Practical retention tool

Lifecycle email checklist

Use this working checklist to assess email journeys from permission and welcome through post-purchase, renewal, and reactivation.

Explore the retention audit

How to use: Work through this with the people who own the customer journey, systems, data, service, and approvals. Mark unknowns honestly; they are useful audit findings.

Foundation

Confirm sender identity, authentication, permission, unsubscribe, and preference handling. Define lifecycle stages and priority rules. Document event sources, required properties, delays, and failure behavior.Notes

Journey design

Give each flow one primary job. Define trigger, eligibility, branches, fallback content, frequency, and owner. Add exits for conversion, reply, issue, opt-out, ineligibility, and higher-priority journeys.Notes

Core coverage

Assess welcome and first-value support. Assess intent recovery, onboarding, and post-purchase or post-booking. Assess replenishment, cross-sell, adoption, renewal, risk, win-back, and sunset.Notes

Content and experience

Make the sender and purpose recognizable. Use accurate customer and product context with safe fallbacks. Coordinate offers, operational truth, service issues, and accessibility.Notes

QA and learning

Test rendering, links, dynamic values, exits, suppressions, and tracking. Monitor delivery, complaints, opt-outs, clicks, replies, conversion, and customer outcomes. Keep a test log with hypothesis, population, guardrails, result, limitations, and decision.Notes

Next three priorities

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