How Moving Customers to 'Subscribed' Impacts LTV

Did you know that 8% of your customers may generate 41% of your revenue? That's not a quirk — it's a signal. The customers who come back, spend more, and stay longer all have one thing in common: they're almost always email and SMS subscribers.

That's why so many Shopify brands invest in list growth. While tactics like popups and discounts can inflate your numbers, they miss the most important moment: checkout. It's the highest-trust point in the journey and the most reliable time to earn a high-value opt-in.

And those opt-ins aren't just a nice-to-have. They directly influence LTV.

In this guide, we'll break down why checkout-based opt-ins outperform every other tactic. We'll also explore how simple changes to your consent flow can unlock higher retention, stronger engagement, and measurable revenue growth.

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How Converting Customers to Subscribers Impacts LTV

Once a customer buys from your brand, there's a 32% chance they will make a second purchase. But here's where it gets interesting — after that second order, the odds of subsequent purchases jump to 54%. It's a compounding effect: The more someone buys, the more likely they are to return.

But not all customers follow that curve — subscription status is the multiplier. Subscribers come back more often, engage more consistently, and spend more because you've earned the right to stay top of mind. And with email or SMS consent in place, you can trigger the right message at the right time to pull subscribers back in.

The difference in customer value is crystal clear. According to Datacop's 2024 lifecycle study, customers subscribed to email marketing had a 24% higher lifetime value than non-subscribers — a result driven primarily by increased purchase frequency. Those subscribed to both email and SMS performed even better, showing a 42% increase in LTV over non-subscribed customers.

This reflects exactly what we're seeing in our data. Since we launched our A/B testing feature in January and have put a few dozen brands through it, we see, on average, a $65 increase in LTV coming from every single new opt-in.

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Psychological Barriers that Keep Customers From Opting In

You know that email and SMS subscribers drive higher LTV, stronger engagement, and better retention. The real challenge isn't understanding the value of a subscriber. It's actually getting customers to opt in.

And the truth is, most don't. Here's why that happens:

Poorly Timed Opt-Ins

Picture this: someone lands on your product page. They're still figuring out what your brand even sells. Before they can start scrolling, a popup appears, asking for an email without context or sharing vague copy, like "Get offer."

Poor timing kills intent. When a shopper is still in exploration mode, an opt-in ask feels like a cold call, not a helpful next step. And once they click out, the odds of them saying yes later go down.

Spam Anxiety

Consumers have been trained to flinch. If they say yes to one brand's opt-in request, they're suddenly getting 15 emails a week. Half of them are irrelevant, and the other half beg for a sale.

If your brand hasn't earned trust with relevant messaging, a clear explanation of what to expect, or ideally, an actual purchase, even a simple opt-in ask, can feel like a trap. Asking for an email or phone number can feel like asking them to open Pandora's inbox. Many won't take that risk, especially not at first touch.

Generic Messaging

Generic messaging is worse than none at all. When customers see a form that promises "updates" or "news," their guard goes up. What kind of updates? Why should they care? Will messages feel tailored to them, or like a copy-paste blast?

People don't mind being marketed to — they mind being forgotten. And most brands do a bad job of showing relevance upfront. If the opt-in feels like the start of a one-size-fits-all funnel, your customers tune out.

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Where Most List-Growth Tactics Go Wrong

While the psychological barriers to opt-ins are real, they're not inevitable. The bigger issue is how most brands handle opt-in moments. Even when a customer is ready to subscribe, the tactics we rely on often sabotage the outcome. From popup discounts to buried checkboxes, intent gets lost in execution.

Let's break down where things go wrong:

Popups and Discounts Train the Wrong Behavior

Popups and discounts might seem like an easy win — capturing email addresses in exchange for 10% off. But this approach has hidden costs. Beyond training customers to expect constant discounts (eroding margins and perceived value), popup subscribers often exhibit lower engagement. Their relationship with your brand begins as a transaction — a discount in exchange for contact information — rather than a genuine interest in your products or story.

Website Visitor ID Tools Miss the Mark on Consent

Some tools promise to expand your reach by capturing intent data, like IP-based firmographics or behavioral signals from anonymous visitors. They use methods like reverse IP lookup or cookie-based tracking to help you guess who's on your site and trigger outreach accordingly.

But here's the catch: These are not true opt-ins. While technically legal in some markets, scraped or inferred contacts blur the line between visibility and intrusion, particularly in regions with stricter privacy laws, such as the EU or Canada. That's why many of these tools are geo-restricted or explicitly blocked in certain compliance-focused setups.

The reality is that these tools are staples in the e-commerce marketer's playbook because identity resolution can be a good strategy for creating an affordable top-funnel retargeting audience and driving a return.

But scraped or inferred emails are not and should not be treated as true opt-ins. The messages sent to that audience are usually focused on driving that first purchase. To create a truly owned and compliant list, you should focus on driving true opt-ins. And the best place to do that is the checkout.

Checkout Opt-Ins Are Better (But Still Broken)

Checkout is the ideal moment to ask for consent. It's where trust and intent peak, and it also happens to be the single most nuanced step in the customer journey when it comes to compliance laws because the data is being collected in the course of a sale. In theory, if you nail the configuration, language, and policy presentation, checkout will be your biggest and highest quality source of marketing opt-ins.

But in practice, checkout opt-ins aren't delivering the results they should. Even for brands focused on retention, overlooking the checkout consent experience creates hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of missed opt-ins each month.

Our 2025 analysis of SMS opt-in performance across 500+ Shopify brands found that less than 1% of U.S. shoppers complete SMS opt-in at checkout. Similarly, for email, the UK and Europe tend to see opt-in rates below 20%, and the U.S. hovers around 50%. This data told us one thing. The issue isn't customer interest or hesitancy to join your list — it's that brands overlook the compliance nuances for each market.

For example, in the U.S., brands can rely on implied consent provided they clearly display their privacy policy where the data is collected, maintain detailed logs on exactly when and how the data was collected, and ensure that someone who's already opted out or is on a global DNC does not get resubscribed. The UK can rely on what's called the "soft opt-in" if similar backend standards are maintained.

But because compliance frameworks like TCPA, GDPR, and CCPA make fines and complaints possible, most brands understandably don’t want to (or can’t) optimize these things themselves. Unless someone else takes responsibility, the risk can be too great since fines can exceed a few hundred thousand dollars in some cases.

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Smarter Checkout Opt-Ins Grow and Keep High-Value Subscribers

Checkout is where intent peaks — but as we've seen, most opt-in flows at this stage are far from perfect. Configurations are suboptimal, and in the case of SMS, the last double opt-in step rarely happens in the standard 'Reply Y' flow.

To get more out of checkout opt-ins, you need to fix a few things:

- The way consent is captured

- The way your privacy policy is communicated in relation to the collected data

- The manner in which data is stored in relation to the opt-in

- The way subscribers are treated after they opt in

That means designing a flow that's both easy to complete and fully compliant. Then, you can make sure those subscribers land in a system that keeps them engaged.

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Turn Your Checkout Flow Into an LTV Growth Engine

Your checkout flow is more than a conversion point — it's the single highest-leverage moment to grow your list with customers who can't wait to hear from you. When you nudge more of them to opt in as they complete their purchase, the downstream impact is immediate and measurable.

Brands using Dataships see this firsthand. With Dataships, you can make email and SMS consent collection clear, compliant, and high-converting directly within the checkout flow. For email consent, it dynamically displays the correct opt-in language per region, validates consent, and syncs directly with Klaviyo. And for SMS, it replaces clunky "Reply Y" confirmations with an in-flow, one-time code, ensuring full TCPA compliance without interrupting the purchase.

Benchmade saw what happens when you get this right. After switching to Dataships, they hit a 97% email opt-in rate, added 2,448 incremental subscribers every month, and unlocked $124K in monthly incremental LTV — simply by improving how and when they asked for permission.

When opt-ins become a default part of checkout, you don't just build a bigger list. You build a more valuable one.

Want to see if Dataships is a good fit for you? Book a demo today!