The AI retention tool 1,000+ Shopify brands are using to make money on autopilot.
If you’re like me, your feed has probably been taken over by the AI Wars. Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Perplexity. It’s exhausting.
Every morning I see a new LinkedIn post from someone who has never touched an ad account in their life explaining what it all means for ecommerce.
Okay, that was mean. Honestly: a lot of this stuff is genuinely fascinating. If this little essay was about AI in GENERAL, I’d recommend so many AI tools your head would spin.
Instead, I’d like to recommend my personal AI noise filter question:
“Will this technology theoretically make money someday? Or is it making money for real brands, right now, for real?”
And I do mean “making money,” rather than “saving time.” Saving time is wonderful and time is indeed money, but it’s not quite a 1:1. Like, you can’t connect Grok to Shopify and make revenue go up. Yet.
What you CAN do is study where AI is ALREADY showing up in the P&L of companies currently using it to (you guessed it) make more money.
Which brings us to today’s topic: a specific, AI-powered way for you to do just that.
As testified to by real brands, making money, right now.
Shall we?
AND WE ALL FLOW(T) ON
Last month, we discussed the email flows many brands AREN’T running, and how much revenue is sitting in those untouched sequences.
Now, I’d like to talk about what happens AFTER you turn those flows on, and start scaling them.
The short answer is, more money. Obviously.
But the secret to the success of the brands I keep hearing about isn’t that they’re running more flows (although they are doing that!). It’s that they’re running personalized flows that get smarter every month…because every send turns into an A/B test.
Because without constant testing & iterating, you end up building a welcome series and abandoned cart flow and leaving it unchanged for a year. Even when your offers, your catalog, your pricing, and your bestsellers have all changed since they first launched. Wince.
This testing & iterating & updating is what Instant AI (an AI email platform for ecom) has been building, and it’s worth understanding how it works.
A NEAR-INSTANT RECAP
But first, ICYMI, here’s how this starts:
Instant uses their pixel to track opted-in shoppers down to the SKU, page, and behavior. What makes them linger, which colorways they love, what was cart-worthy, etc. Then, they serve a smart, AI-powered pop up, designed to convert more cold traffic → email & SMS subscribers…REGARDLESS of whether they make a purchase in that 1st visit. Key!
Then, Instant generates and sends personalized emails based on exactly what each shopper did on-site, automatically. There are 12 flows across 3 buckets (abandonment, lifecycle, and inventory).
Important to note: with Shopify, these flows can spin up in a few minutes.
I made a video about how quickly this can be set up (2 mins), and what the dashboard shows (spoiler: $$$).
Note that it has more spoilers for what’s next, though. 👇
HARDER, BETTER, SMARTER, SMARTER
OKAY, here’s what I’ll answer: How to use AI to turn your emails into self-improving revenue generators?
It works like this: every email Instant sends is also a micro-experiment. An A/B test and a revenue stream. Subject lines, copy, graphics, timing, offers, etc – the model learns from every send and updates based on what converts, by individual.
When your email model gets smarter with every personalized send, brands see compounding growth on emails that run automatically. Personalization = more revenue per email. More emails = more revenue. Both = major growth.
A leading skincare brand hit $1.1M in incremental revenue in their first 100 days on Instant. Then, kept growing at 10-20% MoM after that. The AI kept learning from every send.
A major apparel brand saw their email flow revenue grow 25% MoM, for 3 consecutive quarters. Same flows. No additional team resources. Just the model getting smarter.
Reminder: Instant’s customers don’t run manual A/B testson their flows anymore. They get to see the results straight in their dashboard, with learnings automatically incorporated into the next send.
A few more notes, straight from the source(s):
💪 TRX: “Since starting with Instant, our email flows have never been simpler and have driven us more revenue than ever before. Total game changer.”
— Yentrang Phan, Director of Performance Marketing
🍬 Neuro: “Instant made personalization easy to achieve with no additional work from my team and delivered immediate ROI. It’s helping us drive profitable retention by turning traffic into long-term, loyal customers.”
— Brooke Cullison, VP of Media & Acquisition
💗 ThirdLove: “Instant’s capabilities are the best we’ve seen and we’ve tried them all. What impressed us was how quickly we started seeing results, and how knowledgeable their Customer Success team was.”
— Leanne Chan, Senior Director of Retention & Growth Marketing
THE METRICS THAT TELL YOU IF IT’S WORKING
Open rates matter but are often misleading.
What matters more:
✹ Revenue per recipient: per person on your list, not per email sent! Tells you if your list quality is growing or degrading.
✹ Incremental revenue: My baby. You need holdout tests to know what revenue you actually WOULDN’T have made.
✹ Time to purchase: How long after opt-in does a shopper convert? The best retention programs know this number and build around it.
Instant’s dashboard surfaces all 3. That’s how you get the full picture.
INSTANT GRATIFICATION
If you’ve been here for a while, you know I like to keep tabs on businesses that do well. In this case, these brands have something in common: they started treating their email flows like living, evolving systems, automated by Instant.
And, if you’re on Shopify, you can get there…today. Like, in the next few minutes.
If you use my link, you can get 50% off your first 2 months. Hope it’s helpful!
But only on 1 condition: you have to tell me how it goes. 📈💌