The awks middle bit nobody puts on their website
There is a stage some e-commerce businesses hit where, on paper, things still look alive enough to avoid a full-scale meltdown, but underneath it all the engine is starting to cough and splutter. Orders are still coming in. Revenue is still landing. Klaviyo is still doing its thing. From the outside, nobody is reaching for the defibrillator. But if you look properly, the whole setup feels scrappier, noisier and far too dependent on short-term fixes.
That was the shape of one client relationship once I got properly under the bonnet. Email had become the trusty cash tap. If the week looked soft, send an offer. If month-end was looming, send another. If the last one worked reasonably well, why not have another go before the weekend for good measure. The same people got nudged, then nudged again, then nudged with a countdown timer and a “last chance” subject line that had long since stopped feeling like the last anything. It was beginning to feel less like a brand with a strategy and more like one of those DFS sofa ads where everything must go, everything ends Sunday, and somehow there is another sale five minutes later.
This happens more than people admit. Not because business owners are daft, but because they are trying to spin seventeen plates at once. Stock. Margins. Customer service. Packaging. Agencies. Fulfilment. Paid ads. Website issues. Random fires before lunch. If email is still bringing in revenue, it is very easy to leave it alone and keep pulling the lever. The problem is that what looks productive on the surface can be quietly running out of road underneath.
In this case, the database was being leaned on too hard. New customers were not coming in strongly enough. Too much of the monthly result depended on going back to the same people with another discount and hoping they had not developed full-blown promo fatigue. And, obviously, they had. If every week is sale week, sale week stops feeling particularly special.
The Meta Sweats
There was another layer to it as well. The business had been badly spooked by Meta after the fallout from the iOS tracking mess. Fair enough. A lot of brands were. One minute Meta looked like a miracle worker, happily claiming credit for everything short of rainfall. The next, reporting went murky, ROAS looked wobblier, and the whole channel suddenly felt less like an efficiency engine and more like a confidence vacuum with a media budget attached. So the instinct was to back away from it.
The trouble is, going without Meta entirely created a different sort of problem. The funnel started drying up at the top. Fewer new people were discovering the brand. Google had less demand to capture. Klaviyo had fewer fresh subscribers and customers to welcome, nurture and convert. Then email got asked to do even more of the heavy lifting, which only pushed the business further back towards the old habit of repeatedly bashing the same loyal customers over the head with 15% off and a cheerful little subject line.
That is when the ecosystem starts to reveal itself. Meta is not just there to sit in a spreadsheet and compete for best ROAS. Google is not operating in a vacuum. Klaviyo absolutely is not supposed to drag the whole business uphill by itself like an exhausted donkey at a village fête. These channels feed each other. Starve one and the others usually feel it.
Looking at the whole machine, not just one dashboard
So the plan changed, though not in a dramatic rip-it-up-and-start-again sort of way. It was more a case of admitting the current rhythm was getting silly and putting something better in its place.
Discounts stayed, because pretending promotions should never exist is a lovely fantasy until you remember real businesses have targets, stock to shift and wages to pay. But they stopped being the entire personality of the brand. We introduced a more structured content calendar. Campaigns became more product-led, benefit-led and brand-led. Offers were used more deliberately and more often placed where they actually made sense, especially within flows, where timing and relevance tend to matter a lot more than sheer volume. Klaviyo had to stop acting like a panic button and start behaving like part of a proper system.
At the same time, we took a more grown-up view of paid traffic. Rather than obsessing over one channel’s ROAS in isolation and declaring it either a hero or a waste of money depending on the week, we started looking at blended ROAS alongside channel-level performance. Not to flatter ourselves and not to hide weak spots behind a conveniently foggy topline number. Just to judge the business more honestly. If Meta was helping create demand, Google was catching intent, and Klaviyo was doing a better job of converting and retaining those customers, that mattered. The business does not really care which platform wants to parade around with the match ball. It cares whether growth is becoming healthier and more efficient overall.
The bit where everyone starts doubting the plan
All of that was sensible. All of it was absolutely the right thing to do. And then, for a while, it looked like a terrible idea.
This is the part that rarely makes it into a polished case study. The awkward middle. The wobble. The slightly clammy stretch where you have dialled down the old bag of tricks, the new plan is in motion, and the results have not yet arrived to make you feel clever. Revenue dipped enough to make people twitchy. Enough to prompt those quiet, creeping thoughts that arrive when a strategy has not worked yet but has definitely made life more uncomfortable. Have we overcomplicated this? Should we just send a big offer and steady the ship? Was the old way actually fine? Have we accidentally strategied our way out of sales?
That phase is deeply uncomfortable because the old approach, however messy, was familiar. The new one feels exposed. Early. Slightly vulnerable. A bit like Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, standing in a field, hearing mysterious voices and hoping this all comes good in the end. Sorry, is my millennial showing? Anyone under 40 may need to Google that one. But the point stands. You do start to wonder whether you have got it right.
And to be fair, sometimes you have not. Sometimes the strategy does need tweaking. Sometimes the message is off, the landing pages need work, the offer needs reframing, or the acquisition mix is not pulling its weight. Blind faith is not the answer either. You do not keep marching into a wall just because you called it a vision. But more often than not, that awkward middle is simply what happens when you stop feeding the business its weekly sugar rush and have to wait a bit for the healthier stuff to kick in.
The green shoots
That was very much the case here. We kept the faith, but not blindly. We adjusted where adjustment was needed without throwing out the bigger direction. We worked on replenishing the database with new customers. Paid social widened the net again. Google picked up more high-intent traffic. The site and landing experience had to do a better job. Email then had a clearer role to play. It was no longer being asked to carry the whole business on its back. It could focus on welcoming, nurturing, converting and bringing people back at the right moment instead of acting like a permanently exhausted emergency lever.
Gradually, it started to click. Not in some ridiculous movie montage where the graph shoots up and everyone hugs in the warehouse. More in the much more useful way where the business begins to behave more healthily. Sales were up strongly year on year. Sessions were up sharply. Flow revenue grew significantly. The list was being replenished. Flows started pulling more weight. Campaigns felt less frantic. Revenue became less dependent on repeatedly shoving the same offer in front of the same people. The brand started sounding more like itself again, which is usually a very good sign that the marketing is no longer just flapping around trying to save the month.
A few stats sweets, because we all like a peek at the scoreboard:
Shopify sales up roughly 73% year on year
Sessions up roughly 129% year on year
Flow revenue up roughly 162% year on year
Klaviyo conversion rates and revenue efficiency both moving in the right direction as the engine settled
What this actually means
A lot of online stores do not need more hacks, more noise or another channel promising to ride in and save the day. They need a better rhythm. They need acquisition and retention to stop behaving like distant cousins at a wedding. They need someone to look at the whole ecosystem and say, kindly but clearly, that sending four discount emails a week is not a strategy. It is a stress response wearing a nice template.
That messy middle is often where Big Me does its best work. Getting in, untangling what is really going on, calming the panic, and helping the moving parts behave like they belong to the same business. Not chasing tidy little vanity metrics. Not crowning one channel king for the month. Just building something stronger, more joined-up and less reliant on crossed fingers and promo codes, so growth stops feeling quite so chaotic.
If your campaign calendar is starting to look like a DFS sofa ad
If your store has slipped into permanent promo mode, if Meta has gone from golden goose to emotional trigger, or if Klaviyo is basically being asked to perform CPR on month-end every other Tuesday, there is a fair chance the ecosystem needs a proper sort-out.
That is the kind of mess Big Me rather enjoys.
I help e-commerce brands get out of the weeds, calm the chaos, and build a marketing setup that does not rely on panic emails, crossed fingers and one more “Ends Midnight” banner.
Fancy a chinwag?
