Hi {{First Name | Friend}},

Two weeks ago I shared the Monday Ritual. Last week I gave you the three patterns to recognize when you looked at your numbers.

This week I want to show you something different. Not a tactic. Not a framework. Just a real client’s September numbers and a breakdown of what she is actually doing to produce them.

Because a few of you have replied in the last couple of weeks asking the same quiet question: “Is anyone actually doing well right now?”

The answer is yes. Accounts are still thriving.

And no, this is not me telling you to fire your advertising agency if your numbers do not look like this. I want you to use these numbers as a benchmark to audit your own system.

Let me show you.

In September, one of my ecommerce clients did $900,000 in revenue.

Of that, $282,000 came from email alone.

That is 31 percent of her monthly revenue from a single owned channel. The average ecommerce brand sees 15 to 20 percent from email. She is nearly double that. Remember this: owned channel.

Here is the screenshot.

I want to be clear about what this means. She did not do this by running more ads. She did not do it by discounting her way through the month. She did it by running a system where every piece supports every other piece.

Here is what the system looks like.

1. She has a posting strategy, not random posts on random days or times.

Every day. Not when she feels like it. Not only when she has something to launch. Every day. Her audience knows when to expect her. Her organic content is the top of her funnel AND her retargeting layer at the same time. Content is at least 50 percent video.

2. She buys inventory based on what her customers actually want.

Not what she personally loves. Not what the showroom reps pushed on her at market. She reads the data. Sell through rates. Waitlist signups. Replies to drops. The customer tells her what to buy and she listens.

This is the one most owners get wrong. You can run perfect ads and perfect emails, but if the inventory is wrong, nothing converts. Do not be afraid to ask your customers what they want and prefer. Adjust your buying strategy to the current state of the economy too. Something helpful is to look at your average order value. How much are they actually buying?

3. She runs curated, segmented emails. Not blasts.

Her list is divided by what people have purchased, what they have browsed, and what they have told her they want. Every email speaks to a specific group with a specific reason to open.

Blasts to the whole list are easy to send and expensive to recover from. One irrelevant email trains your subscribers to tune out the next ten.

4. She runs paid ads to feed the top.

Her ads bring new people in. They do not have to close the sale on the first touch. Email and organic do the closing. That means her cost per click can be higher and still be profitable, because the sale is coming from the system, not from a single ad.

5. She is reading the market in real time.

Here is something I have been seeing across all my client accounts this quarter. Customers are not buying one $60 top anymore. They are buying one $25 graphic tee and one $20 necklace. Or two tees. Or three jewelry pieces.

The order value is holding. The shape of the cart is changing. Customers want more items at lower prices. Volume is up. Single item averages are down.

And here is the honest part:

Right now, across every client account I run, I do not have a single client in panic mode. The ones with hiccups have one of two specific issues. Either they ran out of inventory on their top sellers, or they stopped showing up for their customers. Slow emails. Inconsistent posting. No engagement on social media. It is always one of those.

Both are fixable this week. Neither one is “the market is dead.”

The market is not dead. The customers are still spending. The businesses that are showing up with what their customers want are still winning.