3,400 new customers.
71% never came back.

How a D2C brand discovered it was spending £6,200 per month to fill a leaking bucket — and that £448K of growth was available with zero new customers.

The founder measured acquisition obsessively. She had a detailed breakdown of every new customer by channel, campaign, and cost. She had never run a retention analysis. The two numbers were not connected.

GrowthBridge built a cohort retention model — tracking every customer from their first purchase date and mapping repurchase behaviour at 30, 90, and 365 days. We then overlaid retention rate against acquisition channel.

• 01Build a 4-touchpoint post-purchase email sequence — Day 3, Day 7, Day 21, Day 30. The data showed each touchpoint had a measurable impact on return rate.
• 02Cut Instagram spend by 35% — redirect to referral programme incentives. Referral customers retain at nearly 6x the rate.
• 03Identify the top 20% of customers by LTV and build a programme specifically designed to deepen their relationship.