Your store and your email platform disagree about your customers
Two numbers that should roughly match, and what it means when they don’t.
- Based on
- An investigation for a UK wellness brand, and a separate private engagement. Both are on my work page.
- Not claimed
- That a gap means lost sales. Sales impact wasn’t measured in either case.
Ask most founders how many customers they can email and they’ll give you one number, usually the one their store shows. The more useful question is whether their email platform agrees.
In one engagement, the store believed 5,490 customers could be emailed. The email platform could reach about 150. Neither system flagged it. Each was doing what it was built to do, and the problem lived in the join between them.
In another, for a UK wellness brand, an account-wide suppression event dated 4 April 2025 had gone unnoticed for fifteen months by the time I investigated it in July 2026. Once it was traced, 2,151 profiles were recovered and verified within the platform.
Failures like these are quiet by nature. Nothing shows an error. Campaigns still go out, just to fewer people than you think, and the reports can look normal because they only count the people the platform could reach.
So here’s a check anyone can do in a few minutes. In your store, find how many customers have agreed to marketing email. In your email platform, find how many contacts it can actually reach. Put the two numbers side by side.
Some gap is normal. People unsubscribe in one system before the other catches up, platforms filter out addresses that bounce, and the two may define consent differently. A gap is a reason to check, not proof that something is broken. But a large gap that nobody on your team can explain is worth an afternoon.
That’s most of what I mean by finding what your systems quietly get wrong. Each tool reports that it’s working. The useful question is whether, taken together, they’re telling you the truth.
Check the joins, not just the parts.