Names below are used with permission. Company names are withheld where the send programme is easy to recognise.
Mei Ling — grocery delivery, Petaling Jaya
“They refused to treat ‘delivered’ as a compliment. Once the Android channel report was split from the iOS opens, we could see the Saturday morning fruit-promo was doing the damage. The written note arrived a week later than promised because our export was a mess — that delay was on us, and they said so plainly.”
The work was a full engagement audit. The reservation is the delay: messy Android files added a week, which we should have priced into the first calendar more bluntly than we did.
Hafiz — card alerts at a bank in KL Sentral
The brief was not “make people happier.” It was to find out why permission withdrawals jumped in the week of a limit-increase campaign. The copy promised a higher limit; the alert that actually sent was a generic security ping, twice, because two teams owned the template. The findings sitting was uncomfortable. Hafiz later wrote that the note was “drier than our usual vendors, which was the point.”
Siti — cadence review for a tuition marketplace
A short one. She wanted someone to look at 6.45 a.m. class reminders stacked on top of evening homework nudges. The annotated fortnight showed parents were not “disengaged”; they were being asked twice before the school run. She did not take every margin note. She did move the morning send.
“I still think one of their comments on tone was fussy. The timing chart, though, I keep on my wall.”
An extended week: Deepavali sends for a small retailer
A two-person commerce app asked for an audit after a festive burst. The log showed decent opens on the first evening and a sharp opt-out the next afternoon, when a “last chance” duplicate went to the same list with a different hero image. We did not advise them to stop festive sending. We did advise them to treat the second day as a different audience, because many of the first-day openers had already bought. Their reservation, recorded here because they asked us to: the findings sitting felt long for a team of two. Fair. We now offer a shorter sitting when the room is that small.
If your week looks like one of these, ask for a date.