RetentionX | E-Commerce Growth OS

Retention can be tough for furniture brands. Using RetentionX’s churn predictions, Plank+Beam targets the right customers and drives an 82% lift in winbacks — smashing industry benchmarks.

Introduction

Plank+Beam was born from the belief that solid wood furniture should be beautiful, accessible, and built to last. Two decades ago, a Danish-German husband-and-wife duo made their first piece: a strong, safe, and attractive solid wood bed. That bed turned out to be the foundation for a brand rooted in craftsmanship, honesty, and design that stands the test of time.

Today, Plank+Beam is part of Maxwood Furniture, a family of brands including Maxtrix and Max & Lily. Still, each piece is designed in-house and brought to life through a direct partnership with their own workshop. The founders remain hands-on in every element, striving to pass quality directly to customers by skipping middlemen and unnecessary markups.

The Challenge

For furniture brands, retention is uniquely challenging. Customers often shop based on demand, not loyalty, and long purchase cycles make it harder to build repeat behavior. That was exactly why the Plank+Beam team turned to RetentionX: to gain insights, understand their customers’ behavior, and create a holistic journey to keep them engaged.

“At Plank+Beam, we’ve always believed in building long-lasting relationships with our customers — not just furniture. That’s why finding new ways to re-engage our community is so important to us.”— Jonathan Sieling, Director of E-Commerce.

As one core initiative, the team focused on customers slipping away. Traditional winback campaigns weren’t moving the needle, so they needed a smarter, more targeted approach to bring high-risk customers back into the fold.

Catie Polachi,

Sr. Email & SMS Specialist

“We knew some customers were at risk of churning, but sending out blanket discounts wasn’t the answer. RetentionX helped us focus on the right audience and prove our efforts truly paid off.”

Why RetentionX Churn Risk Matters

Not every customer is at the same risk of leaving. RetentionX uses predictive models that analyze each customer’s behavior to calculate their likelihood of churning.

For Plank+Beam, this means truly understanding which customers need attention to prevent churn. Based on RetentionX’s churn risk, the team could even match the right incentive to the right customer: a softer 15% nudge for those at high risk, and a stronger 20% push for those most likely to be lost forever.

Catie Polachi,

Sr. Email & SMS Specialist

“The churn risk predictions gave us a whole new way to look at our customers. Instead of guessing who needed an incentive, we had a clear, data-driven roadmap.”

The Approach

Plank+Beam integrated RetentionX with Klaviyo, enriching Klaviyo contact profiles including the churn risk scores. From there, they built two winback audiences and designed a tailored incentive strategy:

1. Customers with a 90–95% churn risk received a tailored 15% off incentive.

2. Customers with a 95%+ churn risk received a more compelling 20% off incentive.

The Results

The winback campaign exceeded expectations:

82% higher order rate in the test group compared to the control.
Consistent lift across both churn-risk tiers.
Outperformed existing winback flows, which hadn’t generated lift.

Across industries, winback campaigns typically drive only 0.25%–0.5% placed order rates. In furniture, the numbers are even lower (0.1%–0.3%) due to high AOVs, long decision cycles, and delivery friction. Plank+Beam’s results were far above these benchmarks, showing how smart segmentation and incentive strategy can unlock outsized value.

In just ten days, the campaign recovered 1.17% of customers who otherwise would have been lost — delivering a 14x ROI on RetentionX’s monthly subscription.

Catie Polachi,

Sr. Email & SMS Specialist

“We’d tested winbacks before without much success, so we didn’t expect an 82% lift. It showed us what’s possible when retention is done right.”

Impact

By moving from generic winback campaigns to precision retention, Plank+Beam not only increased order volume but also proved the ROI of data-driven churn prevention.

Now, the brand is taking the next step by setting up evergreen churn prevention flows ensuring these results aren’t just a one-time spike, but an always-on revenue engine.

“This test gave us the blueprint for retention. We’re now confident enough to make churn prevention part of our evergreen strategy.” - Catie Polachi, Sr. Email & SMS Specialist