How The Corkbox took email from £11k to £117k a month in four months

A full breakdown of the Klaviyo rebuild, list growth programme, CRO and website rebuild that took The Corkbox from £11k to £117k of monthly email revenue across the UK, EU and US.

Before this engagement The Corkbox had a peak month of £11,000 in email revenue on its UK store. Four months into the work, the peak month was £117,000. Over that four month window email produced £163,262 in the UK alone and accounted for 34.45% of everything the store took. The same period across the EU and US stores added another €121,582 and $100,210.

This post is the full account of what was actually done. Not the headline, the work. Because the number is the least useful part of a case study if you cannot see what produced it.

The brand, and where it started

The Corkbox is a premium wine subscription brand trading across three Shopify storefronts: UK, EU and US. Strong product, strong brand, a founder who knew the business had far more in it than the numbers were showing.

The email channel was the clearest example. Across the three stores the peak monthly email revenue before we started was £11,000 in the UK, €19,000 in the EU and $12,000 in the US, sitting on lists of roughly 10,000 to 12,000 profiles each. Those figures were not bad. They were the ceiling, and the ceiling is what we were hired to remove.

What was actually wrong

This is where most agencies would tell you the answer was more campaigns. It was not. When you diagnose an email channel properly, three things usually show up together, and all three were present here.

• The flows were doing almost none of the work. Revenue was arriving in bursts around campaign sends and going quiet in between. That is the signature of an automation layer that is either thin or badly triggered. The most valuable email revenue in any account is the revenue that arrives while nobody is sending anything.
• The list was growing as a vanity number. Profiles were being added with no thought for who they were, what they had looked at or what they were worth. A list that grows without segmentation at the point of capture is a list that gets harder to monetise as it gets bigger.
• The website was not converting the traffic email sent it. An email programme can only be as good as the page it lands on. The gap between what the emails were persuading people to do and what the site allowed them to do easily was costing revenue on every send.

In the ACR Growth Method that is a retention problem, a conversion problem and an acquisition problem all showing up in the same channel. You cannot fix one without touching the others, which is why this was never just an email project.

What we rebuilt, and in what order

Four workstreams ran across the four months. Each one was designed to compound the impact of the one before it.

1. The Klaviyo flow architecture, from the ground up

Welcome series, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post purchase and win back flows were all rebuilt across all three markets. Not tweaked. Rebuilt, with market specific logic, timing and creative. On top of that sat a segmentation model built around purchase behaviour, engagement level and region, so every campaign that followed was going to a defined audience rather than a list.

This is the layer that turns email from a channel you push into a channel that runs. It is also the layer most brands underinvest in because the results do not show up on the day you build it. They show up every day after.

2. List growth that was built to make money

The sign up forms were rebuilt as a data led programme rather than a pop up. Forms were optimised on submit rate, segmented at the point of capture, and tracked all the way through to the revenue new subscribers actually produced. Submit rates across the three markets held above 10.79%, and the UK list grew from 10,246 profiles to 17,719 in the window. More importantly, those new profiles arrived already segmented and already inside the flows that had just been rebuilt to convert them.

3. A structured conversion programme on all three stores

Alongside the email work a CRO programme ran across the purchase journey on every storefront, with conversion rate and average order value as the two primary KPIs from day one. The point was simple. Every improvement to the site multiplies every email that lands on it. A stronger product page does not just lift organic conversion, it lifts the return on every flow and campaign at the same time.

4. A full website rebuild, designed around AOV

The final workstream was a complete rebuild of the site, with conversion rate and average order value driving every structural decision. The brand was presented at the premium level it deserved, and the journey actively guided customers toward higher value purchases.

The clearest evidence that the site and the email programme were working together is the AOV gap. In the UK, Klaviyo attributed orders averaged £95.10 against a store wide Shopify average of £73.42. Email was not just bringing people back. It was bringing them back to spend more.

The numbers, all three markets, one window

All primary figures are taken from a consistent four month reporting period so they can be compared cleanly.

• United Kingdom. Total store revenue £473,944, up 219% year on year. Email attributed revenue £163,262, up 160% year on year and 34.45% of the total. List grown to 17,719 profiles.
• European Union. Total store revenue €453,942, up 397% on the prior period. Email attributed revenue €121,582, up 213% and 26.78% of the total. List grown to 18,741 profiles.
• United States. Email attributed revenue $100,210, up 204% on the prior period and 22.94% of the total. List grown to 14,209 profiles.

You've felt like a true extension of the team, always available, incredibly responsive and consistently proactive. I can honestly say I've never experienced this level of dedication working with a freelancer before.
Mac, Founder, The Corkbox

What this means for your brand

Three things worth taking from this, whether you sell wine or supplements or apparel.

• Retention is where the profit is. Email revenue carries almost no acquisition cost. Taking it from a single digit share of revenue to a third changes the economics of the whole business, and it changes what you can afford to pay to acquire a customer in the first place.
• Flows before campaigns, always. If your email revenue arrives in bursts around sends, your automation layer is the constraint. Fix it before you send another campaign.
• The site is part of the email programme. An email that lands on a page that does not convert is a wasted send. Conversion and retention have to be run as one system, which is the whole point of ACR.

If you want to know what the same diagnosis would find inside your own account, the free ACR Growth Audit scores your Acquisition, Conversion and Retention and tells you which one is holding the others back. It takes a few minutes and you get the answer immediately.