points. Someone returns to your site more than once? They’re obviously curious. This bumps them up and adds more points to their score.
Only when enough points are stacked up does the popup appear, when the shopper is actually ready to act.
It’s kind of like a great waiter at a restaurant or bar. They don’t interrupt you the moment you start sipping your first drink. They come over right when you’re ready to order another and present you with an offer for the next glass. And the result? A much smoother experience and a higher conversion rate.
I’ve personally seen that changing the timing on a popup to give someone that last mile discount or chance to enter their email can 2X conversion rates.And if you can 2X conversion rates on 50-100K+ unique visitors per month, good things will happen for you and your brand. Some of Instant’s clients are seeing much higher opt-in rates and CVRs, way above 2X as well.
Solving The Express Checkout Black Hole
I’m a big fan of Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay. They are incredible tools but they are terrible for retention if you’re not capturing data correctly.
Most express checkout flows bypass email capture entirely so while you get the sale, you lose the opportunity to bring that customer back. Instant also solves this by remembering express checkout users just like anyone else so the next time they visit, they’re still on your radar and you can hit them with targeted emails and interactions no matter what tool they used before.
I think as express checkout tools continue to grow in usage over the next few years, this is going to become even more important for brands to track and get right. This alone makes using the tool worthwhile.
The Rise of AI For Automated Email Marketing
The other way to think about Instant is that it’s a great retention and reactivation tool. We are building out the capability to send hyper-specific emails to the right user at the right time after they opt in. Right now they send great win backs and abandon cart follow ups but these are going to get even more personalized and customized by their AI over time.
I think the dirty little secret about email marketing is that most brands set up their email flows once and never touch them again. And in some ways, I get it, it’s time consuming, you need creative, copywriting, and strategy. Most teams are too busy working on other things but Instant has built something that changes that. Our AI-powered retention engine can generate personalized emails on the fly for every single shopper who has opted-in.
Imagine that one of your customers browses your pink sweatpants and another checks out your black windbreaker. It’s the same brand but different behavior from different visitors. Why are you sending both of them the exact same email? With Instant’s AI tool, the entire flow including the design, copy, images, products and even the time the email is sent is all personalized which leads to higher conversion rates. It’s not just based on what they bought, but how they browsed. Karen Kane’s emails are now powered, built and sent by AI and generated an additional $450k in revenue in the past 30 days.
Follow The Results
The thing I care about the most for any new tool that I test is the actual performance.
Fayt, saw 4.5X higher email revenue and 46.1X ROI on the cost of using Instant.
July Luggage saw a 21% increase in abandoned cart recovery revenue when they A/B tested Instant’s email tools. To quantify the revenue impact, they split shoppers into two cohorts: The control group i.e shoppers who did not receive abandonment emails through Instant and the test group, i.e shoppers who were sent Instant-powered abandonment emails. The test group really outperformed.
Acler improved their email revenue by 85% with Instant
Rolla's generated $133k in new email revenue
The Collagen Co increased their revenue by $150k in 30 days
Runaway the Label saw an 8.6X increase in shopper identification.
And GolfBox has driven millions in incremental revenue with Instant.
These brands didn’t change their entire marketing stack. They just added Instant and they did it early, months before Q4.
In general, retention platforms love to take credit for sales but few are willing to show you the real data behind the results. Instant will. We’ll split your traffic in half and run a holdout test. Fifty percent get emails, fifty percent don’t.
Then we’ll show you the actual results side by side. I really like this level of transparency. Most brands really love this level of transparency. If a tool says it works, it should be able to prove it.
More Help For Meta Ads
If you're running Facebook ads, you’re probably overpaying on your retargeting ads. Why? Because Facebook’s native pixel often loses track of shoppers after a short window. Instant also pushes first-party data including real, opted-in user profiles into your Meta account, creating much more precise custom audiences.
So instead of blasting generic retargeting ads, you're reaching higher intent prospects at the right time. Instant’s longer term goal is to help reduce your retargeting CAC significantly across paid social over time. It’s still early but here’s more information on what they are rolling out.
Getting Ready for Q4, 2025
Another thing I see is that most brands wait until August, or September to really start thinking about Black Friday. But the real winners are laying the groundwork now. If you start remembering your site visitors in Q2 or Q3 you’ll enter Q4 with a massive advantage. I think it’s always good to plant the seeds early so you can harvest the results later.
If your brand is doing at least $50,000 to $100,000 a month in revenue, you should look into Instant. You are already paying a ton of money for your traffic. Now, it’s your job as a brand owner to actually maximize that traffic with better opt ins and follow ups campaigns.
Nik Sharma
CEO of Sharma Brands
Alright, that’s it — a long one, but hopefully helpful.
If you have any questions about how this all works or anything you want me to help answer for you, just book a time here.
I hope you have a great rest of your week.
Liam.
Hey friends, Liam here.
I hope that you’re at work grinding out some emails, optimizing your campaigns, responding to a few Slack messages and sipping on an ice cold coffee or tea with a snack in the other hand.
Today’s playbook is a long-one, but is packed to the brim with helpful information on everything retention and reactivation and how it’s a critical part of your sales funnel.
IMO, retention is usually an afterthought for most brands and only becomes a bigger focus once you get past the $5M/year revenue mark. Unfortunately by then, you wish you would’ve started focusing on retention a lot sooner and ideally from the start.
At this point, you’ve probably already spent a few million dollars driving traffic, you’ve had hundreds of thousands or even 1M+ people visit your website but 98% of that traffic never bought, never gave you their email address or SMS number and now you have no way to follow up.
Yes, you got a ton of unique site visits and impressions but most of it was wasted without a better opt in flow and follow up campaigns. In general, when I think about customer acquisition today, I think about the full funnel journey, i.e the first ad someone sees, to the landing page they get to, to the welcome-series or site-abandonment email they get right after they have opted in. Everything there is a part of the acquisition funnel in my mind.
Email (like many might tell you) is not just a retention and reactivation tool. It’s what closes the loop from the first ad you ran to get them to your site and enter their info into a popup to ultimately making that sale (whether that happens 1 hour later or 1 month later) from your follow up campaigns.
I think in order to set yourself up for the best possible at-bat, you want to ensure that you have the necessary technology to successfully capture, track and message site visitors in order to get them to become customers over time.
Obviously, not in a way that’s spammy, but by using the best technology available to you to get these people to opt in so you can then sway them with your product education, social proof, and reasons why others have shopped before. So that’s what today’s email is all about.
Are you ready to dive in?
Let Me Paint a Picture For You
Like a lot of brands I know and work with, you’re probably spending a ton of money driving traffic to your site every single month. You have Meta ads, Google ads, native ads, CTV, influencer campaigns, PR, OOH, and more.
Your leadership team is wondering what the marketing team is doing and who all of these magical “visitors” are that are showing up in your Google Analytics each week.
The funny thing about marketing is that although you're generating tons of traffic, nobody knows who the hell these visitors actually are. Like I said above, these people see an ad, visit your site for a few seconds, bounce and then they disappear. Unless they buy on that first visit, many of these visitors are gone forever and never come back.
Imagine running a brick and mortar store where almost everyone who walks in refuses to tell you their name, where they are coming from and why they wanted to visit your store in the first place. After they leave, you have no way to follow up. It’s pretty insane but that’s exactly what’s happening in ecommerce and marketing more broadly today.
After raising over $30M, we’ve spent the last 12 months building one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the US and Australia by helping brands identify and remember who their shoppers actually are. 500+ brands now use Instant so I wanted to break down some of the compelling points and opportunities that I see.
Why We Should All Focus More on Retention
If you listen to Nik Sharma’s podcast with Ben Yahalom and Ryan from True Classic, they both told him why they view email addresses as just another asset on their balance sheet. The same way they have inventory, they have email addresses which have real monetary value to them. Why? Because each email address has a quantifiable value that they can rely on and if they send enough follow ups and campaigns, they know that some percentage will convert into a sale.
I also think during “hard times” in DTC (Like right now with all of the Tariff madness) when you have to dial back some of your ad spend, and you need to rely on these “cheaper channels” like email where you can send out 100K emails for a pretty reasonable monthly fee.
This means that whatever traffic you are driving, needs to opt in to fuel your email program so you can follow up without having to spend more on paid ads.
Why Remembering Shoppers Matter
In short, tools like Klaviyo, Meta and your Shopify checkout have what people call “short-term memory loss.” Once someone leaves your site, you’ve got a few hours, maybe a day, before the data on that visitor disappears.
Why Remembering Shoppers Matters
The cool thing about Instant is that they remember every opted-in visitor indefinitely. Whether someone subscribes to your newsletter, checks out with Apple Pay, or abandons a cart two weeks before Black Friday, Instant remembers them. When they come back, you now know who they are and exactly how to bring them back into your funnel to convert.
It doesn’t matter if your visitor comes back next week or next year, Instant still recognizes them as long as they’ve opted in and can serve them targeted, specific, and hyper-personalized emails based on their past browsing behavior at exactly the right time in order to drive a sale.
Predictive Opt-Ins. Timing Is Everything:
Most brands I know treat popups like a speed bump. Visitors come to your site, get hit with a lazy discount code with no context and then they bounce. But Instant does this a bit differently.
They use what they call a point system to assess visitor intent. Someone who scrolls for 5 seconds? Maybe that’s worth a point. Someone who adds to cart? That’s a big one and worth a lot more points. Someone returns to your site more than once? They’re obviously curious. This bumps them up and adds more points to their score.
Only when enough points are stacked up does the popup appear, when the shopper is actually ready to act.
It’s kind of like a great waiter at a restaurant or bar. They don’t interrupt you the moment you start sipping your first drink. They come over right when you’re ready to order another and present you with an offer for the next glass. And the result? A much smoother experience and a higher conversion rate.
I’ve personally seen that changing the timing on a popup to give someone that last mile discount or chance to enter their email can 2X conversion rates.And if you can 2X conversion rates on 50-100K+ unique visitors per month, good things will happen for you and your brand. Some of Instant’s clients are seeing much higher opt-in rates and CVRs, way above 2X as well.
Solving The Express Checkout Black Hole
I’m a big fan of Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay. They are incredible tools but they are terrible for retention if you’re not capturing data correctly.
Most express checkout flows bypass email capture entirely so while you get the sale, you lose the opportunity to bring that customer back. Instant also solves this by remembering express checkout users just like anyone else so the next time they visit, they’re still on your radar and you can hit them with targeted emails and interactions no matter what tool they used before.
I think as express checkout tools continue to grow in usage over the next few years, this is going to become even more important for brands to track and get right. This alone makes using the tool worthwhile.
The Rise of AI For Automated Email Marketing
The other way to think about Instant is that it’s a great retention and reactivation tool. We are building out the capability to send hyper-specific emails to the right user at the right time after they opt in. Right now they send great win backs and abandon cart follow ups but these are going to get even more personalized and customized by their AI over time.
I think the dirty little secret about email marketing is that most brands set up their email flows once and never touch them again. And in some ways, I get it, it’s time consuming, you need creative, copywriting, and strategy. Most teams are too busy working on other things but Instant has built something that changes that. Our AI-powered retention engine can generate personalized emails on the fly for every single shopper who has opted-in.
Imagine that one of your customers browses your pink sweatpants and another checks out your black windbreaker. It’s the same brand but different behavior from different visitors. Why are you sending both of them the exact same email? With Instant’s AI tool, the entire flow including the design, copy, images, products and even the time the email is sent is all personalized which leads to higher conversion rates. It’s not just based on what they bought, but how they browsed. Karen Kane’s emails are now powered, built and sent by AI and generated an additional $450k in revenue in the past 30 days.
Follow The Results
The thing I care about the most for any new tool that I test is the actual performance.
Fayt, saw 4.5X higher email revenue and 46.1X ROI on the cost of using Instant.
July Luggage saw a 21% increase in abandoned cart recovery revenue when they A/B tested Instant’s email tools. To quantify the revenue impact, they split shoppers into two cohorts: The control group i.e shoppers who did not receive abandonment emails through Instant and the test group, i.e shoppers who were sent Instant-powered abandonment emails. The test group really outperformed.
Acler improved their email revenue by 85% with Instant
Rolla's generated $133k in new email revenue
The Collagen Co increased their revenue by $150k in 30 days
Runaway the Label saw an 8.6X increase in shopper identification.
And GolfBox has driven millions in incremental revenue with Instant.
These brands didn’t change their entire marketing stack. They just added Instant and they did it early, months before Q4.
In general, retention platforms love to take credit for sales but few are willing to show you the real data behind the results. Instant will. We’ll split your traffic in half and run a holdout test. Fifty percent get emails, fifty percent don’t.
Then we’ll show you the actual results side by side. I really like this level of transparency. Most brands really love this level of transparency. If a tool says it works, it should be able to prove it.
More Help For Meta Ads
If you're running Facebook ads, you’re probably overpaying on your retargeting ads. Why? Because Facebook’s native pixel often loses track of shoppers after a short window. Instant also pushes first-party data including real, opted-in user profiles into your Meta account, creating much more precise custom audiences.
So instead of blasting generic retargeting ads, you're reaching higher intent prospects at the right time. Instant’s longer term goal is to help reduce your retargeting CAC significantly across paid social over time. It’s still early but here’s more information on what they are rolling out.
Getting Ready for Q4, 2025
Another thing I see is that most brands wait until August, or September to really start thinking about Black Friday. But the real winners are laying the groundwork now. If you start remembering your site visitors in Q2 or Q3 you’ll enter Q4 with a massive advantage. I think it’s always good to plant the seeds early so you can harvest the results later.
If your brand is doing at least $50,000 to $100,000 a month in revenue, you should look into Instant. You are already paying a ton of money for your traffic. Now, it’s your job as a brand owner to actually maximize that traffic with better opt ins and follow ups campaigns.
Nik Sharma
CEO of Sharma Brands
Alright, that’s it — a long one, but hopefully helpful.
If you have any questions about how this all works or anything you want me to help answer for you, just book a time here.
I hope you have a great rest of your week.
Liam.
Hey friends, Liam here.
I hope that you’re at work grinding out some emails, optimizing your campaigns, responding to a few Slack messages and sipping on an ice cold coffee or tea with a snack in the other hand.
Today’s playbook is a long-one, but is packed to the brim with helpful information on everything retention and reactivation and how it’s a critical part of your sales funnel.
IMO, retention is usually an afterthought for most brands and only becomes a bigger focus once you get past the $5M/year revenue mark. Unfortunately by then, you wish you would’ve started focusing on retention a lot sooner and ideally from the start.
At this point, you’ve probably already spent a few million dollars driving traffic, you’ve had hundreds of thousands or even 1M+ people visit your website but 98% of that traffic never bought, never gave you their email address or SMS number and now you have no way to follow up.
Yes, you got a ton of unique site visits and impressions but most of it was wasted without a better opt in flow and follow up campaigns. In general, when I think about customer acquisition today, I think about the full funnel journey, i.e the first ad someone sees, to the landing page they get to, to the welcome-series or site-abandonment email they get right after they have opted in. Everything there is a part of the acquisition funnel in my mind.
Email (like many might tell you) is not just a retention and reactivation tool. It’s what closes the loop from the first ad you ran to get them to your site and enter their info into a popup to ultimately making that sale (whether that happens 1 hour later or 1 month later) from your follow up campaigns.
I think in order to set yourself up for the best possible at-bat, you want to ensure that you have the necessary technology to successfully capture, track and message site visitors in order to get them to become customers over time.
Obviously, not in a way that’s spammy, but by using the best technology available to you to get these people to opt in so you can then sway them with your product education, social proof, and reasons why others have shopped before. So that’s what today’s email is all about.
Are you ready to dive in?
Let Me Paint a Picture For You
Like a lot of brands I know and work with, you’re probably spending a ton of money driving traffic to your site every single month. You have Meta ads, Google ads, native ads, CTV, influencer campaigns, PR, OOH, and more.
Your leadership team is wondering what the marketing team is doing and who all of these magical “visitors” are that are showing up in your Google Analytics each week.
The funny thing about marketing is that although you're generating tons of traffic, nobody knows who the hell these visitors actually are. Like I said above, these people see an ad, visit your site for a few seconds, bounce and then they disappear. Unless they buy on that first visit, many of these visitors are gone forever and never come back.
Imagine running a brick and mortar store where almost everyone who walks in refuses to tell you their name, where they are coming from and why they wanted to visit your store in the first place. After they leave, you have no way to follow up. It’s pretty insane but that’s exactly what’s happening in ecommerce and marketing more broadly today.
After raising over $30M, we’ve spent the last 12 months building one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the US and Australia by helping brands identify and remember who their shoppers actually are. 500+ brands now use Instant so I wanted to break down some of the compelling points and opportunities that I see.
Why We Should All Focus More on Retention
If you listen to Nik Sharma’s podcast with Ben Yahalom and Ryan from True Classic, they both told him why they view email addresses as just another asset on their balance sheet. The same way they have inventory, they have email addresses which have real monetary value to them. Why? Because each email address has a quantifiable value that they can rely on and if they send enough follow ups and campaigns, they know that some percentage will convert into a sale.
I also think during “hard times” in DTC (Like right now with all of the Tariff madness) when you have to dial back some of your ad spend, and you need to rely on these “cheaper channels” like email where you can send out 100K emails for a pretty reasonable monthly fee.
This means that whatever traffic you are driving, needs to opt in to fuel your email program so you can follow up without having to spend more on paid ads.
Why Remembering Shoppers Matter
In short, tools like Klaviyo, Meta and your Shopify checkout have what people call “short-term memory loss.” Once someone leaves your site, you’ve got a few hours, maybe a day, before the data on that visitor disappears.
Why Remembering Shoppers Matters
The cool thing about Instant is that they remember every opted-in visitor indefinitely. Whether someone subscribes to your newsletter, checks out with Apple Pay, or abandons a cart two weeks before Black Friday, Instant remembers them. When they come back, you now know who they are and exactly how to bring them back into your funnel to convert.
It doesn’t matter if your visitor comes back next week or next year, Instant still recognizes them as long as they’ve opted in and can serve them targeted, specific, and hyper-personalized emails based on their past browsing behavior at exactly the right time in order to drive a sale.
Predictive Opt-Ins. Timing Is Everything:
Most brands I know treat popups like a speed bump. Visitors come to your site, get hit with a lazy discount code with no context and then they bounce. But Instant does this a bit differently.
They use what they call a point system to assess visitor intent. Someone who scrolls for 5 seconds? Maybe that’s worth a point. Someone who adds to cart? That’s a big one and worth a lot more points. Someone returns to your site more than once? They’re obviously curious. This bumps them up and adds more points to their score.
Only when enough points are stacked up does the popup appear, when the shopper is actually ready to act.
It’s kind of like a great waiter at a restaurant or bar. They don’t interrupt you the moment you start sipping your first drink. They come over right when you’re ready to order another and present you with an offer for the next glass. And the result? A much smoother experience and a higher conversion rate.
I’ve personally seen that changing the timing on a popup to give someone that last mile discount or chance to enter their email can 2X conversion rates.And if you can 2X conversion rates on 50-100K+ unique visitors per month, good things will happen for you and your brand. Some of Instant’s clients are seeing much higher opt-in rates and CVRs, way above 2X as well.
Solving The Express Checkout Black Hole
I’m a big fan of Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay. They are incredible tools but they are terrible for retention if you’re not capturing data correctly.
Most express checkout flows bypass email capture entirely so while you get the sale, you lose the opportunity to bring that customer back. Instant also solves this by remembering express checkout users just like anyone else so the next time they visit, they’re still on your radar and you can hit them with targeted emails and interactions no matter what tool they used before.
I think as express checkout tools continue to grow in usage over the next few years, this is going to become even more important for brands to track and get right. This alone makes using the tool worthwhile.
The Rise of AI For Automated Email Marketing
The other way to think about Instant is that it’s a great retention and reactivation tool. We are building out the capability to send hyper-specific emails to the right user at the right time after they opt in. Right now they send great win backs and abandon cart follow ups but these are going to get even more personalized and customized by their AI over time.
I think the dirty little secret about email marketing is that most brands set up their email flows once and never touch them again. And in some ways, I get it, it’s time consuming, you need creative, copywriting, and strategy. Most teams are too busy working on other things but Instant has built something that changes that. Our AI-powered retention engine can generate personalized emails on the fly for every single shopper who has opted-in.
Imagine that one of your customers browses your pink sweatpants and another checks out your black windbreaker. It’s the same brand but different behavior from different visitors. Why are you sending both of them the exact same email? With Instant’s AI tool, the entire flow including the design, copy, images, products and even the time the email is sent is all personalized which leads to higher conversion rates. It’s not just based on what they bought, but how they browsed. Karen Kane’s emails are now powered, built and sent by AI and generated an additional $450k in revenue in the past 30 days.
Follow The Results
The thing I care about the most for any new tool that I test is the actual performance.
Fayt, saw 4.5X higher email revenue and 46.1X ROI on the cost of using Instant.
July Luggage saw a 21% increase in abandoned cart recovery revenue when they A/B tested Instant’s email tools. To quantify the revenue impact, they split shoppers into two cohorts: The control group i.e shoppers who did not receive abandonment emails through Instant and the test group, i.e shoppers who were sent Instant-powered abandonment emails. The test group really outperformed.
Acler improved their email revenue by 85% with Instant
Rolla's generated $133k in new email revenue
The Collagen Co increased their revenue by $150k in 30 days
Runaway the Label saw an 8.6X increase in shopper identification.
And GolfBox has driven millions in incremental revenue with Instant.
These brands didn’t change their entire marketing stack. They just added Instant and they did it early, months before Q4.
In general, retention platforms love to take credit for sales but few are willing to show you the real data behind the results. Instant will. We’ll split your traffic in half and run a holdout test. Fifty percent get emails, fifty percent don’t.
Then we’ll show you the actual results side by side. I really like this level of transparency. Most brands really love this level of transparency. If a tool says it works, it should be able to prove it.
More Help For Meta Ads
If you're running Facebook ads, you’re probably overpaying on your retargeting ads. Why? Because Facebook’s native pixel often loses track of shoppers after a short window. Instant also pushes first-party data including real, opted-in user profiles into your Meta account, creating much more precise custom audiences.
So instead of blasting generic retargeting ads, you're reaching higher intent prospects at the right time. Instant’s longer term goal is to help reduce your retargeting CAC significantly across paid social over time. It’s still early but here’s more information on what they are rolling out.
Getting Ready for Q4, 2025
Another thing I see is that most brands wait until August, or September to really start thinking about Black Friday. But the real winners are laying the groundwork now. If you start remembering your site visitors in Q2 or Q3 you’ll enter Q4 with a massive advantage. I think it’s always good to plant the seeds early so you can harvest the results later.
If your brand is doing at least $50,000 to $100,000 a month in revenue, you should look into Instant. You are already paying a ton of money for your traffic. Now, it’s your job as a brand owner to actually maximize that traffic with better opt ins and follow ups campaigns.
Nik Sharma
CEO of Sharma Brands
Alright, that’s it — a long one, but hopefully helpful.
If you have any questions about how this all works or anything you want me to help answer for you, just book a time here.
I hope you have a great rest of your week.
Liam.