Right message.
Right time.
Right people.
Grovae is a retention practice for D2C brands. We run WhatsApp, email and SMS as one programme rather than three, built on your own order data, and we are judged on one number: how much of your store's revenue retention brings back.
A selection from seventy-plus brands across India, the Gulf, the UK and the US since 2023.
Everything that reaches a customer after the first click.
Most brands buy retention as three separate things: someone for email, someone for WhatsApp, a tool for SMS. They run on different calendars and talk to the same customer three times in a week without knowing it. We run all of it as one programme, on one calendar, off one view of your order data.
Flows and campaigns
Welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, win-back. Then a monthly calendar of sends around your launches and sales.
Templates that get approved
Broadcasts, order updates and nurture flows on the WhatsApp Business API, written to pass Meta review the first time.
Numbers a founder can read
Who to message, when, and with what offer, worked out from your order data. One monthly report, two minutes to read.
You are not sending too little. You are sending the same thing to everyone.
Every account we open looks different on the surface and identical underneath. The list is large, the calendar is full, and almost every message goes to almost everybody. Four things we find over and over.
- 01The list is big, and quiet.One footwear account had 3.4 lakh subscribers. 1.5 lakh had signed up and never ordered. 50,000 bought once and disappeared for 200 days. All of them were getting the same newsletter.
- 02Reach went up. Revenue did not.On one brand, a send to 81,210 people earned ₹69,035. A send to 37,627 people earned ₹4.27 lakh. Twice the list, a sixth of the money.
- 03The discount quietly became the strategy.A segment goes cold, so it gets 20% off and that gets called retention. Do it for a year and the list simply waits for the next code.
- 04Nobody computed the rebuy window.Four of five accounts we opened were running one replenishment flow on a 30 or 45 day delay. In acne skincare the second order lands on day 8, so that delay misses 82% of buyers.
The same offer, sent to people who had already bought twice, returned 9.4x. Sent to the cold list, 1.1x. Same creative, same discount. The only thing that changed was who received it.
One account, two years in.
Brand name withheld at the client's request. Vegan women's footwear, India. Taken over September 2024, no new channels, no extra acquisition spend.
| Journey | Read | Buy rate | Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Footwear browse follow-up | 66% | 7.45% | ₹33.3 L |
| Browse abandonment | 63% | 1.19% | ₹19.4 L |
| Abandoned cart recovery | 67% | 3.48% | ₹16.2 L |
| Post-delivery cross-sell | 56% | 1.10% | ₹10.5 L |
Retention revenue grew from ₹87 lakh a year to ₹1.54 crore, almost all of it on WhatsApp. The browse follow-up buys at 7.45% against 2 to 3% for a strong WhatsApp journey. Right product, right moment, not a bigger discount.
What we find when we open an account.
Six real accounts opened in 2026. Names withheld, numbers exact. These are things we found on day one, not things we fixed.
- 01Fitness, ₹300 Cr run rate.12.66 lakh contacts sitting in the panel, no email programme at all. Thirteen broadcasts ever.
- 02Acne skincare.An identity tool had recognised 43,306 shoppers in eight weeks. Messages sent: zero.
- 03Women's wellness.3,43,579 emails in twelve months produced 824 clicks. Replenishment made 2 orders in 30 days.
- 04Checkout abandonment.₹1.03 crore abandoned in one account, recovered at 0.2%. A second account: ₹68.9 lakh in one month at 0.47%.
- 05Premium skincare.The cheapest acquisition product brings the most customers and retains worst: 13% against 27.6%.
- 06Four accounts.WhatsApp delivery at 30 to 66% against 85 to 95% healthy, every failed send billed in full.
The repeat window is not where you think.
Computed from each brand's own order export. This one number sets every replenishment delay, and almost nobody computes it.
| Category | Median days to 2nd order | Lifetime repeat | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acne skincare | 8 | 11.6% | A day 20 delay misses 82% of buyers. |
| Barefoot footwear | 10 | 17.2% | Second pair inside a month, not a season. |
| Men's premium tees | 10 | 20.2% | 76% of rebuys are the same tee in a new colour. |
| Women's wellness | 30 | 23.3% | Whole repeat business decided by day 56. |
| Premium skincare | 74 | 19.7% | A cross-sell window, not a replenishment one. |
Four of these five were running one generic replenishment flow on a 30 or 45 day delay. On three, the money was already decided and lost before the message went out. It is the first thing we compute on any account.
What actually lands on your desk.
Every engagement ships a live audit and a monthly report a founder can read in two minutes. Retention's share of total store revenue leads every one of them. Not opens.
We would rather read your data than pitch you.
So the first thing we do is free, and it happens before there is a contract to sign. We pull your order export and your panel, compute your numbers, and hand you the findings written down. If the findings say your problem is not retention, we will say that too.
- 01The audit, on your own data.Your order export and your panel, read properly. About two weeks. No cost, and no call required before it starts.
- 02The findings, ranked by money at stake.Ordered by revenue at risk, not by what we would like to sell you. Yours to keep either way.
- 03The baseline, agreed before we build.We write down what retention's share of revenue is today, so there is a real number to be judged against later.
- 04The build. Campaign first, then automate.We send, we measure, and only what performed becomes a flow. You end up owning the system, not renting it.
- Repeat rate, cohorts, and your real rebuy window
- Capture, and the sessions leaving anonymous
- Flow estate: live, silent, mistimed
- Campaigns and calendar gaps
- Creative against your own best performers
- List health and segmentation
- Deliverability, and what failed sends cost you
- What to measure, and what to stop measuring
Four things we will tell you that a pitch deck will not.
Retention gets oversold, usually by people who benefit from the overselling. These are the caveats we would want if we were buying it.
- 01It is not just a revenue channel.Judged on attributed rupees alone, you are seeing about a quarter of what it does. The rest lands as orders acquisition takes credit for.
- 02It does not work in silos.WhatsApp alone, or email alone, leaves money on the table. That is why we will not run only one of them for you.
- 03Half the outcome sits outside our control.Unit economics, product fit, landing pages, and how acquisition spends. Retention cannot fix arithmetic.
- 04It is not a first-click channel.And usually not a last-click one either, which is exactly why it gets underfunded in most businesses.
So why pay for it. Because it is four channels wearing one name, and only one of them shows up in the revenue report.
Find out who your next send should actually go to.
A written retention audit computed from your own order export. No cost, no obligation, and the findings are yours to keep even if you never hire us.