A full Tention engagement, start to finish.

If you've been thinking about filling in the form and you want to know what you're actually signing up for, this is that.

I'm going to walk through an entire Tention engagement in order. The first call. The first two weeks. Campaigns. Month two to six. Then what it looks like a year in, because nobody ever shows you that part. Then the guarantee, what it costs, and real accounts by niche.

Everything I'm about to walk through is backed by a guarantee. If we don't hit the number, you don't pay. I'll explain exactly how that works near the end.

It's about twenty minutes. By the end you'll know whether this is for you.

Before I get into it, a bit about me. My name's James. I run Tention. I didn't start it. Tyler started it in November 2023. I came in a few months later, February 2024, as part owner and CEO. I'm still the CEO.

Before that I was in e-com communities trying to figure out the whole e-com thing, and at the same time I was interning at an SEO agency. That's where I learned how agencies work. How they grow, how they get clients, how they sell the service. And it's where I saw everything I didn't want to do.

I didn't want to charge a lot of money for something that takes a long time to show a return. I didn't want to sell a service with a low chance of actually working. That's most of what I saw.

Email is the opposite. It's fast. It's high likelihood. And it's the thing most brands neglect, because it's a maintenance job that owners don't want to do. Nobody wants to be splicing designs together in Figma. It makes sense to hand it off. It just has to be at a reasonable price, and most email agencies are not reasonable. They're overpriced, and they market the service up to match.

I knew Tyler from an agency Discord. Tention had about ten clients at the time. I came in and took part ownership, and everything about how we run it is downstream of that. Don't overcharge. Don't sell slow.

That was almost two years ago. Since then we've taken a lot of brands off agencies that charge a lot more than we do, and beaten their results. So I'm fairly sure about this. That's the bio.

This is for DTC e-commerce brands doing at least twenty thousand a month. Usually on Shopify.

If you're under that, come back when you're there. For this to make sense for both of us the retainer has to be at least a thousand a month, and at under twenty K it doesn't.

Klaviyo is the platform we recommend. Most of our clients are on it. If you're on Mailchimp or Omnisend or Attentive, that's fine, we have clients on those too. It's not a hill we die on. We'll probably suggest moving you to Klaviyo at some point, and if you want to, we handle it.

We've worked in twenty-seven niches, at least twice in each. Skincare. Supplements. Fashion. Streetwear. Furniture. Automotive. Cannabis. Fitness. They're all on the site by niche, so you can look up yours.

You fill in the form. Taiwo and I read every one. You'll hear back within a business day.

If it looks like a fit, we book a Google Meet. Thirty minutes. It's me, not a sales rep.

If you've got Klaviyo open, we look at it together. Here's what I check, in order.

The homepage. Your overall Klaviyo attribution, and how it splits between campaigns and flows. How many flows you've got live. Which flows are bringing in the most revenue. How many campaigns went out in the last thirty to sixty days. And if there's time, your deliverability tab.

That takes about ten minutes and it tells me most of what I need to know. By the end of the call I'll tell you what I think we can do with the account, and whether I'd take it on.

Sometimes the answer is no. Usually the list is too small, or the product isn't moving yet. If that's you I'll say so on the call.

If it's a yes, you send us access to Klaviyo and Shopify, your brand assets, and you fill in an intake form about your products and your customers. That's what we need from you to start.

Then we build out your core flows. Welcome. Browse abandonment. Abandoned cart. Abandoned checkout. Post-purchase. Cross-sell. Win-back. Back in stock if you've got a lot of SKUs. Subscription flows if you're a subscription product. Transactional, so order confirmed and shipped. And a sunset flow, which proactively asks people who haven't opened anything in five or six months to unsubscribe, because they're hurting your deliverability.

You already know what most of those are, so I won't go through them one by one.

On design. We work from your brand assets. You see the first batch before anything goes live. After that you can approve every email, or let us run. Most clients approve the first few and then stop asking.

We aim to have your core flows live within fourteen days. That fourteen days matters. It's why I can put a ninety-day guarantee on this without sweating it.

We aim to have your regular campaign cadence going within ten days of onboarding. Twelve campaigns a month, so about three a week.

We plan your campaign calendar. Based on the answers in your intake form, and what we've seen work in similar niches with similar products and similar audiences, we come up with a balance of promotional emails, product spotlights, holiday emails, educational emails, and community emails. The point is the best balance between revenue and deliverability. We don't blast your whole list with a discount every week. That's how you train a list to never pay full price.

You get the calendar ahead of time. If you've got a launch, a sale, or a new product, tell us and it goes in. Otherwise you look at it and say go.

Here's something most agencies won't say out loud. After month one, email marketing is the same job everywhere. Flows and campaigns get built in the first month. After that it's flow optimization, looking at the data, and keeping the campaign calendar running.

We don't build new flows every month, and you shouldn't want us to. Black Friday is the exception. Otherwise you want as much data as possible going through one flow so you can make a real decision about it. We improve flows with segmentation, logical filters and conditional splits, not by starting over.

So if month two onward is the same job everywhere, the difference is the deal.

At the agency I interned at, and at most email agencies, the first month is where the work happens, and then you keep paying the same number for a lot less. The deal gets worse every month. I built Tention the other way round. Our first month is the discounted one. You get the full buildout for far less than it's worth. Every month after that, you're paying a fair price for exactly the work being done.

Your involvement is highest in month one. That's when you're giving input on design and copy, and if we're missing the mark on something, that gets fixed inside the first thirty days. It doesn't drag on. By month four or five, most of our clients just look at the calendar, see what flow tests we're running, and say go.

Here's the part nobody shows you. What it looks like a year in.

The flows we built in month one are still the flows. They've been split, segmented and tested a dozen times by now, so they're doing more than they did at the start, but we didn't tear them down and rebuild them. The campaign calendar is still landing in your inbox every two weeks. You still get twelve campaigns a month. Taiwo is still the person you talk to. Same team, same cadence.

The one time the job changes is Black Friday. That's when we build flows and campaigns specifically for the season. We start planning it in September. That's the exception, and it's the one month where it should feel like month one again.

At some point a lot of brands decide they don't need to keep paying for flow optimization. That's fine. We bring the retainer down and just run your campaigns. We've got brands doing six figures a month, some close to a million, who use us for campaigns only. You don't have to decide that now. You decide it when the flows are mature and you can see what's left to gain.

And because it's month to month, every month you stay is a decision you made, not a contract you signed. Most of our clients have been with us over a year. That's the number I care about more than any dashboard, because it means the deal still makes sense to them twelve invoices in.

The guarantee. If Klaviyo isn't attributing at least twenty percent of your revenue within ninety days, measured on the thirty-day chart, we pause billing until it is.

Ninety days is the guarantee. It's not the timeline. Core flows are live in fourteen days. Add thirty days to that and you're looking at a real number. More often than not we hit twenty percent in forty-five to sixty days.

And you don't have to wait to see it coming. After the first two weeks you can watch the seven-day chart. If the weekly number is holding, you know where the thirty-day chart lands.

If your revenue doesn't move, I don't get paid. That's the deal.

Full service, so every flow I mentioned, ongoing optimization, and twelve campaigns a month, is no more than two thousand a month. There's a one-time setup of six hundred for the first two weeks.

Month to month. No contract. If you want to leave, you leave.

And the return is easy to work out. Take twenty percent of your monthly revenue. Divide it by two thousand. That's the floor, because twenty percent is the minimum we guarantee.

Here's what twenty percent looks like. These are all current clients, screenshots from this month, so nothing here is old.

A tech brand. Eighty-four thousand in the last thirty days, twenty percent of revenue.

An automotive brand doing seven hundred thousand a month. Twenty percent of that is email.

A kids' pajama brand. Twenty-six percent.

Cannabis. Fitness. Supplements. Cookware. Feminine care. Skincare. Firearms. Streetwear. One line each, number from the screenshot.

Every one of these is on the site, by niche. And if you'd rather hear it from a client than from me, get on the call and I'll put you in touch with one.

One more thing on the numbers, because other agencies won't tell you this.

If you're a DTC brand over twenty K a month, you want your Klaviyo attribution between twenty and forty percent. Under twenty, you're not doing enough. It doesn't matter if your product is a one-time purchase.

Over forty is not a brag. If I show you a brand at sixty-five percent, that usually means their top of funnel has slowed down. Not enough new customers are coming in, so the ratio of repeat buyers goes up. I had a call with a brand at eighty percent. I spent ten minutes explaining that it was a fancy way of saying the brand isn't growing.

Where you land inside that range depends on the product. Subscription or supplements, you'll be near forty. Fashion with a lot of SKUs and a loyal audience, above thirty. One-time purchase products, closer to twenty-three, twenty-five. There are exceptions. That's the honest range.

Whatever niche you're in, if I called you out in the ad, the data says we can get you there.

Scroll down. The form's right there. Fill it in. Taiwo and I will get back to you within a business day.

For the call, have Klaviyo open and know your monthly number. We'll go through the account together and I'll tell you whether this makes sense for you. If it doesn't, I'll tell you that.

I'm a nice guy. I don't bite.