Not just "we loved it." We asked clients what was actually annoying, and what really changed.
Honestly, at first I didn't believe an email sequence would move the needle — I thought it was a wasted budget. Setup took almost a month since we were migrating an old list from our previous platform, so there were a few hiccups. But after launch, funnel revenue really did grow. Not by leaps and bounds, but noticeably — and without any extra ad spend.
We had complaints that emails weren't being delivered, and we assumed it was the subject lines and copy — rewrote them maybe five times. Turned out DMARC just wasn't configured. Once that was fixed, a chunk of the problem disappeared on its own, before we'd changed a single line in the emails. A bit annoying we didn't think to check that ourselves sooner.
They suggested cleaning out part of our list — that felt scary, a list is still an asset, we'd spent years building it. We agreed to test it on one segment first. A couple of weeks later we checked the numbers: open rates were up, sales hadn't dropped. After that we cleaned the rest of the list too, but the test was worth doing.
We'd looked at two other agencies before this one — both had polished decks and vague talk about "boosting sales." On the very first call here, they asked for our actual numbers and told us straight away that part of what we wanted wouldn't pay off at our list size. Not the most fun thing to hear, but it's exactly why we picked them.
I won't say everything moved instantly — our own side slowed the process down with email approvals, and that's on us, not them. On the plus side: I didn't have to explain what list segmentation even was, they just suggested how to split it. About two months in, we hit a steady increase in repeat purchases.
Our previous agency used to send reports — open rate, clicks, and that's it, no connection to actual revenue. Here, the report shows exactly how much each campaign brought in. I showed it to my manager — first time I didn't have to calculate any of it myself.