# Kate Williams

Kate Williams runs KW Marketing, an agency focused on helping food and drink businesses grow their ecommerce sales. The agency's work includes marketing strategy, email and Klaviyo automation, customer retention, and turning growth plans into measurable sales.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/kate-williams/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/k8williams
- LinkedIn followers: 5,351
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, ecommerce, email-marketing, ecommerce-retention
- Based on 13 dated posts, latest 2026-10-09

## Summary

Kate Williams is most useful for food and drink ecommerce brands wanting retention, Klaviyo email automation, and growth plans before scaling acquisition.

- Best for: Food and drink ecommerce brands selling direct and through retailers, wanting repeat purchase and email revenue growth.
- Not for: A large consumer brand seeking paid creator sponsorship with media kit, rates and follower reach guarantee.
- Check first: Confirm this is an agency engagement, not creator sponsorship, and ask for earlier signature work examples.

### Takeaways

- Fix leaks before buying more traffic for a £1m online revenue goal.
- Automated lifecycle email does more for retention than another channel or a discount.
- Wholesale listings do not build a customer list; QR codes, sampling and recipes can.

## Main ideas

- **Fix the leaks before buying more traffic**: Williams argues that when a food and drink brand sets a serious online revenue target, acquisition looks like the obvious answer but often isn’t the right first move. Bringing together customer behaviour, website performance, email, repeat purchase, paid media, search and average order value usually reveals a bigger opportunity among existing customers. The recommended order: fix leaks, raise conversion, build retention, grow repeat purchase and get the foundations working harder — then scale acquisition. This is a commercial decision, not a technical one: good strategy means being brave enough to say the money shouldn’t go there yet.
- **Automated lifecycle email does more for retention than another channel or a discount**: Email is the subject Williams returns to most. Timed, data-driven messages built around where a customer actually is — joining a database, browsing, abandoning a basket, making a first or second purchase, celebrating a birthday or lapsing — outperform discount-led blasts, another acquisition channel or another Q4 campaign. These moments in the customer journey are opportunities to say something different, not just rows of data. The same standard applies to agency hiring: they want someone who owns Klaviyo strategy, campaigns, automated flows and Shopify data end to end — not someone handed a calendar and asked to send emails.
- **Wholesale listings don’t build a customer list**: Williams draws a hard line between wholesale revenue and customer ownership: the retailer owns the customer; the brand owns the brand. Securing listings is a genuine achievement, but when most buyers meet the product on someone else’s shelf, the brand can’t email them, prompt a second purchase, build loyalty or grow lifetime value. The practical response is to capture shoppers and reconnect with them, rather than post more discovery content — giving them a reason to return to the brand itself.
- **Judge marketing by sales, and treat early numbers as early**: Williams measures the work in sales, repeat purchase and customer lifetime value, not reach, impressions or engagement. Behind a sales figure, they lists the questions that produced it: where customers are being lost, what drives a first purchase, what brings them back, where the next pound should go and what doesn’t need doing. Different brands get different answers; Williams sees that as the substance of the job.
- **Strategy only counts once it becomes three months of action**: A strategy document starts the work; it doesn’t finish it. Williams describes the follow-up session as the favourite part: sitting around a table with the client team to choose the few things that will actually move the needle in the next quarter, with named levers rather than a positioning deck. A food or drink brand might specify repeat purchase, paid media and seasonal gifting as those levers.
- **AI buying decisions are another touchpoint, not the end of search and email**: Williams pushes back on the idea that AI assistants make search or email obsolete. Their reading of ChatGPT Ads is that buying decisions are increasingly happening inside AI tools, adding a touchpoint to the customer journey rather than replacing the others. The brands likely to win have a clear proposition, strong customer reviews, helpful content, strong brand awareness and a joined-up marketing strategy — fundamentals that hold whichever route the customer arrives by.

## Work to read

- [Fix leaks before buying more traffic for a £1m online revenue goal](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/k8williams_foodanddrinkmarketing-marketingstrategy-businessgrowth-activity-7495830056204722176-BluT)
- [Why a birthday email is still a serious retention channel](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/k8williams_emailmarketing-ecommerce-customerretention-activity-7510690523704098816-I63i)
- [Wholesale listings do not build a customer list](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/k8williams_foodanddrink-foodbusiness-d2c-activity-7487825710691188736-vQ2q)
- [Judging Q4 by Shopify sales, not reach](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/k8williams_foodanddrinkmarketing-businessgrowth-ecommerce-activity-7513557043774066688-opQw)
- [Turning a food brand strategy into three months of action](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/k8williams_foodanddrinkmarketing-foodanddrinkbrands-activity-7511482823061520385-9ysJ)
- [AI buying decisions are another touchpoint, not the end of search](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/k8williams_foodanddrinkmarketing-foodanddrinkbusiness-activity-7485391650362470401-jMi9)
- [What Kate Williams looks for in a Klaviyo account manager](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/k8williams_hiring-emailmarketing-klaviyo-activity-7499053179150540800-fuEb)

## Brand relationships

- **KW Marketing** (owned_business)
- **Flapjackery** (client)
- **Klaviyo** (mention)
- **Shopify** (mention)

## Partnerships

No sponsorship programme, media kit, rate card or published partnership inquiry route appears in the posts. Kate Williams operates KW Marketing, an agency for food and drink ecommerce brands, so the commercially realistic route is an agency engagement rather than a creator sponsorship. The closest named commercial relationship is Flapjackery, described in an October 2026 post as a client whose strategy work is complete and whose focus has shifted to a three-month action plan covering repeat purchase, paid media and Christmas gifting. Other posts describe agency work for unnamed clients, including monitoring Shopify dashboards in early Q4 and reporting year-on-year sales increases across different food and drink clients. An August 2026 hiring post for a Digital Account Manager at £30,000–£33,000 on a minimum 30-hour hybrid contract points to an agency team rather than a one-person operation, a key consideration for a buyer's timeline. The approach is retention-led: email and Klaviyo automation, repeat purchase and customer lifetime value take priority over additional acquisition spend. Ask directly about rates, deliverables and availability for any sponsorship-style arrangement.

## Alternatives

- Aminat Hammed: Choose Aminat Hammed for a retention programme that needs to be argued with published industry numbers and broadened to reflect how shoppers now find products. The posts cite named data rather than assertion: a 2026 ecommerce marketing report covering 150,000 brands, where automations were 2% of email sends and 30% of email-driven revenue, and figures on AI-assisted shopping discovery. Those figures suit a brand that has to justify its email and flow budget to a sceptical board, or wants retention work joined up with product-page clarity, comparison content and first-party data. The follow-up recommendation is to ask what customer behaviour the brand is not responding to yet, before adding another campaign to the calendar. A food and drink brand that also wants its product information made legible to AI-driven discovery would get a broader frame than a flows-only engagement.
- Lindsey Lopez: Choose Lindsey Lopez when a programme includes SMS as well as email and the recurring problem is uncoordinated sending. The posts work through cross-channel orchestration with a concrete example: an abandoned-cart email, an SMS follow-up two hours later if the email is not opened, and a dynamic product recommendation that evening if the customer opened but did not buy. They also describe an educational sequence built for a direct-to-consumer client in one product category, run as three parts rather than a single promotion. That suits a brand whose email and text messages currently overlap or contradict each other, and whose lists are large enough that message discipline matters more than learning another platform. Their framing of email and SMS as relationship-building channels rather than promotion channels is useful when the internal argument is about sending fewer, better messages.
- Alejandra Salomon: Choose Alejandra Salomon when the brand suspects the churn problem starts before retention does. The posts argue that a retention team can be held responsible for customers it never had a chance to keep, that customers acquired through heavy discounting churn faster, and that a better win-back flow will not fix a product, pricing or service problem. The suggested method is concrete: tag customers, show the cohorts and point to where behaviour starts to change, shifting the conversation with leadership from churn in isolation to the story before the churn. That is the right alternative when a food and drink brand has built the flows but the numbers have not moved, or when the disagreement inside the business is about whether the problem is acquisition, offer or experience. It is also a useful check before spending the quarter on another lifecycle build.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/