On September 11, 2025, “Retention: The North Star for Winning Q4 Sales” – hosted by Moonpie Creative Global – officially wrapped up with over 100 attendees and a lineup of international and Vietnamese experts across the core disciplines of modern ecommerce: Conversion Rate Optimization, Loyalty & Membership, Email Marketing Automation, and Brand Building.

More than a knowledge-sharing session, the event brought the ecommerce community together to take an honest look at sustainable growth – right before the biggest sales season of the year.

1. Moonpie Creative Global – A journey from challenges to pioneering Life-cycle Marketing

Speaker: Hannah Nguyen – Founder of Moonpie Creative Global

To open the event, Hannah Nguyen walked attendees through Moonpie’s journey – from the uncertainty of its early days to becoming one of Vietnam’s pioneering agencies in Life-cycle Marketing, now partnering with DTC brands across the globe.

What Hannah emphasized was not simply a success story, but the mindset that drove it:

• Continuously improving services based on real-world data
• Combining customer insights with technology and optimized processes to deliver measurable impact

Real client data presented by Hannah made the results speak for themselves:

• Email Marketing revenue accounted for over 30% of total client revenue
• Nearly 70% of customers enrolled in subscription programs
• Repeat buyers made up 60% of subscription revenue
• Loyalty program revenue reached $15,600 with an impressive redemption rate of 5.4%

Moonpie’s goal goes beyond driving revenue for clients, it is about helping brands build lasting relationships with their customers, which remains the most valuable asset any business can own today.

2. Key CRO principles every ecommerce business needs to know

Speaker: Chris Koh – Founder of GemPages & GemCommerce

Chris Koh – the mind behind GemPages, Shopify’s #1 CRO platform with over 100,000 active stores and 20,000 paid users – delivered one of the most anticipated sessions of the event: a hands-on Sales Funnel and CRO Playbook for ecommerce businesses.

His central argument was straightforward: In a world where traffic is getting more expensive by the day, conversion optimization is the highest-ROI lever a brand can pull.

Most ecommerce businesses today operate at a conversion rate below 2%, while ad costs continue to climb and consumer attention becomes harder to hold. Ignoring CRO in this environment is the equivalent of paying for traffic and leaving most of its value on the table.

Chris illustrated this with a simple but striking calculation: with the same $50,000 ad spend driving 100,000 visitors, a 1% conversion rate generates $60,000 in revenue – but push that rate to 4%, and revenue jumps to $240,000. Same budget, four times the return.

More importantly, CRO creates a compounding chain reaction: higher Conversion -> stronger Retention -> greater LTV. This is why CRO is not just a short-term revenue play, it is the foundation of any serious long-term customer retention strategy.

Chris went deep on the tactical side, covering:

• A proven advertorial framework built around the Hook -> Story -> Proof -> CTA structure
• Common landing page design mistakes that silently drain conversions

To close his session, Chris presented a three-pillar CRO Playbook that brands can put into practice immediately:

• Researching customer behavior and identifying friction points
• Running systematic A/B tests to validate hypotheses
• Building a quick wins list for short-term action

The takeaway he left the room with: optimize continuously, test continuously, grow continuously.

3. The blueprint for building a POD/Dropshipping brand

Speaker: Ngo Thanh – Founder of ECM Global

Mr. Ngo Thanh brought a practitioner’s perspective on brand building within the POD (Print On Demand) and Dropshipping model, drawing directly from ECM’s own journey.

He drew a clear distinction between two fundamental approaches:

• A product mindset focuses on selecting evergreen products that solve real needs, generate high repeat purchase rates, and lend themselves naturally to upselling for long-term sales.
• A brand mindset places customer experience at the core, prioritizes products that can be self-manufactured and self-produced for content, and requires clear long-term investment planning.

On the operational roadmap, he outlined two distinct phases every business should plan for:

• Early stage: Build a Social Media system in parallel with selling to lay the groundwork for customer acquisition and data collection.
• Scaling stage: Focus on four key fronts — expanding data and launching new campaigns, optimizing product quality and logistics, diversifying marketing channels, and developing a structured affiliate system.

The core message Ngo Thanh returned to throughout his session was the importance of getting the fundamentals right from day one:

• Define the right target market before taking action
• Choose products based on real competitive viability, not gut feeling
• Establish operational processes as early as possible

Every case study he shared came from ECM’s actual experience – including early missteps and the strategic adjustments that eventually led to measurable results. It was one of the most hands-on sessions of the event, and particularly valuable for anyone still in the early stages of building their brand.

4. Loyalty & Membership – When retention becomes a competitive advantage, not just a tactic

Speaker: Thomas Nguyen – Founder, JOY Loyalty App, Avada

Thomas opened his session with a reality that most merchants know all too well: CAC is rising with no sign of slowing down, while profit margins continue to thin. At this point, retention is no longer an optimization choice – it is a condition for sustainable survival.

Two numbers he put on the table are worth every ecommerce operator committing to memory: Retaining an existing customer costs 5 to 7 times less than acquiring a new one, and a mere 5% increase in retention can drive profit growth anywhere from 25% to 95%.

He drew a clear line between two core tools:

• Loyalty drives repeat purchase behavior through points systems and rewards.
• Membership creates deeper, longer-lasting value by building exclusivity and community – fostering emotional connection, higher spend, lower price sensitivity, and natural word-of-mouth referrals.

=> The result: lower CAC, higher CLV, increased AOV as customers stretch their spending to hit reward thresholds, and a gradual reduction in dependence on paid ads.

Thomas also introduced Joy – a Loyalty and Membership platform with flexible pricing for businesses from startup to enterprise, deep integration with Shopify Flow, POS, email and reviews, and a 4.9-star rating from over 1,400 merchants.

He closed with a practical three-phase framework for applying Loyalty during BFCM:

• Before the sale: activate points campaigns to build anticipation and encourage early spending.
• During peak: deploy member exclusives – double points, free gifts and exclusive coupons – to drive AOV while protecting margin.
• After the sale: follow up with personalized offers and reward incentives to convert seasonal buyers into repeat customers.

5. Winning BFCM with Omnisend AI – Automate smarter, optimize at the right moment

Speaker: Laurynas Ališauskas – Omnisend’s Partnership Manager

Laurynas closed the event with a detailed walkthrough on how to prepare and execute a winning BFCM campaign with Omnisend – the email marketing platform trusted by over 150,000 ecommerce brands worldwide.

He highlighted three deliverability mistakes that cost merchants dearly during BFCM season:

• Introducing a new sending domain right before BFCM: a domain needs 2 to 3 months of proper warm-up. Skip this step and emails will land in spam folders at the exact moment brands need to reach their customers most.
• Spiking email volume overnight: the safe rule is to increase send volume by no more than 25% at a time. A sudden large increase can severely impact inbox placement and overall deliverability.
• Sending to long-inactive subscribers: the majority of revenue comes from active subscribers. Blasting disengaged contacts only drives up spam rates and pulls down overall deliverability across the entire list.

For brands looking to go into Q4 prepared, Laurynas proposed a clear month-by-month roadmap:

• September: audit integrations, warm up sending domains, and grow email and SMS lists.
• October: launch teasers, countdowns, and SMS-exclusive offers for VIP customers.
• November: roll out full campaigns alongside key automated flows — abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and win-back sequences.

To close his session, Laurynas walked through Omnisend AI’s standout features that automate the entire email marketing workflow and personalize engagement based on customer behavior – helping brands significantly cut down the time needed to build and manage their email system.

6. Key takeaways

Looking back across every session, one topic ran through it all: Sustainable growth does not come from pouring more budget into the top of the funnel – it comes from making the most of what you already have, holding on to the customers who already trust you, and building systems that keep revenue from depending entirely on paid ads.

That is the philosophy Moonpie Creative Global has operated by from day one, and the reason we brought this event to life – to give the Vietnamese ecommerce community a sharper perspective, better tools, and the confidence to step into the most important sales season of the year.

For partnerships and consulting inquiries, reach us at: growth@moonpieglobal.com

See you at the next Moonpie Creative Global event!