Case study: a lingerie brand where email went from 13% to 19% of revenue in five months while the store grew 90%

The store

A US lingerie brand on Shopify with a strong social presence and a product that is bought for occasions as well as for everyday wear. The second half of 2026 was the growth phase: store revenue in October was 1.9 times June’s. The client is not named and the store’s revenue is not disclosed; the figures are shares, rates and relative changes from the client’s own reports.

What email did while the store grew

The risk in a growth phase is that email stays flat while the store doubles, and the share falls. Here the opposite happened. With June 2026 as 100:

Month	Store revenue (June = 100)	Email revenue (June = 100)	Email share	From flows
June 2026	100	100	15.0%	53%
July 2026	122	108	13.3%	63%
August 2026	150	166	16.6%	77%
September 2026	158	205	19.5%	75%
October 2026	194	238	18.5%	82%

Email revenue grew 2.4 times while the store grew 1.9 times, and the share of email revenue coming from flows went from 53% to 82%. That second number is the mechanism: as more new visitors arrived from social and paid, each one entered a browse-abandonment or checkout flow that already worked, and the flows scaled with the traffic without anyone doing more work.

Across the 12 months the flows clicked at 4.76% and earned $2.20 per recipient, twice the benchmark median on both counts. Campaigns clicked at 1.41% (median 0.64%) and earned $0.04 per recipient: typical for fashion, where the campaign keeps the brand in front of the list and the flow closes the sale.

What we built, in order

1. Browse abandonment by size and style. Lingerie is bought by size and by occasion; the flow shows the piece viewed in the size the visitor chose, then two pieces in the same style family. The flow has three emails; the second carries the fit guide and the return policy, which is the objection in this category.
2. Abandoned checkout with discreet packaging and returns. Two things stop a lingerie checkout: “what will the box look like” and “can I return it”. The second email answers both before it shows the cart.
3. Welcome without a sitewide code. The brand runs occasional offers, not a permanent first-order discount. The welcome series leads with the fit guide and the best-selling styles; the offer comes in email four, for the people who have not bought by then.
4. Post-purchase with the matching piece. A buyer of one piece sees the matching set and the pieces that complete it. Cross-sell by style family, timed to delivery.
5. Campaigns to the engaged 90-day segment with buyers of the last 14 days suppressed, one story per send: a new style, a date-night edit, a restock. One offer a month at most.

What did not work

• The first version of browse abandonment was generic. “You left something behind” with the product and a button. It earned about a third of the rebuilt version. Fashion flows need the size and the alternatives.
• A June sitewide sale campaign. It produced the month’s biggest single-day sales and the month’s lowest flow revenue, because the flows were suppressed around the sale window and the list learned to wait. We kept sales to one a quarter afterwards.

What to take from it

1. If traffic is about to grow (a creator deal, a paid push, a launch), rebuild the flows first. The lift arrives with the traffic instead of lagging it by a quarter.
2. Watch the flow share of email revenue as a health metric. Rising means the automation is scaling; falling means campaigns are propping the number up.
3. In fashion, size and alternatives are the content of a flow. The product alone is not enough.

The brand is on our Elite retainer. The free 30-minute audit shows what your flows earn per recipient and whether they are ready for the next traffic spike. See also the fashion and apparel guide.