By: Jay Kt
Most direct-to-consumer brands treat email as one channel among several, worth a slice of revenue and a junior hire. At the brands YOCTO runs, it is often the largest single line in the business.
Klaviyo has published its own case study of a health technology brand, documenting the email and SMS program YOCTO rebuilt around the customer lifecycle and crediting the results to the agency.
How YOCTO Runs Retention as One System
The approach, according to founder George Kapernaros, is that the agency does not sell email. YOCTO runs customer retention for DTC and subscription brands as a single system, covering how the offer and the plans are structured, what happens on the cancellation page, how failed payments are recovered, and how cohorts pay back over time, with the lifecycle programs built on top of that. One team owns both the analysis and the execution. That structure lets the same people who read a brand’s cohort data write the flows that act on it, instead of passing findings from a strategist to a separate production team.
“A platform can tell you how you compare against a thousand brands,” Kapernaros says. “We can tell you what actually works for brands like yours, because we are inside dozens of them at once. That is the part you cannot buy anywhere else.”
The proof is unusually public for an agency. Multiple technology platforms have published case studies naming YOCTO in the write-ups. Skio documented a subscription wine brand where YOCTO rebuilt the cancel flow to reduce cancellations and win back lapsed subscribers. Loop Subscriptions recorded strong subscriber growth over a single quarter at a children’s skincare brand. Paper Run measured incremental return on ad spend from direct-mail flows against a maintained holdout group, an incremental rather than attributed standard that is materially harder to hit.
Why Retention Compounds When Acquisition Doesn’t
Which points to the argument underneath it all. Acquisition costs money every time it runs, and the price only goes up. Retention compounds because the same customer, bought once, keeps paying, and every improvement in how long they stay applies to every customer who follows.
“Founders will spend six figures a month teaching strangers who they are,” Kapernaros says. “The people who already bought are the quickest revenue in the business, and almost nobody works them properly. That gap is your opportunity.”
YOCTO is a Klaviyo Elite Partner and a Platinum-tier Loop Subscriptions partner, working with brands including Kilo Health, BetterMe, Gratsi and Orbio World.
