How Quaker Marine turned post-delivery check-ins into 51% more repeat purchases with Signals

At a glance

Quaker Marine is the kind of brand people want to hear from. The products are distinctive. The brand feels personal. The service has character.

But like most ecommerce brands, the customer experience still risked going quiet right after delivery. Customers got the standard order emails, then the relationship depended on whether they decided to come back on their own.

Signals gave Quaker Marine a better way to show up in that window. Instead of letting the moment fade, the brand sent a simple post-delivery check-in over iMessage and RCS. Customers could ask about sizing, care, restocks, returns, or what to buy next. It felt less like a campaign and more like a real conversation.

That shift turned post-delivery into something more valuable than a courtesy touch. It became a retention channel.

A small change to the customer journey

Starting on February 18, 2026, every new order was randomly assigned 50/50 to treatment or control.

Treatment customers received a post-delivery check-in from Signals. Control customers received Quaker Marine’s normal Shopify transactional emails only.

The message itself was simple. It arrived after delivery, in a channel customers actually use, and opened the door to a helpful conversation. No survey. No discount. No hard sell. Just a timely reason to reply.

For the channel analysis below, we focus on customers reached through iMessage and RCS, where Signals delivers its richest conversational experience.

The result: customers came back and bought again

The check-in drove measurable repeat purchase across every time window we measured.

Repeat purchase rate: treatment vs. control

Cohort	1 week	2 weeks	3 weeks
Control	3.6% (29/796)	6.6% (39/595)	9.7% (45/464)
Treatment (iMessage + RCS)	4.6% (31/670)	8.3% (41/493)	11.2% (41/366)
Replied customers	5.0% (20/397)	10.2% (29/285)	14.7% (31/211)
Lift (treatment vs. control)	+27%	+27%	+16%
Lift (replied vs. control)	+38%	+55%	+51%

Each column uses customers reached via iMessage or RCS with enough elapsed time for that measurement window.

Two things stand out.

First, the lift is real across the entire treatment group, not just among customers who replied. Even customers who saw the check-in and never responded repurchased at higher rates than control. Receiving the message alone moved the needle. Having a conversation moved it further.

Second, the replied cohort’s advantage grew over time. At 1 week, responded customers repurchased 38% more than control. By 2 weeks, that gap widened to 55%, and at 3 weeks it held at 51%. That pattern is consistent with what you’d expect from relationship-building: the conversation creates a connection to the brand that compounds as the customer thinks about their next purchase.

More than half of customers replied

Of the 773 customers reached via iMessage or RCS, 57.6% replied. On iMessage (717 customers), the reply rate was 56.9%. On RCS (56 customers), it was 66.1%. RCS is a smaller sample but consistently outperformed.

These are not typical marketing response rates. For context, SMS campaigns average 1-5% reply rates. Signals reached 57% because the message arrives in a personal channel, at the right moment, and asks a question the customer actually wants to answer.

Engagement rate by channel

Channel	Customers	Reply rate
iMessage	717	56.9%
RCS	56	66.1%
Combined	773	57.6%

These were real conversations, not throwaway replies

We categorized all 454 conversations where a customer replied.

Conversation outcomes (454 replied customer conversations)

Outcome	% of conversations
Thankful response	73% (333)
Support issue handled	17% (79)
Mentioned plans to reorder	13% (59)
Asked about new products	9% (40)

Categories overlap. A single conversation can appear in multiple rows.

Most conversations (73%) were straightforwardly positive: customers saying the product was great, thanking the team for checking in, or sharing how they were using the item. That matters because it means the outreach was welcomed, not tolerated. Customers did not treat the message as noise. They treated it as attention.

17% of conversations turned into support moments: exchanges for a different size, return labels, care instructions. These are issues that would normally require a customer to navigate a returns portal or open a helpdesk ticket. Instead, they got handled in the same thread.

The most commercially interesting finding: 13% of customers (59) volunteered plans to reorder, and another 9% (40) asked about products they hadn’t bought yet. Restock dates, new colors, gifts for a spouse. These are buying signals that brands usually spend real marketing dollars to surface. Here they showed up organically, in a conversation the customer initiated, at zero incremental cost.

What this means in dollars

The incremental 3-week repurchase rate for engaged customers was 5.0 percentage points (14.7% vs. 9.7%). That means for every conversation Signals starts that a customer replies to, there is a 5% chance it generates an additional order that would not have happened otherwise.

At scale, that adds up quickly.

Incremental revenue per engaged conversation

Average order value	Revenue per conversation
$100	$5.00
$200	$10.00
$500	$25.00

And this only counts the first 3 weeks. The conversations also generated product feedback, support resolutions, and buying intent data that compounds over time.

This is revenue that required no discount, no ad spend, and no promotional campaign. It came from one well-timed message that customers wanted to answer.

Why this mattered for Quaker Marine

Quaker Marine did not need to reinvent its brand voice. It already had a service ethos customers responded to. Signals gave the team a way to extend that feeling into the days after delivery, when most brands go quiet.

The result was stronger repeat purchase, more customer conversations, smoother support moments, and clearer buying intent, all from a message customers actually wanted to answer.

That is the bigger takeaway from this case study. Post-delivery does not have to be the end of the journey. For Quaker Marine, it became the start of the next one.