Fifteen years working with 20+ retailers, including
Acquisition costs keep climbing.
Repeat purchases are flat, and nobody knows why.
Data in three places. No proof of what retention is worth.
Retention is somebody’s fifth priority.
The solution
An £80 order at 60% margin leaves £48. Dark is what you keep.
First order£40 goes on acquisition
Second order£8 to keep them, nothing to win them
Same customer. Same basket.
Five times the profit.
Keeping a customer costs something. Nothing like what winning one costs.
So there’s one number I work to
Share of revenue from returning customers.
Move it up and you lean on paid acquisition less.
How it gets done
A reason to come back that isn’t a discount.
A proposition worth joining that you can still afford when everybody joins.
Welcome, replenishment, win-back — running whether or not anyone remembers.
Built on what someone actually bought, not the same email to everyone.
The engagements
Take one, or run them in order. You know the scope, the deliverable and the finish date before anything starts.
01
Where you are now — what it’s costing you, and what to fix first.
I go through your data, your customer lifecycle, your email platform and your existing programmes, and I tell you what I find. Every leak sized in money, ranked in the order worth fixing.
This tells you what’s wrong. It doesn’t fix it.
02
Where you want to be, and how you get there — a twelve-month plan on the tech you already have.
Who your customers are and how you’ll talk to them, what programmes to run, whether loyalty or rewards earns its place, and how you’ll know it’s working. Built to run on your current stack, so nothing waits on a new platform.
I write the plan. Your team runs it.
03
A data and technology audit, and the new tools that fit the plan.
Whether your current stack can get you there, and if it can’t, which one can. What you need, who’s worth looking at, how they score against each other, what they really cost, and what it takes to move.
I take no referral fee from any vendor, ever.
04
An operating playbook that runs the plan faster, at lower cost.
I set your marketing team up to run retention work with AI properly: the context it needs about your brand, your customers and how you speak; skills for the jobs you repeat every week; and connectors into the systems your data already sits in. Then I train your team on it, session by session, until they’re doing it without me.
Handed over to a named owner on your side. A project with an end date, not a seat on your team.
Platforms
I don’t resell software and I take no referral fee from any vendor. So the answer can be that your current stack is fine — which it often is.
Deepest hands-on experience
Years of live work in each, across loyalty, promotions and CRM. Whatever you’re running, I’ll tell you what it can do, what it can’t, and whether that’s the thing holding you back.
In their words
“…constantly tested and refined Finisterre’s retention strategy, surpassing all ROI and customer satisfaction benchmarks.”
“His innovative approach to email marketing and automation has boosted both engagement and revenue results.”
“If you ever cross his path and get the opportunity to work with him you should definitely take the opportunity — you will not regret that.”
About me
I’ve spent fifteen years making retention work inside retailers. Now consulting with brands including IKEA Group, Flatspot and Heidi. Before that I co-founded a customer profiling business and ran marketing at Finisterre.
I work from Ericeira, Portugal, through Lochran Limited. Mostly remote, onsite when it makes sense.
I take on a small number of projects a year and deliver what I’ve learnt in a package for you and your team: diagnostics, strategy, technology and operations.
If retention is on your list this year, book a call and let’s grow your revenue from repeat customers.
Start here
Bring me the thing you’re stuck on and I’ll give you a straight answer, plus a short written follow-up you can use whether or not we work together.
hello@gregormatthews.com