# Zach Schieffer

Zach Schieffer works on email and SMS retention for direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands. Schieffer's posts discuss retention strategy, campaign planning, and improving how brands turn customer relationships into repeat revenue.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/zach-schieffer/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-schieffer
- LinkedIn followers: 21,137
- Topics: ecommerce, email-marketing, ecommerce-retention, ecommerce-operations
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

They are most useful for concrete email and SMS retention work for DTC ecommerce brands.

- Best for: DTC retention agencies or high-growth ecommerce brands needing email and SMS consulting.
- Not for: Consumer or B2B brands seeking sponsored LinkedIn reach or influencer-style paid partnerships.
- Check first: Confirm sponsorship format, rates, terms, and audience demographics.

### Takeaways

- A brand's ceiling is set by what it earns after the first order.
- Promotional pressure is budgeted in blocks, not spread evenly.
- List growth is a designed sequence, with email collected before SMS.

## Main ideas

- **A brand’s ceiling is set by what it earns after the first order**: Schieffer’s central claim is that ad spend gets blamed for problems retention numbers actually explain. Before discussing creative or budget, they ask what share of revenue comes from email and SMS, along with the 90-day LTV and repeat purchase rate. When those numbers are weak, they argue, the same product, traffic and ad account can produce a very different P&L once email and SMS approach 25-30% of revenue: each customer is worth more, allowable CAC rises, payback quickens, margins improve and paid platforms have more room to scale.
- **Promotional pressure is budgeted in blocks, not spread evenly**: Rather than drip discounts steadily, Schieffer sees a strong email calendar as alternating stretches of non-offer and offer sends, with the deepest discounts reserved for the few moments when the whole market is buying. Discount depth is a scarce resource: use it in ordinary weeks, and customers learn to wait while the brand gives away margin it may need later.
- **The offer should be carried inside an idea**: Schieffer argues that an incentive lands better when it comes with a story, game, holiday or curiosity hook than when it is announced as a percentage off. The discount is still there; the framing gets the email opened and keeps the brand from seeming permanently on sale.
- **Give every channel one job and read them together**: Schieffer’s teardowns treat email as one part of a business calendar, not a channel to judge on its own. Paid, retail, marketplaces, the website and the loyalty program each have a role; the test is whether they pull in the same direction. When they do not, promotional effort lands in the wrong channel or the same revenue gets counted twice.
- **List growth is a designed sequence, with email collected before SMS**: Schieffer treats the popup as a sequence, not a widget, and starts with the lower-friction ask so a drop-off can still be captured. The steps: a small persistent teaser, one question that changes what the subscriber receives, email, SMS with full consent language, then the reward delivered immediately. They also recommend checks to confirm it works, including mobile-first QA through checkout and monitoring submit rate after launch. A theme update, targeting change or script conflict can kill conversion even when the popup still looks fine.
- **Retention can be delivered from behind an agency**: Schieffer’s recurring point: email and SMS work does not have to be sold directly to brands. They describe a split where the agency keeps the client relationship, approvals and context while the retention partner handles strategy, copy, design, Klaviyo build and QA, reporting, and the technical problems nobody else wants. The agency earns more from clients who already trust it, the brand gets a retention team without adding payroll, and the partner gets volume.
- **The everyday operating mess is the harder problem, and the copy says so**: Beneath the playbooks is a running argument: ecommerce failure usually comes from operational and measurement confusion, not a missing tactic. The satirical post works because it lists the ordinary chain of failures rather than offering a strategy slide. It ends on attribution, with Meta, Google and Klaviyo each claiming the order while the bank balance disagrees. The informal, specific, direct tone carries through both the counted teardowns and this sketch.

## Work to read

- [I studied 182 OLIPOP emails — here's their playbook](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zach-schieffer_i-studied-182-olipop-emails-heres-their-activity-7500548521918529537-fjaQ)
- [“Zach how do I take this brand from $500k to $1M/mo?”](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zach-schieffer_zach-how-do-i-take-this-brand-from-500k-activity-7498004257036480512-4rya)
- [Popups: five steps the best DTC brands follow](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zach-schieffer_i-really-debated-even-posting-this-but-the-activity-7501326902272434177-pNaI)
- [How we made a DTC agency a ton more money from existing clients](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zach-schieffer_how-we-made-a-dtc-agency-a-ton-more-activity-7499099730803638272-Q7C9)
- [Ecommerce is literally so easy](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/zach-schieffer_ecommerce-is-literally-so-easy-i-really-activity-7512875027382546432-FQ8Q)

## Brand relationships

- **OLIPOP** (mention)
- **ZHS** (disclosed_partnership)

## Partnerships

Zach Schieffer's posts describe retention work delivered to DTC brands as a service, largely through agency and referral arrangements. They describe a working model rather than a placement: strategy, copy, design, Klaviyo build and QA, reporting, and the technical fixes brands tend to avoid. A brand or agency should approach this as scoping a services engagement, not booking an influencer slot. The posts do not describe a sponsorship or paid-partnership program; ask directly about rates and terms if you are considering one. Zach also gives away a free 182-email swipe file and strategy guide, a lead magnet rather than a paid format, and in at least one post invites direct messages for a free review of a brand's popup and email/SMS setup.

## Alternatives

- Conor Gallagher: Choose Gallagher when the biggest risk is a retention plan that looks strong inside the email platform but damages the wider funnel. Gallagher writes from the position of someone who has run a supplement brand at mid-seven figures while also working as an email marketer for five years. That combination drives the argument: email is not a standalone revenue stream but an efficiency tool that keeps the rest of the marketing system from collapsing. The practical difference shows in popup placement. Gallagher's brand shows its popup on the home page only, not the product page, specifically to avoid raising bounce rate, and runs no extra discount on it—the offer just reflects the bundle-and-save deal already on the product page. The stated consequence is that a high-converting popup with a rising bounce rate pushes Meta CPMs up and compounds into lower conversion. For a high-growth brand where paid acquisition is still working, that linkage between list capture and paid efficiency is the reason to pick Gallagher over a stricter retention-channel specialist. The same operator view explains the rest of the setup: pre-purchase flows built from the winning ad angles, three campaigns a week to different segments to drive new-customer acquisition and second orders or subscriptions, and a judgement that email keeps the brand profitable every day even as paid ROAS declines.
- Mark Mei: Choose Mei when the decision turns on delivery capacity rather than a single consultant's diagnostic skill. Mei describes running a seven-figure email agency where email is the only channel touched, arguing that agencies selling paid, SMS and email as one package spread their people thin. The operating detail is concrete: a four-person pod on every account—account manager, copywriter, designer and email-platform technician—three quality checks on every send with a human who knows ecommerce signing off, and hiring out of larger agencies at pay above the going rate because a long-form writer who cannot build an email around a product module and a discount code is not useful. The people running the agency have run their own stores, including two dropshipping stores that reached $1M, which is the basis for judging a client's email by what it does to margin, ad spend and fulfillment on the same profit-and-loss statement. Two further specifics matter for email-only execution: Mei sets a popup conversion target of 10–15% where most sit at 1–2%, and sends a launch to the most engaged segment first before widening out, a habit attributed to a fidget-spinner batch that made $5,000 and a second batch that gave it all back. For an agency that needs headcount-backed execution and can accept email as the whole scope, this is the more complete answer on who does the work.
- Noah Haynes: Choose Haynes when the deliverable is a diagnostic and teaching exercise—fixing flows, segmentation and send volume—rather than a named consultant embedded in delivery. Haynes describes having shot more than 170 breakdown videos showing brands where retention goes wrong, and names four high-impact, most-neglected areas: list growth, campaign volume, content and missing flows. The flow guidance is the most directly portable part. Haynes lists welcome, site abandon, browse abandon, cart abandon, checkout abandon, branded transactional, first-time and returning thank-you, immediate upsell, general winback and sunset as flows every brand should have at least one or two emails for, inside a larger idea of 40–50 essential flows. Alongside that: a minimum of three campaigns a week even with a small list under 15k engaged subscribers, segment buckets that must not overlap so a 30-day engager is not also sitting in the 90-day bucket, and the position that angle matters more than design because brands with pretty layouts still push the wrong products at the wrong time. On metrics, Haynes pushes past campaign revenue to cohort lifetime value, returning customer rate and customer retention rate. The dead-stock post adds a second usable play: a two-to-four campaign slow-mover sequence with a threshold offer such as bundles-only or subscription-only, the slowest movers merchandised closest to the top, campaigns spread through evergreen sends rather than fired off in a row, and framing—value stacking, risk aversion, a satisfaction guarantee—rather than blanket discounting.

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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/