The Challenge
Flat subscriber growth for most of the year, a generalist ad agency and a fractional CMO on the way out, and an email program on Shopify's native tool that hid attribution and couldn't reach unsubscribed members with service updates.
Key Highlights
Migrated email to Klaviyo with campaigns written in Vinyl Moon's own brand voice, running in the background while the old agency was still live
Replaced discounts with a no-discount retention model: gift-with-purchase on overstock, a quarterly gift card and a member-exclusive 10-item add-on rotation
Set an engagement-based cadence (30-day, 60+ day, 180+ day groups), capped at one send a week
Background
Vinyl Moon is an indie music subscription: a curated vinyl and CD discovery box for fans of music they can’t get anywhere else. Brandon, the founder, was running the business solo after his operations lead left. The active newsletter list was about 8,000 members, suppressed down from a 200K legacy list. The goal was 3,000 active members.
For most of the year, ads were “just staying steady, steady, steady.” Brandon had hired outside help in two places, and neither was working.
The Problem
Two vendors were on the way out:
- A generalist ad agency. Efficient at media buying, but it ran a creative-storytelling brand like a generic DTC account.
- A fractional CMO. Slow, limited in scope and not actually setting strategy.
Email was broken too. Shopify’s native email hid attribution data, and there was no way to send transactional updates to people who had unsubscribed from marketing, including a record-delay notice. Brandon had a bad past experience with Klaviyo (an unmanaged list inflated by spam bots) and didn’t want to migrate unless someone actually managed it.
On the first call he said: “I wish I had somebody who could do something with all this data and all these insights.”
What We Did
Klaviyo migration with brand-voice AI
We rebuilt the email program in Klaviyo, with campaigns that took their voice from Vinyl Moon’s website and past campaigns. Setup took 30 minutes. The migration ran in the background while the old agency was still live, then we cut over.
A no-discount retention model
Brandon was firm: no discounts on club memberships. We kept to that and replaced discount logic with:
- Gift-with-purchase on clearance and overstock items, instead of cash discounts
- A quarterly gift card to drive store purchases without touching membership pricing
- A member-exclusive 10-item rotation: each month, members can add one of ten items to their box for free
A cadence framework
- Engaged in the last 30 days: general announcements and new product launches
- 60+ days since engaging: lapsed re-engagement
- 180+ day non-purchasers: nurture only
Sends are capped at once a week, with no more than one or two launches a month for non-Vinyl Moon records.
Content and community
The audit surfaced behind-the-scenes material worth sharing: the visual-artist collaboration process, die-cut manufacturing samples and monthly member video events. We set up Slack Connect with Brandon for fast turnaround.
Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Net new subscribers | Flat | +150 a month |
| Customer acquisition cost | Baseline | ~45% lower |
Ads stopped being flat. With the same baseline traffic, the retention work and the new email setup made every acquired subscriber worth more.
Results are specific to this client and engagement, not typical or guaranteed outcomes.
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