Tim Ian Michael

Lifecycle & Retention Marketing Strategist

Fifteen years building lifecycle and retention programs for ecommerce and B2B brands — eleven of them owning the full lifecycle at Book Depot, where segmentation and continuous testing across onboarding, nurture, loyalty, and win-back flows grew online revenue by more than 40%.


Case studies

Building a full-lifecycle email program from the ground up

Book Depot, one of the largest retail booksellers in Canada, needed its email channel to move from an ad-hoc, promotional-only tool into a true owned-media revenue driver — covering the entire customer lifecycle rather than one-off blasts.

I owned the program end-to-end: onboarding flows to convert first-time buyers into repeat purchasers, behavior-based nurture sequences, loyalty programming for high-value repeat customers, and reactivation flows to catch lapsed buyers before they churned. Everything ran on segmentation by buyer stage and purchase history, with subject lines, CTAs, and landing pages treated as living assets under continuous testing.

More than 40% growth in online revenue attributable to the program, run as a core revenue channel — not a side project — for over a decade, with zero deliverability incidents.

Automating onboarding to cut time-to-first-transaction by 60%

New customer onboarding relied entirely on manual sales rep outreach — slow, inconsistent, and bottlenecked by individual rep bandwidth. I designed and built an automated, Salesforce-triggered onboarding sequence in Pardot/HubSpot that replaced that manual process with timely, consistent, behavior-triggered messaging.

60% faster time-to-first-transaction, and sales reps freed from repetitive onboarding outreach to focus on higher-value conversations.

Recovering lost leads with a behavior-scored win-back program

Leads disqualified or gone cold in Salesforce were, by default, a dead end. I built a segmented, evergreen win-back series triggered by lead status, layered with a lightweight behavioral scoring model:

  • 5 points for an email open
  • 15 points for a blog click
  • 50 points for a "Contact Me" click — routed straight back to sales

Messaging was personalized to appear as if sent by the lead's originally assigned salesperson, with automatic suppression on re-contact. Leads that engaged without crossing the sales-ready threshold moved into a longer nurture running up to 12 months, styled as coming from the VP of Sales.

17% of previously lost leads recovered back into active sales conversations, running with minimal ongoing manual management.

Live work samples

Landing pages and email builds from Global Payments and Heartland Payment Systems.

Email builds