Overview

I joined Perfect Keto as Email and SMS Marketing Manager at a moment when the company’s primary revenue channel was in decline.

Email accounted for the majority of attributed revenue, exceeding social, affiliate, paid media and SEO combined. The CRM database held over one million contacts but only about 100,000 of those subscribers were engaged.

The role I inherited was described as channel management. I coordinated directly with channel leads across social, Amazon, affiliate, and retail, functioning as de facto Director of Lifecycle Marketing. In practice, it became something closer to revenue architecture: rebuilding the CRM systems, vendor relationships and cross-functional workflows that allowed the loyalty, email, and SMS channels to operate as reliable revenue engines rather than deteriorating assets.

The challenge

The retention program was actively failing.

Legacy email automations had decayed into what I came to call “zombie flows” that were technically active but functionally broken, triggering on defunct logic and sending to segments that no longer engaged. Deliverability infrastructure had eroded to levels that risked wholesale failure. The sender reputation was potentially catastrophic.

The mandate was straightforward but not simple. Stabilize the foundation. Then rebuild for growth.

Rebuilding deliverability and technical infrastructure

I partnered directly with Klaviyo as a Certified Partner to execute a full sender reputation rewarming protocol. The process was methodical: gradually re-engaging dormant segments, suppressing unengaged contacts, and rebuilding trust with inbox providers over weeks rather than days.

In parallel, I audited every automation flow in the system. The zombie automations were replaced with behaviorally-triggered lifecycle flows. I established segmentation infrastructure that shifted the program from list-blasting to targeted engagement based on customer behavior.

Subscriber-only VIP event

One of the most consequential initiatives I led at Perfect Keto was a 24-hour sitewide shutdown. For one day, only email and SMS subscribers could access the store.

This required custom Shopify development to gate the storefront behind a subscriber verification system. It was not a discount code distributed across the internet. It was a manufactured scarcity event that delivered on a VIP promise the brand had been making to subscribers for years but had never actually kept.

The event generated $1.3 million in revenue, the most successful single sales day in company history outside of Black Friday, achieved on an otherwise unremarkable Monday, with discounts of up to 60% across the entire catalog.

The strategy deliberately cross-pollinated channels. Email-only subscribers had to activate SMS to receive the access password. SMS-only subscribers had to confirm email preferences. This was designed to convert longstanding single-channel subscribers into multi-channel customers while simultaneously driving record revenue. It worked on both fronts.

Building SMS as an independent channel

When I arrived, SMS was being treated as a secondary channel, like a “mini-email campaign” with no independent logic of its own.

I became a beta tester for PostScript’s Sales product before its general release, working directly with the platform’s founders to co-develop implementation strategy. The goal was to transform SMS from a one-way broadcast into a two-way conversational commerce engine with its own content, cadence, and personalization strategy. This work led to my selection as a PostScript webinar panelist on economic adaptation strategy for top DTC brands.

The operating principle I established was that email and SMS require fundamentally different approaches. SMS received its own deal structures, its own frequency management and real-time customer support integration. By the first Black Friday under this strategy, SMS Sales had become a major attributed revenue driver operating with it’s own sales training program and personalization strategy.

Cross-functional content architecture

When creative operations needed restructuring mid-stream, I assumed interim creative direction and built a freelance infrastructure to maintain output quality without disruption.

The larger move was establishing the email program as the organization’s central content engine. Copy and creative developed for email fed social media, Amazon listings, Shopify storefronts, blog content and affiliate scripts across the organization. Rather than each channel generating its own content in isolation, email became where messaging was tested, refined and proven before being distributed elsewhere.

I also directed direct mail reactivation campaigns for dormant subscribers, matching Klaviyo engagement data to physical mailing addresses through proprietary systems. This was an unconventional move, drawing on political campaign experience to reactivate lapsed email audiences through an entirely different channel. The principle: if someone will not open your email, put a different piece of paper in their mailbox.

Rethinking the loyalty program

The existing loyalty program relied on points-based gamification mechanics, transactional incentives dressed up as retention strategy. I eliminated that system.

In its place, I built an experiential loyalty framework grounded in a simple idea: deliver on the promises already made to subscribers. Personalized help. Deep discounts. Early access. The things they were told they would receive for being loyal customers but never actually got.

The bet was that genuine VIP treatment would outperform point accumulation. It did.

Key Results:

• $1.3M single-day revenue from subscriber-only access event (non-holiday)
• Rebuilt deliverability for 1M+ contact database as Klaviyo Certified Partner
• Beta tested PostScript Sales product; established SMS as independent revenue channel
• Eliminated points-based loyalty program in favor of experiential retention framework
• Served as organization’s central content engine for cross-channel messaging

The transition

Following this work, I reconnected with Perfect Keto’s former Director of Content to help found the Seed Oil Free Alliance, detailed in Case Study 1.

This is the second of three case studies documenting my transition from retention operator to marketing founder. For the complete series, see Case Study 1: Communications Director for the Seed Oil Free Alliance and Case Study 3: Fractional CMO for White Oak Pastures.