Early this summer, I launched an experiment to compare two lifecycle programs under identical conditions: I purchased the exact same product (a web camera), on the same day, with a new email, in a new containerized browser. And I did it for two of the biggest retail brands: Target and Best Buy.
I tracked every message that followed, and what I found changed how I think about every lifecycle program. They each reveal a big shift that’s happening in lifecycle and martech right now that most folks are missing.
🤔 Retail isn’t just about selling stuff anymore, it’s about using loyalty + CRM to power owned media networks.
Take a look at the breakdown:
The entire post-purchase journey
The strategy each retailer uses
The different messages they send
The actual segmentation and personalization logic
The email calendar
The data (volume, cadence, frequency, etc.)
And so much more
It’s the closest thing you’ll get to actually looking inside their ESP instance.
🤔 Why is email so important?
Target and Best Buy both operate at an incredibly large scale (Target is #8 on the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) top 100 list, and Best Buy is #18), but their margins are incredibly small. In 2025, Target’s net margin was roughly 3.72% and Best Buy was even lower at 1.87%. That’s not a lot of wiggle room to keep scaling and growing. (Target has a slight advantage because they sell across more categories, whereas Best Buy is tied to major tech purchases, which only happen a few times a year.)
Email is one of the biggest levers that retailers can pull to improve these margins because the tiniest lift in percentage points can drastically impact the bottom line. Here’s what I mean, based on their economics and a few reasonable assumptions:
Target: With just a .3% increase in conversion, Target could unlock roughly $13M in new e-commerce sales and $1M in profit, and that’s not even accounting for the halo effect of driving more shoppers to brands that Target designs and sell because they have better margins.
Best Buy: A 10% lift in email engagement could unlock an additional $4M in revenue and an additional $1M in profit.
The economics are slightly different because the programs are structured differently, but the TL;DR is that Target is running a traditional lifecycle program focused on fueling other owned channels, and Best Buy is monetizing email directly as part of their ad network. You’ll understand why the math is structured the way it is when you look at the full breakdown.
💡Key takeaways & differences
To summarize, here’s a chart I made breaking down exactly where and how the programs are different.
⚙️ The CRM engines
What’s really interesting is that both of these companies are deeply expanding their retail media networks (RMN) to improve margins. Target Roundel has 165M shoppers, and Best Buy Ads has 200M shoppers. That makes sense given that on-site RMN margins are roughly 70-90%, and 20-40% for off-site (and if you need a primer into this world, check out these two blogs: “What is Retail Media?” and “Offsite: the next frontier for retail media”). What’s interesting, though, is that they’re going about it with two entirely different CRM approaches.
Target is focused on building shopping habits and frequency through category exploration, which then fuels Target Roundel, and Best Buy is focused on monetizing email as part of their RMN channel.** **
On the surface, we tend to think all retail is the same, but the actual decisions and systems that both companies have set up to power their campaigns are quite different.
Target’s CRM program is controlled by the in-house lifecycle team. Business goals map to audiences, audiences to product categories, and deals to campaigns. The entire program is built to drive shopping habits.
Best Buy’s CRM program is controlled by the vendor and managed by the lifecycle team. Vendors like Samsung or Apple can purchase ad inventory, which is then mapped to audiences. The entire program is built to drive product-placed conversions and ad revenue.