The Setup
A subscription-based culinary service was growing fast but leaking subscribers just as fast. New customers would sign up, get their first box, love it — and then cancel within three months. The churn rate was 35%.
The founder was spending all her energy on acquisition (Instagram ads, influencer partnerships) while ignoring the people who’d already said yes. There was no welcome sequence. No onboarding. No re-engagement emails when people went quiet. The email “strategy” was a monthly newsletter that read like a press release.
Hazel was brought in to fix the retention side.
The Build
She designed a 4-layer email funnel:
Welcome sequence (5 emails over 10 days): introducing the brand story, the sourcing philosophy, recipe ideas, and a referral incentive.
Engagement layer (triggered emails based on behavior): opened the box? Here’s a recipe. Skipped a month? Here’s what’s coming next month plus a 15% comeback offer.
Upsell layer (after the 3rd box): introduce the premium tier and add-ons.
Churn prevention (3-email sequence triggered when someone starts the cancellation flow): acknowledge the issue, offer a pause instead of cancel, final “we’ll miss you” with incentive.
Everything was automated in Klaviyo with Zapier handling the connections between the subscription platform and the email system.
The Mess
The founder wanted every email to sound like a food magazine. Beautiful, poetic, aspirational. Hazel pushed back: “Your subscribers are busy parents who forgot to plan dinner. They don’t want poetry. They want to know what’s in the box and how to cook it in 30 minutes.”
The first round of emails was too pretty and too long. Open rates were fine but click-through was terrible. They had to strip the emails down — shorter copy, bigger buttons, one CTA per email, subject lines that sounded like texts from a friend (“your box ships tomorrow — here’s what’s inside”).
The Result
After 90 days:
- Churn rate dropped from 35% to 22%.
- The welcome sequence had a 68% open rate (industry average is around 50%).
- The “pause instead of cancel” email saved 1 in 4 subscribers who started the cancellation flow.
- The upsell sequence converted 12% of month-3 subscribers to the premium tier.
Most importantly: the founder stopped spending weekends writing emails. The whole system ran itself. She checked the dashboards once a week and sent one manual email per month (a personal note — the one email that should be human).
The Takeaway
Retention is cheaper than acquisition. Always. If you’re spending money to get new customers while ignoring the ones you have, you’re filling a leaky bucket.
How It’s Built
Klaviyo for email automation, Zapier for connecting the subscription platform to Klaviyo, Google Analytics for tracking, and a simple dashboard in Google Sheets tracking churn, open rates, and upsell conversions weekly.
Playbook: 5-Email Welcome Sequence Builder | Playbook: CRO Sprint Checklist