How Hanky Panky Grew Click-Through Rate 80% YoY in Two Months With a Full Retention Rebuild

Direct answer: Revamping a D2C retention program is harder than building one from scratch — you're working inside a live system with an existing customer base, campaign history, and accumulated technical debt. Sticky Digital took over Hanky Panky's email program in April 2026 with a mandate to rebuild their full-funnel retention experience and increase brand ownership over the channel. In the first two months, campaign RPR increased 13% year-over-year, net email subscribers grew 40%, and click-through rate jumped 80%. This is what a retention takeover looks like when it's done right.

What Hanky Panky Was Looking For

Hanky Panky is an iconic American lingerie brand — 50 years old, famous for the Original Rise thong and an expanding line of lace, swim, and everyday basics. They have a real customer base, real brand equity, and a product that sells on both emotional identity and physical product quality. The Oprah Magazine pull quote on their French Brief doesn't hurt either.

What they didn't have was a retention program that fully reflected any of that. The brief was specific: revamp the D2C presence, take more ownership of the retention program, and build a full-funnel experience that actually moved customers through a lifecycle — not just broadcast campaigns at an undifferentiated list.

This is a materially different challenge from a startup building from zero. Hanky Panky had history: existing subscriber lists, legacy flow setups, campaign patterns, and a team with its own instincts about what the brand should communicate. Ellie M., Director of EComm, described the situation plainly: "Sticky jumped right into a complex system and lots of unknowns with ease and confidence. The team brings ideas and expertise to every conversation. I trust them with very little oversight."

That last sentence is the one that matters. Trust with very little oversight is what every DTC brand wants from an agency relationship and almost never gets within two months of starting.

The Three Metrics That Tell the Story

Three numbers define what changed. They're measuring three different things, and all three matter.

Campaign RPR up 13% year-over-year. Revenue per recipient is the metric that tells you whether the people receiving your emails are buying from them. A 13% lift in two months means the campaigns going to Hanky Panky's list are more relevant, better timed, or better targeted than they were under the previous program structure. More likely: all three. RPR is hard to move because it's sensitive to both creative quality and audience health simultaneously. A list full of disengaged subscribers drags RPR down regardless of how good the email is. Improving it requires getting both right.

Net email subscribers up 40% year-over-year. This one isn't about campaigns — it's about list growth infrastructure. A 40% increase in net subscribers in two months means the acquisition side of the email program was rebuilt or significantly improved. Pop-up performance, opt-in offers, SMS-to-email cross-capture, and suppression of unengaged subscribers all factor into the net number. A 40% lift here is meaningful because it's not just adding names — it's adding names faster than the list is churning. That's a fundamentally healthier list trajectory.

Click-through rate up 80% year-over-year. This is the engagement story. An 80% increase in click-through rate isn't a marginal improvement — it's a signal that the emails Hanky Panky's subscribers are opening are actually motivating them to take action. CTR is the gap between "this email was interesting enough to open" and "this email was good enough to click." Closing that gap by 80% in two months is the result of better hierarchy, cleaner CTAs, more relevant offers, and email design that moves the eye toward the action point instead of distributing attention across the template.

Why a Revamp Is Harder Than a Build

When Sticky Digital builds a retention program for a new brand, the architecture starts clean. The flows are designed with current best practices, the segmentation logic is built from the start to reflect how that brand's customers actually behave, and there's no legacy structure to work around.

Taking over an existing program means inheriting all of that: flows that were built by someone else based on assumptions that may no longer hold, campaign templates with baked-in design patterns that don't match where the brand is today, subscriber lists that reflect years of acquisition without the suppression discipline that keeps engagement healthy. You can't pause the program to rebuild it. Customers are still being triggered, campaigns are still going out, and the business still needs revenue while the work happens.

Hanky Panky's situation had additional complexity. A brand with 50 years of identity has strong opinions about how it communicates — and those opinions exist inside the organization at multiple levels, from the e-commerce team to creative to senior leadership. Coming in with "here's how we'd do it differently" requires more than technical competence. It requires enough confidence in the recommendation to explain it clearly and enough humility to listen when the brand knows something about its customers that the data doesn't capture.

The results suggest Sticky got that balance right. An 80% increase in CTR isn't built on ignoring the brand's creative instincts — it's built on sharpening them.

What the Creative Shows

Hanky Panky's emails from this period are worth looking at because they communicate something the numbers alone don't: the brand has a voice, and the retention program now reflects it.

"Turkish Tile Has Entered The Chat" for a new color drop. "Come for the Lace, Stay For The French Brief" as a product education moment. "Stay Palm, Wherever You Are" for the swim launch. These aren't subject lines generated by a formula. They're lines that could exist in the brand's social feed or packaging copy. The retention program sounds like Hanky Panky, not like an email agency's interpretation of Hanky Panky.

The loyalty mechanic is present and prominent — "Shop. Earn. Redeem." as a campaign CTA, not buried in the footer. The swim collection launch has its own campaign architecture with functional product callouts (SPF 50+, color-stay water-resistant fabric, Hanky Panky stretch) alongside lifestyle photography. The French Brief campaign leans into the Oprah Magazine endorsement as social proof at the decision moment, not just as a brand credential.

None of this happened accidentally. The creative quality of a retention program reflects the strategic framework underneath it: which segments receive which messages, at what point in the lifecycle, with which offer and which CTA. When that framework is right, the creative team has something clear to execute against. When it isn't, even strong creative underperforms because it's reaching the wrong people at the wrong time.

What List Growth at This Scale Actually Means

A 40% increase in net email subscribers is easy to undervalue if you're focused on the revenue numbers. It shouldn't be.

Email list growth compounds in a way that most acquisition channels don't. A new subscriber acquired in April will be in Hanky Panky's welcome series, post-purchase flow, and reactivation sequence for years. The lifetime value of a well-acquired email subscriber for an apparel brand with Hanky Panky's repeat purchase profile is substantial — and the work of acquiring that subscriber is done once. The work of retaining them is automated.

A 40% lift in net subscribers also signals something about list health. Net subscriber growth accounts for both additions and removals — unsubscribes, bounces, suppressed contacts. If the gross acquisition number went up but unsubscribes also went up, net growth would be constrained. A 40% net increase means the new subscribers coming in are staying, and the suppression and list hygiene work is keeping the overall list quality higher. That directly feeds into the RPR and CTR improvements. A healthier list engages better. Better engagement produces better deliverability. Better deliverability produces better reach. The compounding goes in one direction when the fundamentals are right.

The "Very Little Oversight" Standard

Ellie's quote deserves its own section because it describes something specific: a client who came in with a complex, ambiguous situation and ended up trusting the agency to operate independently within two months.

That doesn't happen by default. It happens when an agency comes into a complex system, diagnoses it accurately, proposes solutions that make sense to the people who know the brand best, and executes without requiring constant re-explanation. It happens when the agency brings ideas to calls instead of waiting for the client to supply direction. It happens when the work is good enough that the client stops feeling like they need to review everything before it goes out.

The operational bar for DTC retention is higher than most clients expect at the start of a relationship. Email is the channel that touches every customer at every lifecycle moment. The agency running it needs to understand the brand, the customer, the product calendar, the competitive environment, and the technical infrastructure simultaneously — and make judgment calls on all of them, often in the same week. "Very little oversight" is the grade Sticky aims for on every account. Hanky Panky gave it in month two.

Frequently Asked Questions

How quickly can a new retention agency make a measurable impact?

For Hanky Panky, meaningful metric movement was visible within the first two months. The speed depends on where the leverage is: click-through rate improvements can happen within the first campaign cycle if the structural issues are clear. List growth improvements are slightly slower because they depend on pop-up and acquisition changes that need time to accumulate. RPR improvements that reflect actual buying behavior typically need 6–8 weeks of campaign data to read clearly. All three metrics moving positively within two months is a faster result than typical — it's a function of how much room for improvement existed in the original program.

What does "full-funnel retention experience" mean in practice?

It means the email and SMS program reflects where a customer actually is in their relationship with the brand — not just what the brand wants to say. A new subscriber gets a welcome series built for someone who doesn't know the product yet. A past purchaser gets post-purchase flows that reinforce the decision and introduce the next relevant item. A lapsed customer gets a winback sequence calibrated to their original purchase behavior. A loyal customer gets VIP signals that reflect their status. The funnel is full when every lifecycle stage has a programmatic response that feels appropriate to that customer's context.

Is a 40% increase in net email subscribers sustainable?

The 40% figure reflects a year-over-year comparison over a two-month window. Sustaining that growth rate over a full year requires consistent list acquisition investment — pop-up optimization, SMS cross-capture, campaign-driven opt-in moments — combined with suppression discipline that keeps the net number honest. What's more important than the growth rate is whether the subscribers being acquired are engaged: if they open, click, and buy, the list is an asset that compounds. If they're acquired cheaply and immediately disengage, growth is cosmetic. Hanky Panky's CTR improvement in the same period suggests the new subscribers are engaging.

What makes apparel retention different from other DTC categories?

Apparel customers make repeat purchases driven by a mix of product category (basics like the French Brief get replenished), newness (color drops, seasonal collections like swim), and identity (the brand means something to the customer beyond the product). A retention program for an apparel brand needs to address all three simultaneously: flows that support replenishment timing, campaigns that create genuine urgency around new collections, and loyalty mechanics that reinforce the identity signal. Brands that only do one or two of these leave meaningful repeat purchase opportunity on the table.