Which promo actually pays off? (Your emails already know.)
You're putting together a special offer and you're torn: 15% off? 30%? free shipping? a free gift? Almost no one measures what actually pays off. Your own emails already have the answer.
By Thibault
The promo reflex that costs you
Every DTC brand stacks promos. A discount here, free shipping there, a gift for Christmas, a “from $49” threshold for the sales. It’s become a reflex.
The problem is, that reflex is almost never measured. You pull an offer because it “worked well last time,” or because that’s what the competition is doing. Nobody really knows which one pays off the most, or which one fits which moment.
The honest comparator: revenue per contact
First trap: comparing offers on total revenue. A promo sent to your whole base will mechanically generate more revenue than one sent to a segment. That tells you nothing about its actual efficiency.
The only honest comparator is revenue per contact: how much each recipient brings in when the offer is sent to them. It normalizes audience size, and that’s what reveals the real winners.
What the data says
On one account we analyzed, here are the offers ranked by revenue per contact:
Offers ranked by revenue / contact
| Métrique | Votre valeur | Seuil | Statut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid discount (15-30%) | $0.09 | /contact | ✓ |
| Heavy discount (> 30%) | $0.06 | /contact | ! |
| Free gift / bundle | $0.05 | /contact | ! |
| Free shipping | $0.03 | /contact | ! |
| Spend threshold (from $X) | $0.03 | /contact | ! |
The takeaway on this account: a mid discount (15-30%) brings in more per contact than a heavy discount (>30%), even though the heavy one eats much more margin. It’s not a universal law, it’s what this specific data says. And that’s exactly the point: as long as you don’t measure, you’re guessing.
Another useful signal: the free gift / bundle has the best open rate (over 61%), even though it pays a bit less per contact. An offer can be a great engagement tool without being the most profitable.
The best offer depends on the moment
“Most profitable on average” isn’t “most profitable for every occasion.” The same offer can crush it on the sales and fall flat for Mother’s Day.
By crossing your history with the calendar, you get a recommendation per event:
- Sales (January & June): mid discount (15-30%)
- Mother’s Day (late May): heavy discount (>30%)
- Back to school (late August): free gift / bundle
- Christmas (December): heavy discount (>30%)
- Black Friday (late November): mid discount (15-30%)
The important bit: these recommendations don’t come from a generic benchmark. They come from your own campaigns, on your own customers.
How to read this on your account
You could do it by hand: pull a year of emails, tag each offer, cross with revenue generated, normalize by audience size. Plan for several days, and a result that goes stale fast.
Or you connect Retain. It reads all your past campaigns, detects every offer, ranks them by revenue per contact, and tells you which offer to pull for which moment of the year. In a few minutes, no credit card.
You stop guessing which promo to pull for Black Friday. Your emails have already decided.