What Happened:
Milk Bar’s Jessica Levinson published a post calling out retention programs that default to blasting offers without accounting for where the customer actually is in their journey.
She pointed to common missteps (like sending another promo immediately after someone buys, or pushing SMS opt-ins to subscribers who haven’t opened an email in a year) as signs of teams prioritizing internal agendas over real behavior.
Her core message: when brands ignore signals and context, they erode trust, drive disengagement, and condition audiences to tune out future communication.
Read her full post here.