From 8 Cents to 40 Cents Per Subscriber: Building a Retention System That Actually Pays

Steve Hutt:
Welcome to eCommerce Fastlane. I am your host. Today’s conversation is all about what happens after the click. A lot of times we talk about everything leading up to it. I’m talking about what happens after the click, because most Shopify brands know retention matters, but they haven’t actually built a proper retention system in their business. They’re more focused on the top of funnel, net new customers, push, push, push. But we know from a previous conversation I had with another team member in this org, and I’ll link both episodes together, that this topic is critical.

Steve Hutt:
What really caught my attention for this recording is that the industry median for email revenue per recipient right now is only $0.08. That’s absolutely insane when you compare it to one brand this company works with that’s now hitting $0.40 of revenue per active subscriber. It’s the same list, but five times the output. The difference wasn’t just sending more emails; it was the structure. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. My guest is Tris Dyer, and he’s the CEO of a company called Webtopia. That’s Tris right there. He’s also leading a newly acquired company they’re bringing under the same umbrella called Oaks Email Studio.

Steve Hutt:
They’re a boutique retention agency that’s built some really interesting lifecycle systems around Klaviyo for scaling DTC brands. There’s a very specific ICP, an ideal customer profile, for the brands they work with. You need enough data for them to be impactful and intentional with the work they do. With this acquisition through their parent company Webtopia, which I just recorded with, everything is now under one roof. They’re truly end to end. They actually do everything. They walk the walk and talk the talk.

Steve Hutt:
So that’s my intro. Welcome, Tris, to the show.

Tris Dyer:
Thanks very much, Steve. Yeah, it’s great to be here. This is a very exciting moment for us, introducing people to what we’re doing. A bit of backstory on me: years ago, I worked in large agencies with large businesses, and I’ve seen a lot. I’ve seen a lot of bad spending, a lot of bad strategies, and plenty of good strategies too.

Tris Dyer:
My brother Ben, who you just talked to, and I broke out and set up Webtopia. We actually set up Dire Digital first, which was later acquired into Webtopia. We started by focusing heavily on acquisition, and that went really well. We were working with a lot of brands that were growing super fast. But one major problem kept coming up: we were bringing customers in, and brands weren’t retaining them. We found that our CAC goals, our customer acquisition cost goals, were rising over and over.

Tris Dyer:
We were asking, “Why?” And brands were saying, “We can’t make profit off these customers.” We were saying, “No, you’re doing it wrong. We’re bringing in the right people for the right reasons.” So we decided we’d help with that too. Instead of starting a retention division inside Webtopia, we said, “We’re going to specialize and be super clear on what we’re doing.” That’s why we went out and acquired Oaks Email Studio from a lovely lady called Molly Nutt. One of the things we found at Oaks when we acquired it was a team of people who were super passionate about telling stories based on data, not just sending “pretty” emails. They were focused on data and on actually building customer lifetime value for our clients.

Tris Dyer:
That’s something we’ve seen work really well. It’s been just over a year now, and it’s super exciting to see how many people we’re helping. We’ve had a lot of clients move over from Webtopia, but we’ve also seen strong inbound growth, because word travels fast when you’re doing good work.

Steve Hutt:
Absolutely. One thing I noticed doing some research before recording is that you describe retention more as a financial discipline, not necessarily a creative channel. What does that actually mean in practice? What are you measuring that most email and SMS agencies maybe aren’t managing or monitoring correctly?

Tris Dyer:
Great question. One of the big things we’re looking at is customer lifetime value, of course, but more specifically revenue per recipient per received email. It’s not about blasting people over and over; it’s about looking at that metric in detail and understanding what’s really happening. Some people are brushing up against this on the SMS side. They’ll say, “We can’t send too many SMS messages or we’ll annoy people.” We look at email the same way: how are we segmenting properly to create a journey for people, explain things clearly, and help them understand?

Tris Dyer:
More and more, AI is making things more relevant for people, and that’s accelerating what we do. If you’re not relevant to people on an ongoing basis, you’re going to be brushed aside. There’s so much content. I’m based in Ireland, and we don’t have a huge amount of advertising coming our way. But when I spend time in the States, I have to go into a dark room for a while because it’s just constant. If people feel like that, you have to be relevant. If you’re not, you’re not going to be seen. People won’t pay attention to what you’re saying. So we treat things differently. We treat people like humans.

Tris Dyer:
We’re talking to humans on the other side of this email, not just “segments” or “groups.” It’s humans we’re talking to.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah. What’s interesting too is that a lot of brands are running ads and treating email as a separate function. They might outsource email to an agency, or they have two different teams internally that barely talk to each other. What’s your thought on that? Because my instinct is that unifying acquisition and retention makes a lot of sense, but a lot of people aren’t doing it effectively or at all.

Tris Dyer:
Absolutely. That’s one of the biggest wins we’re seeing right now, the fact that we’re under one roof, talking the same way, sharing the same culture internally. It means we can really start to put out good content for our customers from the moment a sale goes live, all the way through to the emails we send, who we send them to, and how we describe the offer. We also have a head of growth across both agencies.

Tris Dyer:
One of the biggest wins we’ve seen is informing ad creative based on open and click rates in our emails. As we see performance in email improve with certain angles, that informs new creative angles for social ads. It’s been a real win for brands where we can bring that full cycle of business intelligence across the board. It’s important to remember you’re not just paying to send emails, and you’re not just paying to run ads. They have to intertwine.

Tris Dyer:
They have to form a customer journey all the way through. We work with customers doing anywhere from $2 million to $15 million, even $30 million a year. One of the biggest things we’ve seen in the jump from $2 million to $30 million is moving from standard “blast” emails to a planned, segmented approach. Instead of just focusing on getting emails out the door, we plan a month in advance. We say, “Here’s your content calendar for this group of people, and here’s your content calendar for that group,” because they’re not the same. Your entire list of 180,000 people is not one person. There are different groups who subscribed for different reasons.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah, you know what it is? I just wrote this down, and it makes me laugh, but it’s that whole “spray and pray” situation. Unfortunately, a lot of people are still doing that. I’d argue the problem with that, and I’m sure you see it, is list hygiene and deliverability. Hopefully I’m not opening a can of worms by mentioning that, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tris Dyer:
Yeah, I mean, one of the first things we do with any brand is a deep dive into deliverability. Some people say, “I have great deliverability,” and they’re seeing 60% open rates, but they forget that Apple Mail automatically marks emails as opened. So you’re looking at that like it’s 2002. We have to move on from that.

Tris Dyer:
From a deliverability standpoint, what you really want is engagement. What’s your revenue per recipient? What’s your click rate? All the stuff that requires human action. I’d even say conversion rate off the back of an email is an indicator of list health. Another thing we see, related to agencies, is that teams at this growth level are underutilizing their agency but also under resourced internally for the complexity required. You need design, copy, a data analyst, and someone orchestrating it all. There’s a lot more to it than “set up an email and send it.”

Tris Dyer:
And the experience matters. Someone said to me the other day, “Your team really care. They give a shit.” That’s the difference. More and more these days, and my wife is an HR director and says the same, people want to work less. They want to get the thing done and get out the door, go to the bar, go to the beach. When you bring someone in and they’re really good, that’s great, but they become a single point of failure. With a good agency, if someone goes on holiday, it’s covered. If someone gets sick, it’s covered.

Tris Dyer:
That’s not just pumping up agencies. It has to be a good agency that can actually control and manage this. We’ve seen a massive positive impact for our clients over the last six months in particular.

Steve Hutt:
So, other than segmentation, because you’re talking about the customer journey, and we talked offline before recording about RFM, recency, frequency, monetization, and active, at risk, and churned segments. Everyone has different labels for the humans in the data set. Outside of segmentation and orchestrating the right email at the right time, say they bought product A and you want to recommend product B because the data shows people who buy A often buy B within a certain period, or the subscription use case where we talked with your brother about flavor fatigue and options to avoid churn… Outside of segmentation, what else is happening with the list to maximize revenue per customer?

Tris Dyer:
I go back to what we said earlier: it’s the messaging. You can segment people all day and make sure you’re sending to the right groups, but the message has to make sense. It has to be clear, open, and resonate. This is where your ad data can feed into email. You get one shot with an email, but you can test ads with multiple audiences.

Tris Dyer:
So we build that journey. You mentioned flavor fatigue, and that’s something we’ve tested with partners on social and then brought into email. It worked really well because we saw engagement rates climb as we aligned the messaging. I mentioned AI earlier too. Gmail now has an AI scanner, and for those with iPhones, Apple Intelligence is segmenting content when you open your phone in the morning. If you don’t have good, clear, concise content at the start of your email, it’s going to get brushed aside.

Tris Dyer:
So how do we do it? We make sure we have clear, concise messaging, and then relevant messaging to the people we’re segmenting to. If you’re in that range where you’re trying to scale lifecycle marketing, that’s where you need to start. Execution is one thing, but you have to step back and look at strategy. What’s your lifecycle strategy? What are you trying to do? Which types and cohorts of customers are you trying to scale?

Tris Dyer:
There are tools out there. LifetimeLeads, for example, plugs into Shopify and shows you the journey people are on. We’ve used that really well to design flows: people who bought this go to the next step, then the next. It’s a great tool for that.

Tris Dyer:
So to answer your question: creative messaging is very, very important. Incredibly important.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah, it’s all about brand. People buy from people, and if they resonate with the brand, they’re willing to pay more. You and your brother both talked about this. I have a certain brand of pants. I love Vuori. They’re great. Yes, I can buy other versions of “Meta 5 pocket” pants. Lululemon has them, everyone has them.

Steve Hutt:
But I’m wearing the Vuori ones right now. I love them. I’m on their email list and SMS list, and I go to their website to see if there’s something new. I’m a fanboy now, all because they built a brand.

Steve Hutt:
They’re in retail too, which helps, because you see them when you’re out.

Tris Dyer:
Exactly, Steve, that’s what I’m talking about. You resonate with that brand. It makes you feel something. In a world where you can buy from Shein or Temu and fast fashion has made clothes incredibly accessible, people still want the designer label they feel is good quality. That’s what people pay for. Research is showing people aren’t going to keep buying fast fashion at the same rate. Some of that is sustainability, but a lot of it is “pocket sustainability.” If I buy cheap, I buy twice. So if I buy a good pair of pants or a good t-shirt, it should last.

Tris Dyer:
That’s what branding was originally used for: to stand for something. Louis Vuitton designed his bags and put his stamp on them to say, “This is the one. This is the best bag he ever designed. It’s going to stand the test of time.” Then everyone started copying the logo. The point is, a brand has to stand for something. At Oaks, we build your brand around the customers you’ve acquired.

Tris Dyer:
Right.

Steve Hutt:
Okay, that makes perfect sense. What about a case study? I went to your website, and you have quite a few. One in particular is Hydrinity. Some of the numbers are huge, a 194% increase in campaign conversion value, and 32% of attributed revenue coming from email. What did their situation look like before Oaks came on board, and what did you build that drove that performance?

Tris Dyer:
I’m very excited to talk about this. When we started with them, they were sending campaign emails like any startup brand. They were pushing from an acquisition standpoint. They’re a skincare brand, really amazing skincare, if you haven’t used it.

Steve Hutt:
I’m going there right now as we speak.

Tris Dyer:
They’re very high in hyaluronic acid and similar actives. It’s a really good brand. The foundation was strong: there was good fit between the product and the market, and the people who bought cared about the brand and stuck around. But when they were sending campaigns, it was the same story we see everywhere: they were sending emails because it felt like the thing they “should” do.

Tris Dyer:
We wanted to understand who was buying what and what journey they were on. So we used a tool called Octane.ai and plugged it into their lead capture on the site.

Tris Dyer:
We did something similar on their social lead capture. It’s essentially an AI based quiz that routes people based on what they’re interested in: fatigued skin, wrinkles, scars, and so on. That information feeds into our system, and we start building cohorts based on those specifics. That lets us build content that’s very specific to those people. When you see people on Twitter saying “send more emails,” they’re right, but only if you send more to the right people with the right content.

Tris Dyer:
That’s exactly what we saw here. You mentioned the jump from 8 to 40 cents in revenue per recipient. That’s because we were being super segmented. We took one of their products, a retinol based product, and figured out how long it would take for someone to need a replenishment. Initially, when they buy, we say, “Here’s your product, here’s how you use it.”

Tris Dyer:
We built that out, and then when it was time to replenish, we started sending content like, “Here’s what you should be seeing on your skin, here’s how it should look and feel.” In skincare, people often judge effectiveness by feel, how it froths or suds, or how it feels on the skin. We’re not faking it, but we’ll say, for example, “You’ll feel a cooling sensation when you put this on.” We remind them of that feeling so it becomes real and memorable.

Tris Dyer:
They think, “I can’t miss this.” As we get to that stage, we’ve created retention. Then we ask, “When does this become a habitual purchase?” When does it become something you need as much as brushing your teeth? We worked out that we want people to buy four times. Once they buy four to five times, they’ll buy for the rest of time, and we can leave them alone. They don’t need more emails telling them how good it is. Stats show they just keep buying once they hit four purchases. Our job is to get them to that fourth purchase.

Tris Dyer:
So we talk them through what they should feel, how they should look, how and when to use the product more, and so on. It’s about relevance to where they are in the journey, plus opportunities to introduce complementary products that go together. We’ve seen that work very well not just for Hydrinity but for other skincare brands we work with.

Steve Hutt:
As part of a retention strategy, I hear a lot of talk about increasing average order value. We were talking about upsells after the purchase, complementary product recommendations, and things that happen on page. I know that’s a bit more under the Webtopia umbrella versus the email side, but there are still interesting plays from within email segmentation. Things like, “Hey, you have product A, maybe there’s an opportunity through email and education to show that brushes complement what you bought, here’s why,” with a link to a YouTube video. It’s all part of the brand play. You’ve got AOV on the initial transaction, and then LTV, the lifetime value of the customer. How do you think about those two, the first transaction and maximizing basket size, and then the LTV side?

Steve Hutt:
If there’s still a conversion question, we can get into that later. But there’s the LTV side of the business too, right?

Tris Dyer:
I think the main thing is: you can’t have LTV without having a customer. You have to get the customer first. At Webtopia, we talk a lot about getting the right type of customer. One of our brands that worked with us for years said, “We want to massively ramp up new customers.” So we said, “We’ll sell $25 products,” let’s say they’re pants. We decided to sell $25 pants. Customers went through the roof. Great. But those people didn’t come back.

Tris Dyer:
They kept saying, “Our releases keep getting smaller and smaller while our list keeps getting bigger. What’s going on?” It turned out people would buy the product, love it, but then we’d try to sell the next drop at $60. That doesn’t work, because those people came in for price, not quality. Over the last two years, we’ve changed that. We raised the introductory price point from around $25 to $50. Suddenly launches started to perform better because people were coming in for reasons like “the pants fit well, they have great pockets, they last in the rain.” That’s a different customer.

Tris Dyer:
So when it comes to acquisition, it’s about acquiring the right type of customer.

Tris Dyer:
Then, when we look at why people bought, we send emails based on those reasons. We use surveys after the purchase, bring all that into a central data point (Klaviyo Analytics, BigQuery, Segment, wherever) and keep that rich customer data together. That’s the most important thing to do to start scaling your brand. Once it’s flowing into a central place, you can use that data at scale. Big data helps a lot here.

Tris Dyer:
From a lifecycle standpoint, depending on your product, the strategy changes. There’s a golf brand here called Druids in the UK and Ireland. They figured out that their customer acquisition cost wasn’t working because they were losing a lot of money on the first purchase. So they created ambassador packs. They priced those at breakeven and pushed them hard because they were getting the right type of customer who wanted to spend. Then they could sell t shirts for golf trips, shoes that work well in the rain, and that’s where they made their margin.

Tris Dyer:
So, like with social and email, you need a good business strategy before an implementation strategy. Too many people do it the other way around and say, “We need to send emails about this, tell everyone about that.” The question is: what is the strategy, and how is it cohesive across your whole business before you send SMS and emails? That’s the execution. Get the strategy right, and execution becomes easy.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah, it’s interesting thinking about community as part of this. I think progressive brands are using community more as a retention layer, and it’s still underutilized. I’m a case in point. I’m on the SMS and email list for Vuori, and I go to their site directly. I’m not clicking ads. I might not be in their “community” formally, but I kind of am. I think community engaged customers consistently outperform non community customers on retention metrics. Can you talk about community in these lifecycle systems?

Tris Dyer:
Yeah, love that question. Facebook groups have been fantastic for us. With some brands, we started with a Facebook community and posted a lot there. You want it to feel very VIP. As humans, we’re herd animals. We want to be part of something. We want to label ourselves as this or that. We want to belong.

Tris Dyer:
BuzzFeed was huge for that. “What type of X are you?” People loved that. So build a community, and it will start to grow if you have the right core group to start. Then you can test products, let them vote on upcoming launches, and give them first dibs. One thing to really think about is how you set up that community while also having owned channels. Having your email list and your content in owned channels is critical, because if you build everything inside Meta or another platform and they change the rules, you can lose it all.

Tris Dyer:
So you want to own as much as you can, but those platforms are still fantastic tools. Beyond Meta, you’ve got Discord, Slack, and other community tools depending on your brand. Another channel that’s really growing is TikTok Lives. We’re seeing a lot more community built around TikTok Lives. If you have a clear, consistent strategy for when you go live, how long you go live, and what you talk about, it becomes a powerful part of building community. There’s a salvage company here in Ireland…

Tris Dyer:
They sell secondhand gates, urns, all sorts of outdoor items. Every Saturday at 9 a.m., they go live on TikTok for two hours and do a yard walk. If you watch it, and I’m a sucker for it, it’s the same people turning up every Saturday. They’re commenting, chatting, having a laugh, but they’re also the ones who buy. They’re not just hanging out; they bid on products and buy live. That’s one example. There are others, people selling jewelry, clothes, and more.

Tris Dyer:
Again, they’re building community. They use TikTok Shop in those streams. Then, when they ship orders, they capture emails and start building that community in email as well. Email still works, but community deepens it. WhatsApp groups are big in Europe, less so in America but growing. There are lots of ways to build smaller, tighter communities around your brand. But again, it comes back to messaging. If all you do is promote crap in there, people will leave.

Tris Dyer:
They’re not interested. You need to build it organically.

Steve Hutt:
Yeah. What’s interesting about TikTok Live, and I’ve written about this, is that it really started in China and is massive there. Billions of dollars are being spent. You see rooms full of people with ring lights selling products. Done right, TikTok Live bridges community and retention, plus live commerce and email list building. There are enough tools now to connect all of this. It sounds like a lot of Shopify brands aren’t treating it as a retention channel.

Steve Hutt:
And I think they should, because it’s a way to build community, retention, and live commerce all at once.

Tris Dyer:
What I’d say is: here’s how to do it simply. If you have a list and a group of people and you want to give back instead of just selling, talk about your live in your email. At the bottom of your email, after the sales content, say, “We’re going live at 9 p.m. tomorrow,” or whatever time works. Use Klaviyo’s tools to find the best send time for your audience and put that in. Get people onto your live and start talking to them. Talk to your customers. If you don’t have a retail environment, this is the perfect way to connect with them.

Tris Dyer:
Start by giving content and value, not selling. Give information, make it something people want to show up for, not something they feel sold to. We were all locked up during COVID; everyone moved online, and it became okay to talk to people online. Now, “don’t talk to strangers online” has flipped. People talk to strangers all the time. It’s a wonderful thing, and that’s how you can build your brand.

Tris Dyer:
If you’ve got the real OGs, the people who’ve been there from the start, imagine them on a live talking to you and commenting while you respond in real time. That’s such an organic, good feeling. Do that five, six, seven times, and then you can say, “Hey guys, while I’m here, we’ve got this t shirt we’re launching. Do you like it? Give us a heart if you do.” You get instant feedback. You don’t have to sell; just ask if they like it. When you later launch it, it sells out because they’ve already said they love it. That’s great retention, because you’ve built that community.

Tris Dyer:
I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there’s a video on YouTube by a guy called Kevin Allocca. He used to be a trends manager at YouTube. He talks about why things go viral. One of the three tenets, along with tastemakers, which we now call influencers, is “communities of participation.” These are things we can now create in public. On TikTok, you can build communities in public around your brand, and that’s where you start to go viral. That’s when things really take off.

Tris Dyer:
It doesn’t always have to be unexpected, that’s another tenet, but one key piece is the community you’re building in public that people can see. That’s something we work on at Webtopia, and it’s a massive part of retention that a lot of other agencies don’t talk about. They just say, “Let’s get your emails out. Let’s get the next email sent.” We talk about people like they’re humans. When we plan content, we talk to the customer in our minds. Some of our brands even talk about the customer as “her,” who she is, and then we have a group of imaginary friends around her. They may be imaginary, but they represent the real people buying.

Steve Hutt:
So how does AI fit into all of this? I always like to ask at least one AI question because it’s clearly on everyone’s radar. Some people have analysis paralysis and aren’t using anything. Others dabble but can’t justify the ROI. From your perspective, in a retention and owned audience context, does AI help with segmentation, execution, data crunching? My angle is more content production and understanding where I sit in organic search and LLM citations, so I write more content around topics I believe people are searching for. I don’t know what’s happening in email.

Tris Dyer:
Good question. We’ve already alluded to AI in the inbox. Google has AI summaries and uses AI to prioritize between the inbox and promotions tab. AI is working there in ways you might not even think about. It’s already affecting email at scale. Also, I’m sure many people have downloaded Claude and similar tools and said, “Get rid of all my subscriptions that I don’t open.” That’s another big factor.

Tris Dyer:
But you can also use AI positively in a very strategic way. We use it to build core email structures, very simple things like honing the value proposition at the start of the email. Once you’ve built your email with content and images and it looks great, you want to add alt text and the opening text block that allows AI tools to analyze your email. Use AI to write for AI. That’s something we’re seeing: backend work that used to take longer, or more thinking, can be handled faster if you’ve trained AI on who your customer is. You can talk to it and ask what information you should include. It’s still content synthesis, but more specialized for email.

Tris Dyer:
Another really cool tool we use is called Customers.ai. They’ve got two parts. One part works really well for segmentation. You plug it in, and it sits in your segments. It builds segments from customers you’ve suppressed based on behavior, like those who’ve gone through your sunset flow. It sees people who come back to your site, maybe add to cart, and says, “Hang on, they shouldn’t be suppressed.” It brings them back into segments you’re sending to, so you can email them again. We’ve seen 10 to 15% uplifts in sales from those segments.

Tris Dyer:
The second part is for new visitors. When someone comes to your site and signs up to your email list for the first time, they might also be on other lists elsewhere. Customers.ai lets us send flows to those people based on data from other places where they’ve opted into email marketing. Again, we’re seeing nice incremental uplifts from those emails because it identifies people who are open to email. That’s segmentation and personalization that we couldn’t do manually. Without AI, we’d just be sending emails without any real targeting.

Steve Hutt:
I see. That makes a lot of sense. So what about merchants listening now who feel like they’re at the stage where they need help? Maybe they run the numbers, with or without an AI tool, and realize their revenue per active subscriber isn’t where it should be, for the reasons we’ve talked about. What do you see as the next steps to learn about Oaks and figure out whether you can pull the right levers and help them?

Tris Dyer:
Great question. First, I’d say: start by looking at your list. Understand your open rate and click rate. Are people actually moving from email to your site? What’s your revenue per recipient? Are you sending to your entire list all the time? That’s one of the biggest problems we see. Brands send to the whole list, see a huge revenue spike from one email, and go, “Great, that worked!” But they don’t see the detrimental effects on the next several campaigns. If you or your agency are seeing that pattern, reach out.

Tris Dyer:
Our contact details will be in the show notes. The site is oaksemailstudio.com. Fill out the form and we can jump on a call.

Tris Dyer:
I love talking to brand owners. I’m a founder myself. I’ve founded two agencies, and I’m working on building out a brand. I absolutely love building brands. I’ve been doing it for 15 years. Even if we just jump on a call and I talk through what’s going on for you, maybe we can help, maybe we can’t, but I love giving advice and helping. Part of why we’ve grown so quickly is because I genuinely love helping people. We built the agency structure so I can help more people.

Tris Dyer:
That’s why we bought Oaks. Reaching out is really important. One thing I’ll say: we’re at an exciting stage. We’re small enough as a team to care deeply. I talk to every person in this agency every day about what they’re doing and building. We’re structured enough to deliver consistently on an ongoing basis. Across the Webtopia group, one piece of our culture is that we’re ambitious enough to build a category around your product. We want you to become the Hoover of your category, the Band Aid.

Tris Dyer:
We want your brand to grow to that level. Honest, transparent feedback is core. If you really value that, not just someone saying, “Yeah, we can do this,” and then taking your money, that’s us. We’ve turned down more brands than we’ve taken on because they’re not in a position to work with us yet. We’ll say, “You need to fix these things and then come back.” I’ve done that more times than I can count, because I don’t want you coming back later saying, “Why haven’t you fixed this? It’s not working.” After COVID, a lot of people lost jobs and said, “I’ll start an agency.” That can be a terrible idea, because you’re essentially a fiduciary. You’re managing people’s money and businesses.

Tris Dyer:
Our team understands that we’re growing someone’s business, their lifestyle, everything. That’s the most important thing to highlight. So, I’ll bring it back: reach out at oaksemailstudio.com and we can have a chat.

Steve Hutt:
It’s interesting. I spoke to your brother, and what stood out about the Webtopia group is that you’re small enough to care. As agencies grow, and there are some large ones with hundreds or thousands of employees, the problem is that the teams aren’t talking to each other. It’s interesting when you’re small enough to be truly impactful. I think Ben said, “Do I want to be an HR professional, or do I want to get in the weeds and help people?” I’m getting the same feeling from you: you’re willing to get on calls, get under the hood in Klaviyo, and figure out what’s going on. If it’s a good fit, you’ll say so. If not, you’ll say, “You just need Customers.ai or Octane AI running. Here’s a link, off you go.”

Steve Hutt:
And I really appreciate that.

Tris Dyer:
No problem at all. I’ll send across my link. You’ll have everything you need. To all the brand owners out there, anyone with a brand, let’s chat. Let’s work it out and see what happens.

Steve Hutt:
Wow, this is great. Thanks, Tris, for recording today. Have yourself a great evening.

Tris Dyer:
You too.

Steve Hutt:
Thank you. All right, take care. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I’d like to thank you personally for being a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. My hope is that this podcast is giving you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms, all with my goal of helping you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful, thriving company powered by Shopify.

Steve Hutt:
Thanks for investing some time today and listening to the show. I’m so proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey. Enjoy the rest of the week and keep thriving with Shopify.