Come Sit and Stay: email as the #1 booking channel
18k subscribers, sub-14% opens, and weekly blasts burning the list, rebuilt into a lifecycle program driving 38% of bookings on half the volume.
Come Sit and Stay had built a real asset, 18,000 subscribers who genuinely loved the business, and was quietly destroying it with weekly broadcasts. Opens had slipped under 14%, complaints were creeping toward the threshold where inbox providers start routing to spam, and every send made it slightly worse.
Fix deliverability before craft
First month: authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) set up properly, three list-burning flows killed outright, and an aggressive trim of dead addresses. Counterintuitive but decisive, a smaller list that opens teaches Gmail you belong in the inbox.
Lifecycle over blasts
We rebuilt the program around the customer's actual rhythm: a welcome series for new families, a three-touch cadence around each pet stay (confirmation, day-of details, post-stay follow-up with a review ask), and a win-back for lapsed regulars. The weekly blast became a monthly note worth reading. Every send now exists because a behavior triggered it.
What happened
Twelve months in: email drove 38% of bookings, up from 14%, on 47% less volume, with open rates up 19 points blended. Less email, sent better. It's the most leverage we found anywhere in their stack.
“They cut our send volume in half and doubled the bookings. It still doesn't make sense to me, but it works.”