Fix the Leaks, Find the Lift

Everything here is consistent with the flow firing on a product view rather than an add to cart — and if that is the setting, everything else follows from it. Three emails in 25 hours chase a product she only looked at, while the product she actually chose sits in the cart unmentioned.

Cart recovery is normally the highest-intent automated email a store sends: it reaches someone who has already shown what she wants. Right now it recovers the wrong item, shows no picture of it, and leaves a $49.99 wallet sitting in a cart that nobody has ever emailed her about.

The tell is the last two lines: the cross-sell blocks are built correctly; the campaigns and the recovered-item hero are not. Two build standards in one programme — a process gap, not a skills gap. The social icons on every campaign carry alt text, so the template can do it; the campaign step drops it. The launch email went out with none at all, and five days later the next one did too. Image-only email also gives spam filters nothing to read.

Two cart emails an hour apart is what two flows on one trigger look like. The unsubscribe links resolve to Klaviyo, so the likeliest shapes are two Klaviyo flows on the same event, or one Klaviyo flow beside Shopify's own abandoned-checkout email. The Wednesday broadcast then fired into a profile mid-recovery: four emails in 25 hours, to one subscriber.

This is system behaviour, not an incident. Three episodes across seven weeks, each 61–66 minutes apart, and the two emails are different templates with different cross-sells and different offers — the first carries no code, the second 10% off. The pattern is consistent with two independent flows — and on the two episodes checked in full, 22 July and 10 September, the second email carried a code the first did not.

The 48-hour welcome window was still open when a strictly better public offer arrived. The incentive was outbid inside its own window, and the subscriber learned on day one that waiting is rewarded.

For US recipients, CAN-SPAM (15 U.S.C. §7704(a)(2)) prohibits subject lines that would mislead a recipient about the message's contents, and a fabricated "RE:" on a first-contact email is hard to read any other way; Hong Kong's Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance has its own rules for commercial email to the local list. Beyond compliance, it drives complaints — and a brand selling considered design is signing letters from someone who cannot be written back to. The fix costs nothing: the same message, honestly labelled, from a monitored address. Still live on 11 September, in the middle of the iPhone 18 launch week.

A more useful problem than an absence. Nobody needs selling on segmentation or a new tool — the splits are built and sending. They are keyed to who someone is rather than what they just did, so the strongest buying signal a subscriber can give changes nothing about what arrives next.

This was live on 22 July; the screenshot above is that email. By 31 August the same SKU in the same template rendered the correct USD price, and it has held since — which is why this sits here rather than at the top.

It stays on the record for one reason: the block that produced it is the same block that today serves a dead image with empty alt text and names a product that was never in the cart (F1). The recovered-item slot is populated by a different mechanism from the rest of the email, and every rendering fault in the cart flow has lived in that slot. A fix nobody can explain may only be dormant. Worth a line in the weekly check so it does not come back.

Two emails, both about the same code. The six tiles show what Native Union sells; nothing says who it is or who it is for — so the first impression is a transaction rather than an introduction, and it arrives at the one moment a subscriber is guaranteed to be paying attention.

The welcome sequence should be doing a different job: building the relationship before asking for the sale. A new subscriber should finish it thinking this brand understands my style, my devices, how I work and what I buy — that recognition is what earns the second order, the one that does not need a code. The discount still has a place. It belongs after the introduction, not instead of it. Rebuilt in §04.

Native Union was in the inbox 75 minutes after the keynote began, a day ahead of Nomad, with four case lines already live — and it moved off its standing broadcast hour to get there. The arc that followed was deliberate: colourways on the 12th, a conditional gift on the 14th.

The one thing September's sends do not mention is the foldable. Nomad put two Duo cases into its launch email on the 10th, then sent a preorder-eve note timed to Apple's calendar rather than its own. Whether Native Union follows is a product decision — tooling, minimum order quantities, lead times — and none of that is visible from outside this inbox.

Which is the argument for a one-click waitlist rather than a campaign. One question, one click, nothing committed: it costs a send and a landing page, and returns a demand signal — self-selected and imperfect, but the only one available before anything is ordered. If a Duo case is already coming, that list is the launch audience. If it is not, the answer arrives for free, six weeks before the 23 October on-sale date.