How Melanie Auld Grew Email Revenue 40% and Flow Revenue 55% With a Full Retention Rebuild

Direct answer: A retention program with gaps across multiple areas — flows, segmentation, campaign strategy, list health — doesn't get fixed by addressing one layer at a time. It gets fixed by someone who can look at the whole funnel, identify the highest-leverage problems, and move on them simultaneously. Sticky Digital partnered with Melanie Auld in Q1 2025 as that strategic owner. The result was a 40% increase in email revenue year-over-year, a 55% increase in flow revenue, and a 24% lift in flow click-rate. When the program has a clear point of view driving it, the numbers show up.

What Melanie Auld Needed

Melanie Auld is a Canadian fine jewelry brand built around personalization — initial pendants, letter charms, stackable pieces, and colorful cord necklaces that give customers something to make their own. The brand has a loyal following, strong product identity, and a clear customer in mind: someone who wears jewelry as self-expression, not just accessory.

What the retention program didn't have was cohesion. The brief going into the engagement was honest: multiple aspects of the funnel needed work, and the brand needed a thought leader to take the reins — not a vendor waiting to be told what to build next. Samantha, Director of Marketing, put it simply: "Extremely knowledgeable team who is incredibly helpful."

That framing matters. "Incredibly helpful" is table stakes for any agency. "Extremely knowledgeable" is what makes helpful useful. A team that knows what questions to ask, what a benchmark should look like for a personalized jewelry brand, and how to sequence a rebuild when everything needs attention — that's different from a team that executes well on defined tasks.

The engagement started with Sticky doing the diagnosis before proposing the fix.

Three Numbers, Three Different Problems Solved

The Q1 2025 results break cleanly into three distinct performance stories.

Email revenue up 40% year-over-year. This is the top-line story, and it's the one that comes from getting campaign strategy right. A 40% lift in email revenue reflects improved targeting, better offer architecture, and a campaign calendar that creates genuine purchase moments instead of a steady drumbeat of sends that train customers to wait for the next one. For a brand with Melanie Auld's product mix — pieces that are giftable, stackable, seasonal, and personalizable — there's real campaign leverage available if the strategy knows how to access it. Sticky did.

Flow revenue up 55% year-over-year. This is the infrastructure story. Flow revenue is what the automation system generates without anyone hitting send — and a 55% increase means the always-on layer of the program was materially rebuilt. Flows that weren't there got built. Flows that existed but weren't converting got rearchitected. The 55% lift is larger than the campaign lift, which tells you the automation layer had more room for improvement than the campaign side. That's common in brands that have been investing in campaigns but leaving flows on autopilot.

Click-rate in flows up 24%. This is the engagement story within the automation layer specifically. Click-through rate in flows is a measure of how well the emails that reach customers are motivating them to act — not just open. A 24% increase means the flow emails Melanie Auld customers are receiving now are more relevant, better structured, or better timed than before. Probably all three. For a jewelry brand with a personalization mechanic at the core of its product line, flow relevance is particularly important: a customer who bought an initial pendant is a different customer than one who bought a cord necklace, and the follow-up emails should reflect that.

What the Creative Signals

The email creative from this period shows a brand that knows what it's selling and to whom. "Back by popular demand" for the Keane Chain pre-order — backed by real customer reviews pulled into the email body — is a social proof play that works because it names the product and the demand in the same sentence. "Sold out once, guaranteed to sell out again" is a scarcity frame that earns its urgency rather than manufacturing it.

The Summer Style Edit, the Colour Your Stack campaign, The Letter Shop launch — each of these is a distinct campaign concept, not a variation on the same promotional template. That variety matters for list health. Subscribers who receive the same structural email with different products every week disengage faster than subscribers who occasionally get something that surprises them. Melanie Auld's creative under Sticky's program is editorially varied without being inconsistent with the brand.

The personalization mechanic runs through the campaign creative at the product level — initials, charms, letter pendants — but it should also run through the retention program at the customer level. The same customer who buys a Pave Puffed Letter Pendant is a candidate for a cross-sell into the ALPHAbet Charm series. The customer who builds a cord necklace stack is a candidate for the next colorway launch. Flow architecture that reflects this product relationship logic is what turns a 55% flow revenue increase from a one-quarter result into a compounding baseline.

The "Thought Leader" Brief and What It Actually Requires

Samantha's brief — needing a thought leader to take the reins — is more specific than it sounds. Most agency briefs ask for execution. This one asked for strategic ownership, which is a different contract.

Strategic ownership of a retention program means someone on the agency side is thinking about the account proactively, not reactively. It means bringing ideas to calls rather than waiting for the client to surface them. It means knowing when a metric is moving for the wrong reason — when a revenue number looks good because a promo inflated it, not because the underlying program improved. It means being able to say "here's what I think we should prioritize next quarter and why" rather than "here's what we can build if you tell us what you want."

The brands that get the most out of a retention partnership are the ones who want that kind of relationship and find an agency capable of sustaining it. Melanie Auld's Q1 2025 results are partly a function of the team's technical skill and partly a function of the relationship structure: a client who trusted the agency to lead, and an agency that knew how to.

Why Personalized Jewelry Is a Retention-Favorable Category

Not every DTC category has the same retention potential. Consumables have replenishment mechanics. Subscriptions have built-in recurrence. Personalized jewelry sits in a different position: the initial purchase is emotionally significant, the catalog has natural cross-sell logic, and the gifting context creates predictable re-entry moments throughout the year.

A customer who buys a letter pendant for herself is likely to come back for gifts. A customer who discovers the cord necklace collection through a campaign is a candidate for the next colorway. A customer who pre-orders the Keane Chain has already demonstrated a high engagement level — the post-purchase sequence they receive is one of the highest-value interactions in the entire program.

The retention economics for a brand like Melanie Auld are favorable when the program knows how to access them. The gap is almost always the same: brands invest in acquisition and campaign volume, but the automation layer — the flows that run at every high-intent moment — gets built once and left alone. A 55% increase in flow revenue after a rebuild is what happens when that investment finally gets made.

What Q1 2025 Built for the Rest of the Year

Quarter-over-quarter retention results are meaningful. But what a strong Q1 rebuild actually does is set the baseline for everything that follows. A welcome series rebuilt in Q1 is running for every new subscriber acquired in Q2, Q3, and Q4. A post-purchase flow rearchitected in January is working through the summer sale season and into the holiday gifting period — the highest-revenue window for a personalized jewelry brand.

The compounding math of retention infrastructure is why a 55% flow revenue increase in one quarter isn't just a Q1 story. It's the foundation the rest of the year builds on. Every customer who enters a better-built flow from this point forward has a higher probability of making a second purchase, responding to a cross-sell, or returning for a gifting moment. That probability difference, applied across the full subscriber base over twelve months, is the real case study.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean for an agency to "take the reins" on a retention program?

It means the agency operates as a strategic owner, not just an executor. In practice: proactively identifying what the program needs before the client asks, bringing a point of view to every call rather than waiting for direction, flagging when a metric is moving for the wrong reasons, and sequencing work based on what will compound — not just what's easiest to build next. Sticky Digital's engagement with Melanie Auld started with a full diagnostic of the retention funnel before any execution began, which is how strategic ownership actually works.

Why was flow revenue growth larger than campaign revenue growth?

Because the automation layer had more room to improve. A 55% flow revenue lift compared to a 40% campaign revenue lift suggests the flows were further below potential than the campaign program was. This is common in brands that have been actively managing campaigns while leaving flows on autopilot. The campaign side had more structure to build from; the flow side was a more complete rebuild.

How does personalization at the product level translate to personalization in the retention program?

It translates through segmentation and flow logic. A customer who purchases a personalized initial pendant has different follow-up needs than a customer who buys a cord necklace — different cross-sell candidates, different repurchase timing, different gifting context signals. A retention program that reflects this product-level logic routes customers into sequences that feel relevant rather than generic. The 24% flow click-rate improvement Melanie Auld saw is partly the result of that relevance improvement.

What's the retention opportunity in a personalized jewelry brand that most brands miss?

Gifting re-entry moments. A customer who bought a personalized piece for themselves is likely to return for gifts — birthdays, holidays, significant occasions. Most brands don't have a systematic way to predict and prepare for those moments in the retention program. A well-built post-purchase flow for a personalized jewelry brand identifies the most likely re-entry windows for each customer type and puts the brand in front of them at the right time, not just when there's a sale to announce.