Is your dashboard lying to you? Download our free vanity metrics cheat sheet: https://ecomemailmarketer.com/sendit-vanitymetrics

The metrics every retention team reports up to the CFO might be quietly making the company worse.

Jimmy and Chase break down 10 hot takes on retention KPIs, why most of them are broken, and what to track instead. From inflated opens and bot-driven clicks to fake attribution, vanity list sizes, and the metrics leadership doesn't even know to ask for, this one's worth forwarding to your team and your founder. If you're making budget decisions, performance reviews, or strategy calls on numbers built before iOS privacy and bot click farms, you're probably operating on data that's lying to you.

EP 87: We pulled the data on every retention metric brands track, here are the 10 broken ones

Here's what they get into:

- The bot click problem nobody is correcting for

- How ESP attribution overcredits email and SMS

- Why revenue per recipient hides what actually drove the win

- Why industry benchmarks are mostly useless

- The LTV math almost every brand is doing wrong

- The metrics that predict program health (and nobody tracks)

Thank you our friends at Omnisend, Superscale and eCom Email Certified for sponsoring the podcast!

Omnisend is an all in one eCommerce email and SMS marketing automation platform that enables marketers to engage customers and drive sales through personalized experiences. https://www.omnisend.com/sendit/

Superscale is the first AI agent built for social marketing. It connects to your Meta, TikTok, and Google ad accounts, researches your competitors, and turns a single prompt into hundreds of high-converting creatives built on real performance data. Trusted by Taxfix, SumUp, and backed by Creandum. https://superscale.ai/?utm_source=Sendit

eCom Email Certified is a hands-on, results-driven program with a step-by-step guide to mastering retention marketing and driving serious results. Access over 25 hours of learnings and become a certified email & SMS marketer. Use code: SENDIT! for $300 OFF https://www.ecomemailcertified.com/

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00:00 Welcome to the show

01:25 Why your retention metrics are quietly lying to you

03:22 Hot take 1: Open rates are fundamentally broken

06:30 Hot take 2: Click rates are inflated by bots too

10:28 Hot take 3: ESP attribution is mostly a fantasy

14:23 Hot take 4: Revenue per recipient hides more than it reveals

17:35 Hot take 5: List size is a vanity metric

20:46 Hot take 6: AOV is the wrong way to measure most campaigns

24:17 Hot take 7: Industry benchmarks are mostly garbage

27:46 Hot take 8: Your LTV math is wrong

32:09 Hot take 9: Unsubscribe rate isn't measuring what you think

34:48 Hot take 10: The metrics leadership doesn't know to ask for

38:27 Final thoughts and what to comment below

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Enjoying the pod? Subscribe to The eCom Email Marketer Newsletter for your weekly dose of retention strategy, actionable insights, & exclusive industry news! http://ecomemailmarketer.com/

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Contact us at [email protected] for sponsorships, appearance requests, interviews, or general information!