Case study · Sports nutrition retailer
Discount Supplements
A twenty-year-old UK retailer with a huge list nobody was mailing. When acquisition got harder and new customers fell 41%, the rebuilt engine answered: more from every customer, with a third less discounting.
- Klaviyo · Loop · Shopify Plus
- UK
01 · Where they started
Twenty years of customers, one neglected engine
Discount Supplements has sold sports nutrition for the best part of twenty years: a long-established UK retailer with a large customer file, carrying the big third-party names alongside its own brands. Email used to be a pillar of the business.
By summer 2025 email was running on muscle memory. The programme had drifted across platforms and needed an owner: most of the list never received a send, and the flows had sat untouched for a year.
"I just want a team to take hold of it and really run with it. We're trying to run a business here. We can't be strategising all the time."
Adam Oxley, before the engagement
The gap between what the list was worth and what it was producing kept widening, and the market was about to make that gap dangerous. Blanket discounts hurt profit, paid acquisition was getting dearer, and the customers the business already owned were the only asset nobody was working.
02 · What we found
The early window
The diagnostic ranked the leaks, and the first was reach: a very large list of proven buyers, most of whom were simply never emailed, sitting behind a deliverability problem that had crept in during the platform moves. The cheapest revenue in the business was locked in a database nobody was mailing.
-
The list was the asset, and it was idle
Years of real buyers who never heard from the brand, and a sending reputation that needed rebuilding before they safely could. Fixing reach came before anything clever.
-
The second order is decided early
The customer data showed most people who come back do so soon after their first order. Whatever we built had to win that early window, not the twelfth month.
-
Discounting was a trap, not a lever
Blanket discounts hurt profit. Retention had to come from cadence, segmentation and own-brand routines, not an ever-deeper offer ladder. And subscriptions, the most durable revenue in the model, barely registered.
03 · What we built
Rebuilt without the discount crutch
Week one was spent inside the tools they already had, not waiting for new ones: segments rebuilt, the unmailed majority of the list identified, popup targeting tested, a broken browse-abandonment flow fixed.
-
Quick wins first, platform second. The fixes that could ship immediately shipped inside the old system, while the real engine was designed for the platform that could actually measure it.
-
The programme moved home to Klaviyo. New popups and a new welcome flow went live within six weeks, the sending domain was warmed carefully, and the flow library was rebuilt and nearly doubled: post-purchase and cross-sell, abandoned cart and checkout across email and SMS, review request, viewed collection, replenishment timed to product usage, back in stock.
-
Channels added in the order the list could carry them. SMS from a standing start, scaled ahead of the season. WhatsApp captured and put to work. Direct mail posted to lapsed buyers email could no longer reach. And Black Friday itself rebuilt as a code-gated VIP event designed to protect subscribers and margins rather than blast a sitewide discount.
-
From flows to a system. Surveys split the list by intent and fed segmented plain-text sends. The subscription programme relaunched on Loop with rewards built in, cancellation saves, payment recovery and an upcoming-order flow. A new winback family went live across email, SMS and a second direct-mail run. And every agency on the account now works to the same cohort metrics, reviewed quarterly.
"If we can't spend our way to new customers, we need to squeeze more value out of every customer we do get. That's the bit I need us to nail together."
Adam Oxley, Co-Owner
04 · The numbers
What it added up to
- +227% subscription revenue in year one
- +10% orders per repeat buyer within 180 days, matured cohorts
- +10.9% orders per customer
- +12.2% repeat rate at 60 days, matured cohorts
- +7.8% 90-day customer value, matured cohorts
- -33% discount per order, with fewer orders discounted at all
"It's great to finally have someone on our account who knows what they're doing."