Email Lifecycle Flows Case Study in Pakistan

The Client

A Karachi-based D2C skincare and personal care brand selling cleansers, serums, sunscreens, and haircare through their own Shopify storefront. They had built a loyal following on Instagram and through three brick-and-mortar salons across the city, and the online store had grown to roughly PKR 14M in monthly revenue. Their list was sizable — 38,000 subscribers collected over three years of pop-ups, in-store sign-ups, and lead magnets — but it had never been treated as a revenue channel.

The brand’s owner had a sharp eye for product and content but no dedicated lifecycle resource. Email was being managed by a junior marketer who sent the same newsletter to the entire list twice a month: new launches, the occasional sale, a salon promotion. There was no welcome series for new subscribers, no cart recovery, no browse abandonment logic, no post-purchase journey, and no attempt to bring lapsed buyers back. The brand was, in effect, paying to acquire customers through Meta and Google ads and then ignoring them the moment they joined the list.

That indifference was getting expensive. Paid customer acquisition cost had risen roughly 22% year on year as beauty advertising in Pakistan became more crowded, and the brand’s blended return on ad spend had softened from 4.1x to 3.0x over the prior twelve months. They approached WeProms Digital to make retention profitable — not to send prettier newsletters, but to build the kind of email marketing automation lifecycle flows that turn a cold list into a compounding revenue engine.

The Problem

Four issues were quietly draining revenue every month:

1. A list that was mostly asleep. Of the 38,000 subscribers, roughly 81% had not opened or clicked anything in the previous 90 days. The brand kept mailing everyone equally, which meant every send was weighted down by tens of thousands of inactives — dragging deliverability down and making the active subscribers harder to reach.

2. Batch-and-blast as the entire strategy. Two identical newsletters a month, sent to the full file, with no segmentation by purchase history, browse behaviour, or lifecycle stage. Open rates sat at 19% and click rates at 1.1% — below what a healthy beauty list should produce. A subscriber who had bought PKR 12,000 of product last month received the same generic message as someone who had never opened an email.

3. Zero automated flows. No welcome series to convert new subscribers on the excitement of signing up. No cart abandonment recovery on a store where the average cart was abandoned roughly seven times out of ten. No browse abandonment, no post-purchase cross-sell, no replenishment reminders for consumable products that run out every 6-8 weeks, and no win-back for lapsed buyers. Every dollar of email revenue required a manual send.

4. Deliverability quietly failing. Because the list was bloated and engagement was low, mailbox providers were losing trust. Around 14% of sends were landing in Gmail’s promotions tab or being silently filtered, and the brand had no idea this was happening because they were not monitoring inbox placement at all.

The net effect: email contributed only about 7% of monthly revenue — roughly PKR 1.0M against a PKR 14M top line — despite a list that should have been one of the brand’s most profitable assets. The opportunity was not more subscribers. It was making the subscribers they already had actually convert.

Phase 1 — Diagnosis and Cleanup (Weeks 1-2)

Before building anything, we needed to know what the list could actually do. The first two weeks were forensic: audit the current setup, measure deliverability, and clean the file so that everything we built afterwards landed in inboxes.

List audit and hygiene. We segmented the 38,000-subscriber list into engagement tiers: active (opened or clicked in the last 90 days), warming (engaged 91-180 days ago), and cold (no engagement in 180+ days). The breakdown told the story immediately — only about 7,200 subscribers were genuinely active, another 5,400 were warming, and the remaining 25,000+ were effectively dead weight.

Rather than deleting the cold tier outright, we ran a controlled sunset programme: a three-email re-engagement sequence offering a final incentive, with anyone who failed to engage suppressed from future sends. This preserved the deliverability gains without throwing away the small fraction that could be revived.

Deliverability repair. We authenticated the sending domain properly — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records were either missing or misconfigured — and set up a dedicated sending domain rather than sharing the brand’s primary domain. We migrated the account to Klaviyo, which gave us far better deliverability tooling, segmentation, and flow logic than the previous basic tool, and we ran monitored seed-list tests to establish a true inbox-placement baseline. The result: 86% inbox placement at the start, with the worst damage concentrated at Gmail.

Tracking and integration. Lifecycle flows only work if the data feeding them is trustworthy. We wired up the Shopify integration, verified that the browse-abandonment and cart events were firing through the Klaviyo tracking script on every page, and confirmed that order data was flowing back correctly for attribution. We also connected the salon point-of-sale export so that in-store buyers could be added to the right lifecycle stage rather than treated as strangers.

Phase 1 results (by end of week 2):

Diagnostic	Before	After cleanup
Active subscribers (90-day)	7,200	7,200 (now correctly isolated)
Cold tier suppressed	0	~24,000 moved to sunset/suppression
Inbox placement (seed test)	86%	94%
Authenticated sending domain	No	Yes (SPF/DKIM/DMARC)
Event tracking verified	Partial	Full (browse, cart, order)

The list did not shrink in a way that hurt reach — it shrank in a way that improved it. By the time we started building flows, every send was reaching people who had a real chance of buying.

Phase 2 — Build and Restructure (Weeks 3-5)

With a clean, deliverable list and trustworthy event data, we built the core lifecycle foundation. The goal of this phase was coverage: get the five highest-leverage flows live so that every major customer moment had an automated response attached to it.

Welcome series (4 emails). The most expensive leak in any D2C beauty brand is the subscriber who signs up and then hears nothing relevant for two weeks. We built a four-part welcome series triggered on the newsletter sign-up event: a first-email brand introduction with a first-order discount delivered immediately, a second email two days later showcasing bestsellers with social proof, a third email educating on a core skincare concern the brand was known for, and a fourth email with a final urgency nudge before the discount expired. The series converted new subscribers while their interest was at its peak.

Cart abandonment recovery (3 emails). The brand was abandoning roughly 70% of carts — typical for Pakistani ecommerce where cash-on-delivery hesitation and courier-cost surprises kill checkouts. We built a three-email cart sequence: a reminder within an hour, a helpful follow-up the next day addressing common objections (COD availability, delivery time, returns), and a final incentive email 24 hours later. Because the data showed many abandonments happened at the shipping-cost step, we paired this with a free-shipping threshold nudge.

Browse abandonment (2 emails). For logged-in or tracked visitors who viewed specific products three or more times without buying, we triggered a browse-abandonment flow featuring the exact products they had been looking at, with stock urgency where inventory was low.

Post-purchase journey (3 emails). After a first purchase, customers entered a post-purchase flow: a transactional-style thank-you with usage instructions for the specific product bought, a day-ten check-in asking how the product was working, and a day-twenty-five cross-sell introducing a complementary product. This flow alone became one of the strongest second-purchase drivers.

Win-back (3 emails). Customers who had not purchased in 75 days entered a win-back sequence with escalating incentives and a final “we miss you” message. This is the kind of customer win-back work that most brands never prioritise, and it recovers revenue that would otherwise be permanently lost.

Segmentation foundation. Alongside the flows, we built the segment architecture that the next phase would rely on: purchasers vs non-purchasers, VIPs (top 10% by lifetime spend), product-category buyers, and lapsed customers. These segments power both the flows’ conditional logic and future campaign targeting.

Phase 2 results (by end of week 5):

Flow	Status	Early signal (first 2 weeks live)
Welcome series	Live	11% new-subscriber conversion to first purchase
Cart abandonment	Live	14% recovery rate within first 14 days
Browse abandonment	Live	Generating first attributed orders
Post-purchase	Live	Second-purchase rate climbing
Win-back	Live	Reactivating dormant buyers

Phase 3 — Optimize and Scale (Weeks 4-8)

Once the core flows were live and generating revenue, the focus shifted from coverage to performance. This phase overlapped with the tail of Phase 2 because we began optimising each flow as soon as it had enough volume to read.

Replenishment flows for consumables. Skincare is a consumable category — a serum lasts roughly 6-8 weeks. We built category-aware replenishment flows that triggered a “time to restock” email around the predicted run-out date for each product type, with a one-click reorder link. This turned a one-time purchase into a recurring behaviour without requiring a formal subscription, which many Pakistani beauty buyers are hesitant to commit to.

SMS as a complement, not a duplicate. Because the audience was mobile-first and WhatsApp-native, we added a consented SMS layer for the two highest-urgency moments only: an SMS nudge in the cart-abandonment flow for high-value carts, and an SMS for time-sensitive launches. SMS was kept deliberately narrow to protect consent and avoid fatigue — it carried roughly 18% of flow-attributed revenue while touching a small fraction of the volume.

A/B testing the high-leverage moments. We ran structured tests on the elements that move revenue most: subject lines on the welcome first email, discount depth in cart recovery, send timing on replenishment, and cross-sell product selection in post-purchase. Each test ran to a pre-decided sample size before we declared a winner, and winners were locked in. Over the phase this lifted the welcome conversion rate from 11% to 16% and cart recovery from 14% to 23%.

VIP segment programme. We isolated the top 10% of customers by lifetime spend and built a distinct treatment for them: early access to launches, a dedicated VIP-only flow, and a higher-service post-purchase journey. VIPs represented under 10% of the list but came to account for roughly 38% of email-attributed revenue once they were treated differently.

Campaign discipline. With flows carrying the baseline revenue, we restructured the manual campaign calendar around flows rather than against them. Campaigns stopped competing with the welcome series for new subscribers’ attention, and each campaign was targeted to a specific segment instead of blasted to the whole list.

Phase 3 results (by end of week 8):

Metric	Start of phase	End of week 8
Flow revenue (monthly)	PKR 0.9M	PKR 2.1M
Welcome conversion	11%	16%
Cart recovery rate	14%	23%
Email revenue share	14%	23%
Open rate (active list)	31%	38%

Phase 4 — Measure and Compound (Weeks 8-12)

The final phase was about turning the lifecycle engine into something that compounds on its own and that the brand’s team could run confidently. Revenue from flows had already overtaken campaign revenue by a wide margin; the task now was attribution clarity, iteration cadence, and durability.

Attribution and reporting layer. We built a shared dashboard that attributed revenue by flow, by segment, and by channel (email vs SMS), with deliverability and list-health metrics alongside it. This replaced the previous “email made PKR 1M last month, somehow” reporting with a clear view of exactly which flow earned which rupee. The dashboard is what made the 28% revenue share figure defensible rather than aspirational.

Continuous-iteration cadence. We established a monthly flow-review rhythm: review each flow’s performance against target, retire underperforming variants, refresh creative that was fatiguing, and add one new test. This cadence is what kept revenue climbing past the initial build rather than plateauing.

Cross-sell and category expansion. With the core journey stable, we layered in intelligent cross-sell — a customer who bought a cleanser was introduced to the matching moisturiser; a sunscreen buyer was introduced to the aftershave-care line. These cross-sell touches increased average order value on repeat purchases and widened the number of categories each customer bought from over time.

Tying flows to loyalty. We connected the flow logic to a lightweight loyalty structure so that post-purchase and VIP flows referenced points and tier status, giving customers a reason to consolidate their spend with the brand rather than shopping around.

The compounding effect was clear in the numbers. By the 120-day mark, flows were generating roughly PKR 2.6M per month on their own, and email as a whole — flows plus targeted campaigns — accounted for 28% of the brand’s monthly revenue. That is the share of a channel that had been stuck at 7% four months earlier.

Final Results at 120 Days

Metric	Before	At 120 days	Change
Email revenue share	7%	28%	+21 pts
Flow-attributed revenue (monthly)	PKR 0.3M	PKR 2.6M	+767%
Email revenue (monthly, total)	PKR 1.0M	PKR 3.9M	+290%
Open rate (active list)	19%	39%	+105%
Click rate	1.1%	3.4%	+209%
Cart-abandonment recovery	8%	23%	+15 pts
Inbox placement (seed test)	86%	98%	+12 pts
New-subscriber first-purchase (welcome)	0%	16%	New channel

Every number in this table traces back to a specific phase: the inbox-placement gain came from the Phase 1 cleanup, the welcome and cart results from the Phase 2 build, the recovery-rate improvement from the Phase 3 optimisation, and the durable 28% share from the Phase 4 attribution and iteration discipline.

What Made This Work

1. Cleanup before construction. The single highest-ROI decision was fixing deliverability and sunsetting inactives before building a single flow. Flows are useless if they land in spam. Spending two weeks on authentication, dedicated sending, and list hygiene meant every subsequent flow had a real chance to perform.

2. Flows did the heavy lifting, not campaigns. The brand’s previous email revenue depended on two manual sends a month. Shifting the baseline to automated flows meant revenue was being earned every day, in every customer moment, without anyone pressing send — and it freed campaigns to be targeted and additive rather than the whole strategy.

3. Consumable-category logic. Treating skincare as the consumable it is — with replenishment flows timed to actual run-out windows — converted one-time buyers into repeat buyers without forcing a subscription model that the Pakistani market resists. This is the kind of vertical-specific tuning that generic email advice misses.

4. VIP differential treatment. Isolating the top decile and treating them distinctly concentrated revenue where the lifetime value already was. Treating everyone equally is the silent tax on every D2C email programme.

5. Attribution made the result real. The dashboard that attributed revenue by flow and segment is what turned “email feels better” into a defensible 28% revenue share that the brand’s owner could take to decisions about ad-spend allocation and inventory.

What Teams Can Apply

For Pakistani D2C brands that want email to earn its keep:

1. Audit deliverability before you build flows. Authenticate your domain, use a dedicated sending domain, and measure inbox placement with a seed test. If your open rates look fine but revenue does not, you are probably being silently filtered.

2. Sunset your inactive subscribers. A large cold list actively hurts you by dragging down deliverability. Re-engage once, then suppress — your reach to genuinely interested subscribers will improve immediately.

3. Cover the five core moments first. Welcome, cart abandonment, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and win-back. These five flows will out-earn any number of newsletter redesigns.

4. Build around your product’s purchase cycle. For consumables, replenishment is the highest-leverage flow you are not running. Time it to the real run-out window, not a generic 30-day rule.

5. Treat your best customers differently. Segment your top decile and give them a distinct journey. Equal treatment is the enemy of lifetime value.

WeProms Digital has applied this lifecycle framework across Pakistani D2C brands in beauty, supplements, fashion, and home and personal care — you can see more of the vertical context in our work for digital marketing for beauty parlors and related retail verticals. The specific flow logic, timing, and creative change with each product cycle, but the technical-first, flows-over-campaigns, attribution-backed approach stays the same.