Dan Jacobs

Customers are unlikely to gamble on a cheaper unknown brand that might be worse when the known brand is trustworthy and active. The conclusion is direct: ignoring email while competitors use it hands them ripe, low-hanging fruit.

In part 3 of the downturn series, Dan Jacobs compares stressed consumers to people returning to familiar habits. For buyers, the competitive situation comes down to risk: switching to an unfamiliar brand is not worth the potential reward while a trusted brand keeps communicating.

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Before spending hundreds or thousands of dollars advertising an offer on Facebook, a brand should test it with a handful of email campaigns. Email data is more reliable, the marginal cost is negligible because the email platform subscription is already paid, and the downside is limited.

Part 5 of the downturn series recommends sending an offer by email before buying paid ads. It also notes that the orders, data, and sales in the dashboard come from people with pressures and experiences much like the reader's.

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Discounts sent every week or month lose their converting power and overshadow emotional tone, while short scarcity-and-urgency copy can backfire when customers are already locked into a scarcity mindset. The alternative is conversational, down-to-earth writing that tries to replicate the connection a small-town shop has with its customers, something few ecommerce brands bother to do.

Part 4 of the downturn series compares an online shop to a small-town farmstand: an online shop cannot provide face-to-face connection, but a conversational email comes closest to replicating it and can set a brand apart.

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The work is to tune post-purchase Klaviyo flows: fill them with educational content about using, installing, or caring for the product; refresh customer winback timing and tailor its content to what was bought; gather reviews; run post-purchase surveys to learn why customers chose the brand; and use conditional logic to collect SMS consent from email-only customers. A bonus tip recommends moving new customers into the Klaviyo Customer Hub and training them to use it.

The post lists five numbered tips for handling BFCM-acquired customers, including linking how-to pages and blog posts inside post-purchase flows, updating the winback delay, and asking multiple-choice survey questions to get clear data.

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Sending cross-platform requests to customers who have already posted positive reviews can add reviews on Google, Reddit, and Facebook. The stated rationale is that large language models value multiple touch points.

Dan Jacobs writes that review requests can help gain positive reviews across platforms such as Google, Reddit, and Facebook, and cautions that brands should send these requests only to customers who posted positive reviews.

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A later post around K:BOS 2025 describes brainstorming ways to use the Hub for clients and asks peers which custom blocks they have built. Their focus is on platform-specific implementation rather than general email advocacy.

One post calls the Customer Hub Dan Jacobs's favorite launch from K:BOS 2025 and advises prompting BFCM customers to open a hub account and training them to use it. A follow-up describes brainstorming client uses and asks readers to share their own custom blocks.

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The earlier downturn series makes psychology-led arguments for email as a channel that matters more when budgets tighten, in short numbered posts.

• The later Klaviyo posts are narrower and more operational, focused on specific flows, features, and custom blocks.
• The shift suggests Dan Jacobs's public priorities have moved from why email matters to how a particular platform should be configured.

Parts 3, 4, and 5 of the downturn series argue from buyer behavior and channel economics. The post around K:BOS 2025 poses a working question to peers about Customer Hub custom blocks.

The downturn series argues from buyer psychology and channel strategy. In a post around K:BOS 2025, Dan Jacobs writes about a specific Klaviyo release and asks other practitioners for implementation ideas.

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It turns that question into a list a team can execute.

Jacobs argues that most ecommerce brands plan the BFCM campaign itself, not the weeks after, when acquired customers either become repeat buyers or quietly churn.

• They offer five moves: fill post-purchase flows with educational content, linking to pages and blog posts that explain how to use, install, or care for the product; update the customer winback flow so its time delay is current and its content is tailored to what the customer bought; seek reviews across platforms, not only on-site, noting that “LLMs value multiple touch points,” and request cross-platform reviews only from customers who have already posted a positive review; run post-purchase surveys with multiple-choice questions to learn why customers chose the brand over competitors; and use conditional logic inside the post-purchase flow to collect SMS consent from email-only customers.
• As a bonus, Jacobs recommends adopting Klaviyo's Customer Hub, comparing doing so now to opening a Facebook ads account in 2010.

For brands planning a campaign

Directly usable as a brief for a post-BFCM Klaviyo build.

• Each tip maps to a specific flow edit a retention team can schedule before the holiday season, and the SMS-consent conditional gives email a concrete handoff to SMS.
• The reviews-across-platforms tip also shows where Jacobs thinks LLM-driven discovery fits into retention.

It shows where their attention sits and how they talk to other practitioners about it.

Jacobs writes that Klaviyo launched a large number of features at K:BOS 2025 and calls the Customer Hub their favourite.

• They have been brainstorming ways to use it for clients and want to hear what custom blocks other users have built.
• The tone is a working question to peers, not an announcement.
• The post links to a shortened URL with no description.
• Jacobs closes by saying they were “the guy with the dog” at the event.

For brands planning a campaign

Relevant for a brand weighing Customer Hub adoption: Jacobs presents as an early, enthusiastic adopter, and their question to peers points to practical hub configuration as a current focus. Ask directly what custom blocks and hub workflows they have built.

It is the clearest statement in these posts of what they believe email is for.

Jacobs argues that email's most valuable and overlooked quality is that a human can speak to customers as a human.

• They contrast that with two common tactics.
• Frequent discounts lose their converting power if they run every week or month and overshadow any emotional tone; short scarcity-and-urgency copy can backfire when customers are already living in a scarcity mindset.
• Jacobs compares an online shop to a small-town farmstand, with its face-to-face connection, and says a conversational, down-to-earth email is the closest an online business can get to replicating it.
• They frame that approach as rare among businesses and therefore a way to stand out.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful as a voice and cadence argument against defaulting to discount-led retention. It supports a brief that asks for fewer, more human emails instead of a heavier promotional schedule when the market is soft, and offers a specific test: conversational copy in place of urgency copy.

It is an argument a brand could use to justify spending on retention rather than only acquisition.

Jacobs argues that consumers under financial stress fall back on familiar brands, much as people return to familiar habits under stress.

• They frame the competitive situation as a risk calculation: a customer under pressure will not gamble on an unfamiliar brand that might be worse, as long as the established brand is trustworthy and actively communicating with them.
• Jacobs's conclusion is blunt: ignoring email while competitors use it means handing them ripe, low-hanging fruit.

For brands planning a campaign

An argument for keeping retention email running during a downturn rather than cutting it when paid budgets shrink. It gives a brand language for why an established customer list is the lower-risk place to spend attention in a soft quarter.

Jacobs says that before spending hundreds or thousands of dollars advertising an offer on Facebook, a brand should send it as a handful of email campaigns first.

• Their reasoning is cost and data quality: email data is more reliable, the marginal cost is negligible because the ESP subscription is already paid, and the downside is limited.
• They close by noting that the orders, data, and sales in the dashboard come from people with pressures and experiences much like the reader's.

For brands planning a campaign

A concrete pre-flight test a brand could run before committing paid budget to a new offer. A creator could demonstrate the method on camera or in a brief, and it pairs naturally with the retention framing in the rest of the sequence.

Parts 3 and 4 make the case; Part 5 turns it into a testing tactic: send an offer in a handful of email campaigns before spending on Facebook ads, because email data is more reliable and the cost negligible by comparison.

A multi-part LinkedIn series, with one argument per post and everyday examples—reaching for ice cream after a breakup, a small-town farmstand—to explain buyer behaviour.

For brands planning a campaign

A DTC brand pulling back on paid spend can treat email and SMS as a low-cost testing and retention layer rather than a channel to protect. For a post-BFCM brief, the argument supports making email the backbone of the retention plan and using inexpensive campaigns to validate offers before buying traffic for them.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

In Part 4, the case is that weekly or monthly discount campaigns stop converting and drown out emotional tone, while short scarcity-and-urgency copy can backfire when customers are already locked into a scarcity mindset. The recommended alternative is conversational, down-to-earth writing that replicates the connection a small-town shop has with its customers—a practice few ecommerce brands bother with.

For brands planning a campaign

For retention flows, this favours plain, human-sounding emails over another percentage-off send. It also supports using urgency sparingly in the post-BFCM window, when every inbox is already saturated with it.

Examples: Source 1

A bonus tip recommends moving new customers into the Klaviyo Customer Hub, training them to use it, and using it to deliver several messages at once while gathering data.

A numbered tip list with a bonus item; each tip names a specific flow or platform feature and what to change.

For brands planning a campaign

The post applies the strategy to a Klaviyo campaign: combine education, refreshed winback, review requests, survey data and SMS consent in the flow strategy, with the Customer Hub as the platform bet. It frames the real risk as the post-BFCM slump and lifetime value, not the campaign period itself.

Examples: Source 1

Sending them to customers who have already posted positive reviews can add reviews on Google, Reddit and Facebook; the stated rationale is that large language models value multiple touch points. This is the only place in this corpus where search or AI visibility comes up.

This is a single-line assertion rather than a tested method; the posts contain no data on whether cross-platform requests changed visibility or sales.

For brands planning a campaign

A brand investing in review generation can extend it to off-site sources that assistants and search results read. Test this separately rather than assuming it will lift on-site review volume.

Examples: Source 1

One compares adopting the new Customer Hub to opening a Facebook ads account in 2010 and advises prompting BFCM customers to open a hub account and training them to use it. The other, written around K:BOS 2025, calls the Customer Hub the favourite launch of the event, describes brainstorming ways to use it for clients, and asks readers which custom blocks they have built.

Public brainstorming plus an open question to peers; no client names, screenshots or results are published.

For brands planning a campaign

Dan Jacobs positions the Customer Hub as an early-mover advantage and shows a willingness to work through its custom blocks on client accounts.

• Brands on Klaviyo can assess whether that platform-specific enthusiasm fits their roadmap.
• Ask for client examples and measured outcomes before relying on the approach.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The downturn series (Parts 3, 4 and 5) makes broad, psychology-led arguments for email as a channel that matters more when budgets are tight, in short numbered posts with emoji headers, hashtag blocks and a direct sign-off.

• The later Klaviyo posts are narrower and more operational: specific flows, specific features, a list of custom blocks, and one dated reference to K:BOS 2025.
• Both modes use short, platform-native posts rather than long-form articles.

For brands planning a campaign

The Klaviyo-era posts are the more directly usable material for a post-BFCM retention brief; the downturn series supplies the reasoning behind it. Ask for case studies and measurement plans if you need evidence of results.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5

The posts present Dan Jacobs as someone who works with Klaviyo tools for clients and recommends them. Ask whether any sponsorship, employment, affiliate, or formal partnership relationship exists.

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Their posts tackle the same failure points: weak welcome flows, undifferentiated sends, overuse of discounts, ignored data, and missing post-purchase follow-up. Both focus on what to change in a flow rather than what a platform can do.

Muhammad Ahmad writes at the level of diagnosis and segmentation across the whole programme, including zero-party data and testing.

• They warn that a strategy proven on one brand does not transfer to another in the same niche.
• Dan Jacobs takes a narrower, platform-specific approach, with Klaviyo features and post-BFCM post-purchase mechanics carrying most of their posts.

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They favor education and personalisation over repeated discount pushes, and work through specific flow scenarios for a DTC client.

Lindsey Lopez focuses on orchestrating email and SMS, including the timing problem of an abandoned-cart email, a discount text, and an upsell email landing minutes apart and burning trust. Dan Jacobs discusses that relationship in general terms and devotes more posts to Klaviyo's post-purchase and Customer Hub features than to cross-channel sequencing.

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Their BFCM flow-preparation topics overlap directly with Dan Jacobs's post-purchase and winback advice.

Vira Sadlak's reviewed work sits within a team and podcast format, covering BFCM flow reviews, campaign and flow consistency, universal content blocks, and price-drop or back-in-stock flows. Dan Jacobs publishes shorter solo LinkedIn posts focused on post-BFCM retention and the Klaviyo Customer Hub.

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Their posts identify weak welcome flows, treating the same offer to everyone, discount fatigue, ignored metrics, missing post-purchase follow-up, no testing, and no zero-party data as common leaks.

• They also argue against copying another brand's welcome flow, offers, subject lines, or product storytelling, and ask what stage, emotions, product promise, and customer-journey style drive a specific brand's buyers.
• That is useful when the post-BFCM problem may be a system-level strategy issue: the brand may need to rebuild segmentation, tone, and testing discipline before a post-purchase flow can work.

The tradeoff is specificity and holiday timing.

• Dan Jacobs's posts give a broad email-marketing audit and a context-first stance, but they do not lay out a Klaviyo post-purchase sequence for new BFCM buyers, product-use education, product-tailored winback, post-purchase surveys, or conditional SMS-consent requests.
• If a campaign needs a concrete post-BFCM flow map in Klaviyo, Muhammad Ahmad may be better as a strategic reviewer than as the hands-on sequence designer.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Their posts describe a targeted three-part educational sequence for a DTC client that drove revenue growth, brand advocacy, and reviews.

• They also show a concrete cross-channel orchestration problem: an abandoned-cart email, a discount SMS five minutes later, and an upsell email after that feel spammy; the better plan is to wait for opens, follow up by SMS after a delay, and send dynamic product recommendations only if the customer opened but did not buy.
• That is a direct fit when the post-BFCM problem is poor timing, channel conflict, or too many disconnected messages.

The tradeoff is that Lindsey Lopez's posts focus on orchestration and relationship building more than on the specific post-purchase Klaviyo flow Dan Jacobs describes.

• They do not detail product-use education, product-specific winback content, multiple-choice post-purchase surveys, review requests across platforms, or the Klaviyo Customer Hub.
• If the brand needs a holiday-specific post-purchase sequence with those exact components, ask for examples; Lindsey Lopez may be better for the cross-channel timing layer than for the full BFCM post-purchase plan.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The reviewed podcast post covers reviewing every flow that uses discount codes before BFCM, keeping campaigns and flows consistent, using Klaviyo universal content blocks during the holiday rush, setting up price-drop and back-in-stock flows, and creating retention promotions after BFCM.

• The companion post argues for the long game: balance promotional and educational content, respect customer lifecycle stages, and nurture trust before asking for another purchase.
• That fits a brand that knows its post-purchase problem is partly operational and wants a holiday-flow audit first.

The tradeoff is depth on post-purchase sequence design.

• Vira Sadlak's posts are strong on BFCM flow readiness, retention promos, and lifecycle balance, but they do not give the specific post-purchase elements in Dan Jacobs's advice: product-care education, winback timing tailored to purchased products, post-purchase surveys, cross-platform review requests, or conditional SMS consent.
• If a campaign needs a detailed Klaviyo post-purchase flow blueprint rather than a holiday-flow review, ask for examples; Vira Sadlak may be better for the pre-BFCM audit and promotion layer.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2