From Cart Abandonment to Customer Lifetime Value: How Rejoiner Turns Buyer Intelligence into Retention Revenue

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For most eCommerce brands, the problem isn’t getting customers — it’s keeping them engaged long enough to maximize lifetime value.

Mike Arsenault, founder and CEO of Rejoiner, built his SaaS company around solving exactly that problem. What began as a simple tool to track form drop-offs for a SaaS employer evolved into a full-scale email marketing automation platform for direct-to-consumer brands.

The journey offers a playbook in using buyer intelligence to design retention-first marketing that scales.

Lesson 1: Start With the Last Mile of the Funnel

Rejoiner’s origin story came from a very specific friction point: high-intent prospects starting a signup form but not completing it.

Mike’s early solution tracked when and where users dropped off, then tested follow-ups — calls, direct mail, and eventually email — to bring them back.

Email won out for scalability and conversion, leading to the launch of a dedicated cart abandonment product.

Agency takeaway: Some of the most valuable SaaS products — and campaigns — come from fixing “last-mile” buyer drop-off points before worrying about the top of the funnel.

Lesson 2: Listen Until Patterns Emerge

In Rejoiner’s early days, Mike called every person who signed up. Not to pitch — but to understand:

  • What problem were they trying to solve?

  • What other tools were they using?

  • Where was their process breaking?

Over time, the feedback formed a ranked backlog of features, directly tied to recurring requests.

This hands-on buyer research shaped Rejoiner’s evolution from a single-use tool into a full lifecycle marketing automation platform.

Agency takeaway: Buyer intelligence is more than surveys — it’s direct, qualitative conversations that reveal the “why” behind behavior.

Lesson 3: Retention Is a Service + Software Equation

While most ESPs sell software and leave execution to the customer, Rejoiner built an agency layer alongside its platform.

For many brands, Rejoiner’s team handles copywriting, design, template building, and QA — eliminating the execution gap that often stalls retention programs.

This hybrid approach creates stickiness. Brands aren’t just connected to a tool — they’re connected to a partner who knows their business intimately.

Retention insight: The deeper your role in executing for customers, the harder it is for them to churn.

Lesson 4: Keep the Product Roadmap Close to the Buyer

Mike still personally manages several of Rejoiner’s largest, most sophisticated accounts — not just to ensure performance, but to hear unfiltered requests, frustrations, and ambitions.

That direct contact surfaces:

  • Integration opportunities

  • Cross-channel expansion needs

  • Pain points competitors aren’t solving

These inputs shape the roadmap — ensuring new features directly serve proven demand.

Agency takeaway: The closer your decision-making is to real buyer conversations, the lower your risk of building “shelfware.”

Lesson 5: Market Conditions Can Accelerate Retention Opportunities

When COVID-19 forced retail brands to double down on eCommerce, Rejoiner’s positioning — helping DTC brands keep and grow customers — became even more valuable.

Shopify reported a 70% increase in new store creation in Q2 2020, but eCommerce still only accounted for ~16% of total retail sales. That means the retention market for online brands is far from saturated.

Mike’s focus now: expanding from email into multi-channel lifecycle marketing, using the email address as the identity key to target customers across ads, direct mail, and more.

The Buyer-Centric Retention Playbook from Rejoiner

  1. Fix the last-mile friction before expanding your funnel.

  2. Rank your roadmap by recurring buyer requests, not internal opinion.

  3. Combine tech + services to remove execution barriers for customers.

  4. Keep leadership in the buyer conversation loop to guide strategy.

  5. Leverage market shifts to double down on high-value retention channels.

Why this matters for SaaS founders & tech companies: Rejoiner proves that long-term SaaS growth isn’t just about acquiring customers faster — it’s about aligning your product, services, and messaging to the retention levers that matter most to your buyers. That’s the same principle our agency applies when designing SaaS marketing strategies, web experiences, and sales enablement programs: put buyer intelligence at the center, and build around the behaviors that keep them coming back.