Sarah Saturday

Ex-Golden Hippo. Sharing 14+ years of retention marketing knowledge & scaling your favorite brands subscription programs. ✡️

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

Most email agencies are really good at making emails look pretty.

- I audited a hair dye brand last month
- They were scaling hard on Meta
- Their previous agency had been sending 25 campaigns a month

Every single one was a discount banner.

> Same product
> Same offer
> Different color background

Repeat.

- No plain text
- No founder voice
- No education

Flows that trigger three automations on the same day someone abandons checkout.

The brand owner knew something was wrong. He just couldn't name it.

> Emails looked fine
> Design was clean
> Open rates were passable

But nothing was compounding…

Every campaign trained the list that the only reason to open was to get a discount. So they stopped opening unless there was a sale.

Subscription churn was invisible because nobody was tracking it. And the list - which was full of buyers - was being treated like cold traffic.

Design-led email is easy to sell. It looks like work on a deck.

But your customer buys a feeling. And feelings come from words, not layouts.

When you lead with copy - real education, a real voice, something that makes them feel like a person wrote it - the list starts responding between sales. Churn slows, LTV grows, and you stop training your buyers to wait for a deal.

If your agency talks more about templates than angles, you don't have a retention partner. You have a graphic design subscription.

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

Most email agencies are really good at making emails look pretty.

- I audited a hair dye brand last month
- They were scaling hard on Meta
- Their previous agency had been sending 25 campaigns a month

Every single one was a discount banner.

> Same product
> Same offer
> Different color background

Repeat.

- No plain text
- No founder voice
- No education

Flows that trigger three automations on the same day someone abandons checkout.

The brand owner knew something was wrong. He just couldn't name it.

> Emails looked fine
> Design was clean
> Open rates were passable

But nothing was compounding…

Every campaign trained the list that the only reason to open was to get a discount. So they stopped opening unless there was a sale.

Subscription churn was invisible because nobody was tracking it. And the list - which was full of buyers - was being treated like cold traffic.

Design-led email is easy to sell. It looks like work on a deck.

But your customer buys a feeling. And feelings come from words, not layouts.

When you lead with copy - real education, a real voice, something that makes them feel like a person wrote it - the list starts responding between sales. Churn slows, LTV grows, and you stop training your buyers to wait for a deal.

If your agency talks more about templates than angles, you don't have a retention partner. You have a graphic design subscription.

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

@JasonJh1319 Yes!

[Jason @JasonJh1319]

Every narrative has a cycle.

Every product has multiple narrative cycles.

Track all of them.

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

We have a wellness brand doing £1M/month.

They hit that number in under 60 days.

Scaling entirely on Meta. Fulfillment from China with 12-day shipping.

Refund rate is under 0.1%.

The product is over a century old. Your grandmother probably used it.

They just found a new reason to sell it.

Ancient product. Fresh mechanism.

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

We have a wellness brand doing £1M/month.

They hit that number in under 60 days.

Scaling entirely on Meta. Fulfillment from China with 12-day shipping.

Refund rate is under 0.1%.

The product is over a century old. Your grandmother probably used it.

They just found a new reason to sell it.

Ancient product. Fresh mechanism.

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

https://t.co/CVtMErhwe7

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

Me at 25:

- Worked the graveyard shift
- Stopped going out, became a recluse
- Moved back into my parents' house after my dad's heart attack
- Gained weight despite being on my feet 12 hours a night
- Accomplished all the goals my family laid out for me
- Needed to forge my own path, didn't know where to start

Me at 40:

- Managed over $300M in email revenue
- Watched founders go from survival mode to legitimately profitable
- Took subscription programs that are basically dead, and turned them into revenue engines
- Built a team I fully trust and actually want to work with
- Work from the beach at least 1x a week
- Make all decisions based on what works for me

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

Me at 25:

- Worked the graveyard shift
- Stopped going out, became a recluse
- Moved back into my parents' house after my dad's heart attack
- Gained weight despite being on my feet 12 hours a night
- Accomplished all the goals my family laid out for me
- Needed to forge my own path, didn't know where to start

Me at 40:

- Managed over $300M in email revenue
- Watched founders go from survival mode to legitimately profitable
- Took subscription programs that are basically dead, and turned them into revenue engines
- Built a team I fully trust and actually want to work with
- Work from the beach at least 1x a week
- Make all decisions based on what works for me

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

There are two paths you can go with email copy

Path A

- AI with nobody driving it
- Customers don't trust the copy
- Customers don't trust the product
- Numbers are going down over time
- Output goes up, results get worse
- Ends in a dead list

Path B

- A real human driving the AI
- Customers feel a real connection
- Customers feel invested in
- Customers feel part of a lifestyle
- Rev share up, retention up, AOV up, LTV up
- Ends in long-term relationships

There's no in-between.

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

There are two paths you can go with email copy

Path A

- AI with nobody driving it
- Customers don't trust the copy
- Customers don't trust the product
- Numbers are going down over time
- Output goes up, results get worse
- Ends in a dead list

Path B

- A real human driving the AI
- Customers feel a real connection
- Customers feel invested in
- Customers feel part of a lifestyle
- Rev share up, retention up, AOV up, LTV up
- Ends in long-term relationships

There's no in-between.

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

@Sebastianb0527 Congratulations!

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

@Jason______A I have a fridge that was manufactured in 1994 that has never once had a problem. But the "state of the art" fridge I bought in 2018 has already needed 2 major repairs. Planned obsolescence is getting insane lol

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

“My retention agency is fine. Campaigns go out every week, our revenue's steady, and nothing's broken.”

Recently audited the same account doing $3M/month…

“80% of their traffic goes to Checkout Champ. 20% to Shopify.”

They have zero Checkout Champ flows live. Zero. And the agency didn't even know.

This brand works through an agency, the agency built them a Shopify abandoned checkout, and that was it, job done. But 80% of the money moves through Checkout Champ and there’s no abandoned checkout flow there at all, because it never existed.

So we come in and build the Checkout Champ abandoned checkout, specific to that funnel.

> On one brand, that single flow that didn't exist before is now doing ~$800k/month
> Same thing on the next subscription brand
> Same thing on the one after that

In most cases, the flow literally wasn’t there until we built it.

So why doesn't the agency catch an 800k hole?

> They’re not looking
> Don’t understand how Checkout Champ works
> Entire team is complacent
> Just rolling out campaigns
> They have “a system that works,” and that’s it

…literally junior maxxing…

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

“My retention agency is fine. Campaigns go out every week, our revenue's steady, and nothing's broken.”

Recently audited the same account doing $3M/month…

“80% of their traffic goes to Checkout Champ. 20% to Shopify.”

They have zero Checkout Champ flows live. Zero. And the agency didn't even know.

This brand works through an agency, the agency built them a Shopify abandoned checkout, and that was it, job done. But 80% of the money moves through Checkout Champ and there’s no abandoned checkout flow there at all, because it never existed.

So we come in and build the Checkout Champ abandoned checkout, specific to that funnel.

> On one brand, that single flow that didn't exist before is now doing ~$800k/month
> Same thing on the next subscription brand
> Same thing on the one after that

In most cases, the flow literally wasn’t there until we built it.

So why doesn't the agency catch an 800k hole?

> They’re not looking
> Don’t understand how Checkout Champ works
> Entire team is complacent
> Just rolling out campaigns
> They have “a system that works,” and that’s it

…literally junior maxxing…

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

A masterclass on how to find the 5-8 points of email attributed revenue your agency invented to get you to 30%:

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

A masterclass on how to find the 5-8 points of email attributed revenue your agency invented to get you to 30%:

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

The reason we can turn around a full account audit in 24 to 48 hours instead of a week is AI.

Speed of implementation is really what it comes down to in how we leverage it, and it's enabling us to get better results faster.

That speed has one hard limit.

AI hallucinates and makes things up.

The output looks fine when you zoom out, but the moment you actually read it, the whole thing falls apart into gibberish that isn't even real English.

And I'm not letting that get deployed.

Which is why I copy chief my team as if AI doesn't even exist. I ask writers to get on it, go for the actual research, and write the copy the way they would if the tool were never an option.

The strategy, the angle, and the call on whether a line earns its place sit with the people, not the model, because the model was never the thing doing the persuading in the first place.

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

The reason we can turn around a full account audit in 24 to 48 hours instead of a week is AI.

Speed of implementation is really what it comes down to in how we leverage it, and it's enabling us to get better results faster.

That speed has one hard limit.

AI hallucinates and makes things up.

The output looks fine when you zoom out, but the moment you actually read it, the whole thing falls apart into gibberish that isn't even real English.

And I'm not letting that get deployed.

Which is why I copy chief my team as if AI doesn't even exist. I ask writers to get on it, go for the actual research, and write the copy the way they would if the tool were never an option.

The strategy, the angle, and the call on whether a line earns its place sit with the people, not the model, because the model was never the thing doing the persuading in the first place.

[Sarah Saturday @Saturdaymatters]

I've been speaking to my team about spotting dead flows in 9-figure brands.

So far, we've talked about:

- Heavy subscription volume sitting in one risky place
- 80% of traffic going to Checkout Champ, with zero Checkout Champ flows live
- 6-figure/month flows that simply never get built
- Email “attributing” 30%+ on a Checkout Champ brand
- Flows with 4,000 clicks somehow crediting 17,000 purchases
- “Abandoned checkout flow” that was only ever built for Shopify

What else are we missing?