For subscription and services brands, successful customer relationships are built and sustained with each new interaction. Leading brands have realized that legacy ESPs weren’t built for the complexity, longevity, or expectations of modern subscription and services relationships. This guide explores the four pillars of email success (unified customer data, real-time personalization, connected omnichannel experiences, and measurable ROI) along with six high-impact email use cases powered by Loomi AI.
Why Subscription and Services Brands Are Prioritizing Unified Data, Personalization, Connected Experiences, and ROI
For subscription and services brands, successful customer relationships are built and sustained with each new interaction.
A streaming subscriber who browses but doesn’t watch anything for two weeks may be at risk of churning. Or, they’re waiting for personalized recommendations that match their viewing history.
A telecom customer calling support expects your team to understand their entire account history and preferences, not just the issue at hand.
A health and wellness member starting a new fitness journey expects follow-up campaigns that feel informed by their goals, attendance patterns, and achievements, not generic emails sent to everyone.
Key Insight: In professional service industries like these, every touchpoint is an opportunity to strengthen or weaken the relationship you’re constantly building. Disconnected experiences aren’t merely lost chances. They erode trust with your audience and push customers toward cancellation.
That’s why brands are switching away from legacy ESPs and choosing platforms that deliver on four non-negotiables:
- Unified customer data
- Real-time personalization
- Connected omnichannel experiences
- Measurable ROI
The Four Pillars of Successful Email Marketing
Unified Customer Data: Creating a Single Source of Truth
Legacy email platforms force you to work with an incomplete understanding of your customer relationships: a subscriber’s in-app behavior might sit in one system, their support tickets in another, their payment history in a third, and their email engagement in your ESP.
This fragmentation makes true personalization impossible. You can’t deliver relevant communications when you don’t have a holistic view of each customer’s history with your brand.
This is the difference between a legacy approach and a modern approach:
| Legacy ESPs | Modern platforms (Loomi AI) |
|---|---|
| Fragmented data across systems | Unified customer profiles |
| Batch processing with hours or days of delay | Real-time data ingestion |
| Limited personalization capabilities | Deep behavioral insights |
| Incomplete view of customer relationships | Comprehensive source of truth |
Modern platforms consolidate every touchpoint (website visits, app usage, in-store check-ins, support interactions, billing events, and every historical data point) into a single customer view that becomes your comprehensive source of truth. With this unified foundation, you can finally activate the rich behavioral insights you’ve been collecting but couldn’t use.
For example, when a gym member hasn’t visited in two weeks, you can trigger a reengagement campaign that references their favorite classes and workout patterns. When a telecom customer’s contract is approaching renewal, you can send personalized upgrade offers based on their actual usage data.
Key Insight: A unified customer view turns everyday signals into meaningful engagement opportunities. It’s something legacy ESPs were never designed to deliver.
Personalization: Turning Real-Time Data Into Timely, Relevant Touchpoints
Your customer data is only valuable if you use it to deliver truly personalized experiences. A subscriber who just canceled your services needs more than a generic “We’re sorry to see you go” email. They need a message informed by their complete history, recent engagement patterns, and the specific advantages they gain from your brand.
Legacy systems process customer data in batches, often with hours or days of delay. By the time your cancellation campaign triggers, that customer has already committed to a competitor or lost interest entirely.
Modern platforms ingest customer behavior in real time and activate campaigns immediately, allowing you to respond to critical moments (service cancellations, support tickets, usage milestones, and payment renewals) the moment they happen. Your campaigns leverage all the context of your customer’s previous experience and gain the split-second agility that turns reactive marketing into proactive relationship management.
Key Insight: This combination of deep historical context and instant activation is crucial for modern subscription and services brands. Customers are served relevant messages that prove you understand their entire journey with your brand, not just their last action.
Connected Experiences: Orchestrating Seamless Omnichannel Journeys
Today’s subscribers engage with your brand across multiple channels, often within the same day. They browse your app, call support, receive an email, and visit your website, and they expect each interaction to be informed by previous ones.
Legacy ESPs trap you in email-only thinking. Even when they claim omnichannel capabilities, they lack the unified data and true omnichannel orchestration required to cultivate connected customer relationships.
The right marketing platform powers seamless journeys that flow naturally across email, SMS, push notifications, web personalization, and even offline touchpoints. A customer who abandons a plan upgrade on-site can receive a follow-up email highlighting upgrade benefits. A gym member who checks in for a workout class can automatically receive a post-workout email with similar class recommendations, along with an SMS calendar invite for any additional classes they choose.
Modern solutions ensure that every channel is connected, every message is contextual, and the customer never feels like they’re starting over.
ROI: Proving Marketing’s Impact on the Bottom Line
Leadership doesn’t want to hear about open rates and click-throughs. They want to see increased customer lifetime value, lower churn, better NPS, and growing subscriptions.
Legacy ESPs fall short on all these fronts, delivering surface-level engagement metrics that leave marketers without actionable insights and executives without the proof needed to justify continued investment.
Modern email marketing solutions provide business intelligence built for subscription and services brands. They connect email performance directly to retention, attribute outcomes across the full customer lifecycle, and offer AI-powered analysis to reveal which segments, campaigns, and journeys drive the most profitable growth.
Key metrics to track:
- Which automated journeys reduce churn most effectively?
- How does personalization impact customer lifetime value and NPS?
- Which campaigns drive repeat engagement versus one-time interactions?
When marketing’s contribution is measured with precision, conversations shift from defending budgets to scaling what works.
6 Email Marketing Use Cases To Drive Retention and Lifetime Value in 2026
As email marketing for subscription and services brands continues to shift toward data-driven, personalized experiences, 2026 will reward those who understand the full customer relationship and tailor every touchpoint to meet their customers’ unique needs.
The most effective email marketing programs will no longer rely on static campaigns, but on intelligent triggers that adapt to customer behavior, satisfaction levels, and timing.
That’s why leading brands around the world have turned to Bloomreach for email marketing powered by Loomi AI. Loomi AI is an agentic platform designed to ensure every email is perfectly personalized — in real time, at scale, and informed by your complete customer data.
The following use cases represent the new standard for high-performing email marketing, blending automation, personalization, and unified customer data to strengthen relationships when it matters most. Together, they show how forward-thinking brands turn everyday signals into meaningful engagement and measurable value.
Personalized Onboarding Journeys
First impressions matter, especially for subscription and services businesses, where early engagement often predicts long-term retention. In fact, welcome emails achieve 86% higher open rates than other marketing emails. That’s why it’s important to avoid sending the same generic welcome emails to every new customer, as you’ll miss the opportunity to personalize based on the specific service, plan, or preferences the customer selected.
Use your complete customer data to create adaptive journeys that guide new subscribers through their first days and weeks with your services. For example, a streaming subscriber who signed up for sports content can receive recommendations for live games and athlete documentaries. Or, a telecom customer who just upgraded to a premium plan can get personalized tips on advanced features they now have access to.
Personalized welcome flows accelerate value and build confidence in each customer’s decision to subscribe. Loomi AI streamlines this process by automatically leveraging customer attributes, preferences, and behavior to deliver the right message at the right moment, ensuring every customer feels seen and supported from day one.
Key metrics to track:
- Time to first value/engagement
- Onboarding completion rate
- Early-stage churn rate
Intelligent Win-Back Campaigns
Customer churn is inevitable in subscription businesses, but losing valuable customers doesn’t have to be permanent.
With intelligent win-back campaigns, subscription and services brands can identify inactive or at-risk customers early and reengage with tailored messaging, reminding them of the value your brand offers and addressing the specific reasons they disengaged.
For example, a streaming subscriber who hasn’t logged in for 30 days can receive a personalized email featuring new releases in their favorite genres, paired with a reminder of the value they’ve been missing.
When done well, these messages feel helpful and considerate, not pushy, and give customers a clear reason to reengage.
Loomi AI makes win-back campaigns an effortless process, harnessing unified customer data to automatically personalize messaging, content recommendations, and incentives. Rather than generic “We miss you” emails sent to every inactive user, Loomi AI identifies the specific factors that predict churn for different customer segments and tailors outreach accordingly.
Key metrics to track:
- Reactivation rate
- Revenue recovered from churned customers
- Time to reengagement
Refer-a-Friend Campaigns
With the right incentive, your happiest subscribers can be your most powerful growth engine.
Refer-a-friend campaigns help subscription and services brands grow organically by rewarding both existing customers and the friends they invite. When executed well, these campaigns turn satisfaction into advocacy, deepen loyalty among your best customers, and unlock cost-effective acquisition at scale.
With Loomi AI, you can identify your most loyal subscribers using engagement, usage, and loyalty signals and automatically deliver personalized referral invitations. Loomi AI generates a unique code or link for each referral, making it easy for customers to invite friends and ensuring that every successful conversion is tracked, attributed, and used to continuously optimize future campaigns.
Once a referred friend completes a qualifying action (such as signing up, subscribing, or making a first purchase), both parties receive their rewards, reinforcing positive behavior while creating new loyal users.
Key metrics to track:
- Referral conversion rate
- Cost per acquisition via referral
- Lifetime value of referred customers
Milestone Celebration Campaigns
Long-lasting customer relationships are vital for subscription and services brands, which naturally turn milestones into valuable engagement opportunities.
Milestone celebration campaigns highlight important moments in the customer journey (subscription anniversaries, usage achievements, loyalty tier promotions, and personal goal completions) with personalized messaging that makes customers feel recognized and valued.
For example:
- A streaming subscriber can receive a “One Year Together” email showcasing their most-watched content and exclusive previews of upcoming releases
- An education provider can congratulate learners on completing a course or certification, reinforcing momentum with recommendations for next-step programs
- A telecom customer reaching five years of service can receive exclusive loyalty perks and early access to new features
Loomi AI streamlines celebration campaigns by continuously monitoring every customer’s journey and automatically triggering celebratory messages at exactly the right moment. Milestone campaigns are personalized with relevant data points (hours streamed, years of service, etc.) that demonstrate how valued each unique relationship is to your brand.
Key metrics to track:
- Engagement rate on milestone emails
- Retention rate post-milestone
- Upsell conversion from milestone campaigns
Targeted Campaigns Powered by AI-Driven Segmentation
For email campaigns to stay relevant and impactful, audience segmentation can’t be a one-time setup. Engagement levels rise and fall, usage patterns change, and subscribers move between lifecycle stages. To stay relevant, you need to find ways to evolve your email audiences — without manual effort or constant rebuilding.
Loomi AI-powered AutoSegments solve this challenge by continuously analyzing customer behavior and refreshing segments in real time. Marketers can instantly surface actionable audiences (highly engaged users, at-risk subscribers, or long-term loyalists) and trigger campaigns without having to manually create lists, allowing teams to focus on strategy instead of constant maintenance.
For example, you can use AutoSegments to automatically identify subscribers whose usage patterns indicate a shift in needs (consistently hitting feature limits or skipping core services) and trigger campaigns that guide them toward better-fit plans or features.
By automatically identifying underperforming segments and enabling targeted outreach at scale, Loomi AI acts as an always-on optimizer for relationship-driven growth, improving engagement, reducing churn, and maximizing lifetime value across your subscriber base.
Key metrics to track:
- Segment performance over time
- Churn rate by segment
- Campaign efficiency (time saved on manual segmentation)
Cross-Sell and Upsell Campaigns
The most effective upsell and cross-sell campaigns don’t feel like sales pitches. Instead, they provide helpful recommendations based on how a customer actually uses your services.
Intelligent cross-sell and upsell campaigns identify customers whose usage patterns indicate they would benefit from premium features, add-on services, or plan upgrades.
For example:
- A streaming subscriber who frequently maxes out simultaneous streams can receive a targeted offer for a family plan upgrade
- A telecom customer who uses a certain amount of bandwidth can get a personalized recommendation for a faster Internet plan
- A health and wellness member who regularly books the same classes can receive a personalized offer for an unlimited membership or premium coaching add-on
Loomi AI analyzes millions of usage patterns and purchase combinations to identify which customers are most likely to benefit from which upgrades, then delivers those recommendations at the optimal moment in the customer journey.
With AI predicting the next best step for each subscriber, your campaigns always speak directly to your audience with the right recommendations, offering the most valuable services at the right time.
Key metrics to track:
- Upsell/cross-sell conversion rate
- Revenue per customer
- Average order value increase
How Top Brands Win With Email Marketing
Ultimate Performance Powers Personalized Customer Experiences With Unified Data
Ultimate Performance is the world’s only global personal training business, operating private gyms worldwide and helping thousands of clients achieve life-changing fitness results.
With members interacting through in-gym sessions, app usage, email, SMS, and support channels, the brand recognized the need for an omnichannel engagement strategy. However, disconnected data made it difficult to deliver the personalized journeys that members expect.
Ultimate Performance turned to Bloomreach to unify all its customer data and channels into a single platform, creating real-time member profiles that reflect each individual’s full relationship with the brand. Now powered by Loomi AI, the team delivers personalized, retention-driving campaigns that build on every customer interaction, turning real-time insight into meaningful engagement at every stage of the member journey.
The results:
- 11% higher click rates from personalized emails compared to non-personalized messages
- 23% higher click-to-open rates from personalized emails compared to control versions
ClickCease by CHEQ Reduces Trial Attrition With AI-Powered Automation
ClickCease by CHEQ protects digital advertising from fake traffic, helping marketers and agencies eliminate wasted spend and make decisions based on accurate data. With a diverse audience of ecommerce managers and marketers, the company needed a way to deliver highly personalized, timely communications that maintained engagement and nurtured valuable relationships, which its previous email platform struggled to support.
With the power of Loomi AI, ClickCease gained a 360-degree view of its audience and the tools to build flexible, automated user experiences. Now, crucial touchpoints in ClickCease’s customer journey are shaped by real-time data, responding to customer behavior within the product and informed by each subscriber’s unique relationship with the brand.
The results:
- 18% reduction in trial attrition from email campaigns
- 23% conversion uplift from email campaigns
- 52% higher open rates across automated journeys
- 38% higher click-through rates for personalized campaigns
Voyo Achieves 500% ROI With Rapid Email Platform Migration
Voyo is a leading streaming service in Croatia, serving over 100,000 active subscribers. Despite having a clear marketing strategy, persistent issues with its previous marketing solution (technical limitations, instability, and lack of support) made it impossible to execute the personalized campaigns its marketing team envisioned.
Voyo implemented Loomi AI to replace these limitations with a stable, flexible platform built for personalization at scale. Within just one month, the brand launched automated, tailored campaigns powered by real-time data, including email warm-up journeys, win-back campaigns for churned subscribers, and customer surveys to inform ongoing optimization. Loomi AI also unlocked new engagement opportunities, empowering Voyo to personalize content recommendations based on viewing behavior and favorite genres and ensuring every message felt relevant and timely.
The results:
- 58.7% average open rate on the first 4 million emails sent
- 38% open rate and 2.53% click-through rate on win-back campaigns
- 500% initial return on investment within six months of implementation
- 72% customer survey response revealing valuable business insights
Transform Your Email Marketing With Bloomreach and Loomi AI
Disconnected ESPs are simply incapable of nurturing the long-lasting customer relationships that subscription and services brands depend on. You need to understand your customers, recognize their needs, and deliver personalized campaigns that build on every interaction.
To truly personalize email, you need the complete customer picture. Loomi AI connects real-time data from across your entire business (your app, website, billing system, customer support platform, physical locations, CRM tools, and more) to create a comprehensive, accurate view of every customer relationship.
With that foundation in place, you can act with intelligence. Unlike legacy platforms that separate data from execution, email marketing powered by Loomi AI lets you build any audience you can imagine and activate it instantly. AI helps determine the next best action, the ideal send time, and the most relevant message for every subscriber, automatically and at scale.
And once campaigns are live, Loomi AI proves the impact. Detailed analytics go beyond opens and clicks to show how email drives retention, reduces churn, increases customer lifetime value, and creates profitable growth. This gives both marketers and leaders the clarity they need to invest with confidence.
If you’re still sending generic campaigns or struggling to activate the rich customer data that your users provide, 2026 is the year to stop stitching together disconnected tools and start delivering the seamless, personalized experiences subscribers now expect.
Schedule a personalized demo and discover what Loomi AI can do for your email marketing.
