How do you get customers to come back without paying for it?

Own the channel. Email, push notifications and an app cost nothing per message, which means the tenth contact costs the same as the first — unlike every advertising platform.

What decides it

Building that list is the work, and the moment to do it is at the order, when the customer is most willing. What is asked for at that moment — an email, a notification permission, an install — decides what the store can do for the next two years.

The part that gets skipped

Retention beats acquisition on every measure, and almost every store spends the other way round.

The slowest part of most mobile stores is images nobody resized. It is the most common performance problem and the easiest to fix.

Discounting to grow trains customers to wait for discounts. It works once and costs afterwards.

Where an app fits

Push notifications are the one growth channel you do not rent. Every other route to a customer is paid for again each time.