A self-directed concept case study built around Ritual's subscription vitamin business model — not real client work. I imagined picking up email marketing for a subscription supplement brand where most of the moments that matter — welcome, renewal, win-back — were either missing or folded into a single monthly newsletter.
For a subscription brand, email should be doing most of the heavy lifting at the moments that decide whether a subscriber sticks around: the welcome moment, the point where a browse turns into a cart (or doesn't), the renewal reminder, and the win-back after someone pauses. For this concept project, I imagined a subscription vitamin brand where those moments were either missing entirely or handled by the same monthly newsletter sent to everyone — new subscribers, long-time loyalists and lapsed accounts alike. The brief: design the foundational flow architecture and segmentation that would turn email into a genuine lifecycle channel.
Welcome, browse & cart abandonment, post-purchase & renewal reminder, and win-back — the four flows that cover a subscriber's journey from sign-up to (hopefully) years of renewals.
Product line (Essential for Women, Essential for Men, prenatal), subscription stage, and engagement level — so the same flow doesn't send the same message to everyone.
Use education, traceability storytelling and timing (not just percentage-off codes) to make email a channel that earns its share of revenue.
In this concept role as email & CRM marketing lead, I designed the four foundational Klaviyo flows, built the segmentation logic behind them, wrote the email copy and mockups, and set up the flow performance reporting that ties email back to overall revenue.
The two pillars work together: build the flows everyone should be in, then make sure each subscriber sees the version of that flow that's relevant to them.
Four flows covering the full subscriber journey: a welcome series introducing the brand and what's in a subscriber's first pack, browse & cart abandonment for undecided shoppers, post-purchase & renewal reminder flows that turn a first order into a habit, and a win-back flow for subscribers who've paused or lapsed.
Layered three types of segmentation across the flows: by product line (Essential for Women, Essential for Men, prenatal), by subscription stage (new, active, paused), and by engagement level — so a highly-engaged subscriber and a quiet one get different cadences within the same flow.
A multi-email series introducing new subscribers to what's in their first pack, the brand's sourcing & traceability story, and how to get the most out of their first month — setting up the renewal decision before it arrives.
Flows triggered by product-page visits and abandoned carts, using the ingredient and traceability story to address hesitation rather than jumping straight to a discount.
The highest-leverage flow for a subscription brand — timed around the upcoming renewal date, reinforcing the value of the subscription and surfacing complementary products before the renewal happens.
For subscribers who've paused or lapsed (the "Paused & Lapsed" segment from case study 04), a structured sequence re-introducing what's changed and offering a reason to restart.
Two of the email concepts from the lifecycle programme, alongside a mockup of the Klaviyo flow performance view.
A single dashboard view tracking all four foundational flows side by side — open rate, click rate and revenue per recipient — segmented by the product-line and subscription-stage groups from the strategy.
These figures are illustrative projections for this concept project — modelled on what a well-built lifecycle programme could plausibly achieve for a subscription brand, not Ritual's real results.
Modelled growth as flows replaced the single newsletter
Welcome, abandonment, renewal reminder, win-back
Across all four foundational flows
Modelled effect of the renewal reminder flow
Of the four flows, the post-purchase & renewal reminder flow had the clearest line to the metric that matters — renewal rate, the same metric at the centre of case study 04's segmentation work. I'd prioritise this flow first in a real build.
Splitting the newsletter into a welcome series, an abandonment flow, a renewal reminder and a win-back flow didn't require new content from scratch — it mostly required re-sequencing and re-targeting content that already existed.
For a brand whose differentiator is traceability and sourcing, a discount-led abandonment email undercuts the premium positioning. The model assumes education-first messaging with a smaller, secondary incentive — I'd want to validate that trade-off with real A/B data.
The segments used here (product line, subscription stage, engagement) overlap closely with the RFM-based segments from case study 04. Next time, I'd design both from the same underlying subscriber model from day one, rather than aligning them afterwards.