Marketing & Growth

How to launch an email marketing campaign as CPG Founders

Marketing & GrowthFor CPG Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You've got a Klaviyo account, a Shopify store, maybe a wholesale buyer list in a Google Sheet, and a DTC email list you built from trade shows and sampling events. Every time you want to run a campaign — a new SKU launch, a seasonal promo, a retailer co-op email — you're manually pulling segments, copying contacts across tools, writing copy from scratch, and then guessing whether the open rate was good or not because you don't have time to dig into the analytics. You spend 3-4 hours on a campaign that should take 45 minutes, and you still can't tell if your frozen aisle placement announcement actually drove any Instacart velocity.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor CPG Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A contact-aware email workflow that pulls from your CRM — retail buyers, DTC customers, and broker contacts segmented separately — so you stop blasting the same message to people who need completely different information

Automated campaign follow-up sequences that track which buyers haven't responded to your new item form or promo pitch, and nag you (or send a follow-up automatically) before the window closes

A weekly Growth Analyst digest that tells you which campaign drove signups, which subject line beat the control, and what to do differently next send — without you logging into Klaviyo to find it yourself

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Email Agent Growth Analyst

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so the CRM has full thread history and the Email Agent can triage live. Connect Klaviyo and Shopify from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live when your Growth Analyst digest runs or when you need campaign performance data. If your wholesale buyer list lives in a Google Sheet, connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog to import and sync contacts into the CRM.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM with three contact types: retail buyers (with fields for chain name, region, category buyer name, current distribution status, and last promo pitch date), DTC customers (with fields for acquisition channel, total orders, and last purchase SKU), and brokers (with fields for the regions they cover and brands they currently rep). Pull in my Gmail threads so I can see the last email I sent each contact.

Monitor my inbox for any email from a retail buyer or distributor that mentions a promo, a new item form, a deduction, or a reset. Summarize the ask in one sentence, flag it as high priority, and draft a reply I can send in one click.

Every Monday morning, email me a digest showing: open rates and click rates from last week's campaigns by segment (buyers vs DTC vs brokers), which subject lines performed above average, any spike or drop in new email signups from my Shopify store, and one suggested test to run this week.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail — Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule and backfills 12 months of threads so your CRM immediately knows the last time you emailed each buyer, broker, or retail contact.

2 Open the CRM app from the App Store and describe your contact schema: retail buyers by chain and region, DTC customers by acquisition channel and SKU purchase history, brokers by territory. Starch builds the schema to match how you actually sell, not a generic B2B pipeline.

3 Import your existing buyer list from Google Sheets — connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog and tell Starch which columns map to which CRM fields. It handles the cleanup.

4 Connect Klaviyo from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query campaign performance data live when your Growth Analyst runs its weekly analysis.

5 Connect Shopify from Starch's integration catalog so the Growth Analyst can tie email signups and post-campaign orders back to specific sends or subject lines.

6 Set up the Email Agent with a triage rule for anything from a buyer or distributor that mentions a new item form, promo window, deduction dispute, or reset date. These emails have hard deadlines and can cost you distribution if you miss them.

7 For each new campaign — say, a Q3 summer promo or a new SKU launch — pull your segment from the CRM ('show me all retail buyers in the Northeast who carry our current line but haven't been pitched the new SKU yet') and export to Klaviyo.

8 Draft the campaign in Klaviyo as usual, but use the Email Agent to help you write the buyer-facing version (different from the DTC version — buyers care about sell-through rate and promotional support, not recipe inspiration).

9 After sending, let the Growth Analyst run its Monday digest. It will pull Klaviyo campaign stats and Shopify signup data live and tell you which segment responded best and what drove the difference.

10 Set up a follow-up automation: 'Five days after I send a new item pitch to a buyer contact, if there's no reply in my Gmail thread with them, add a task to my CRM and draft a follow-up email for me to review.' This alone recovers deals that fall through the cracks during a busy production week.

11 For trade show contacts or sampling event sign-ups you collect on a clipboard or badge scanner, paste the list into the CRM and tell Starch: 'These are new DTC prospects from Expo West. Tag them as trade show leads, set their acquisition channel to event, and queue them for a welcome email sequence.' Starch structures and stages them automatically.

12 Review your Growth Analyst digest each Monday for 4 weeks and use the suggested test (subject line variant, send time, segment split) to iterate. After a month you'll have a real feedback loop instead of vibes.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

New SKU launch email campaign — June 2026 (grain-free snack bar, 3 retail chains targeted)

Sample numbers from a real run

Retail buyer segment (Northeast, 3 chains)	47
DTC list — repeat purchasers, last order within 90 days	1,840
Broker contacts covering natural grocery	12
Follow-up emails triggered by no-reply after 5 days	23
New email signups attributed to campaign (Shopify)	94

You're launching a grain-free snack bar in June and need to hit retail buyers, your DTC house list, and three brokers covering natural grocery before Fancy Food Show. You pull 47 buyer contacts from the CRM filtered by 'current distribution status: active, region: Northeast' and a separate segment of 1,840 DTC customers who ordered in the last 90 days. The buyer email focuses on the sell sheet metrics — 4.2x velocity in test markets, 38% gross margin for the retailer, Q3 promotional support available. The DTC email leads with the product story and a founding member discount. Growth Analyst runs Monday and shows the buyer email had a 34% open rate (above your 28% average) but only a 9% click rate — buyers opened but didn't click the sell sheet PDF link. It flags this and suggests testing a plain-text version of the buyer email with the PDF attached instead of linked. Meanwhile, the Email Agent caught two new item form deadlines buried in your inbox — one from a regional co-op due in 6 days — and drafted replies so you didn't miss the window. The 23 follow-up emails Starch auto-queued after no-reply converted 4 buyers to a call, including one chain with 110 doors.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Email open rate by segment (retail buyers vs DTC vs brokers) — because a 28% open rate from buyers is very different from the same number on a consumer list

New item form response rate within 7 days of outreach — tied directly to distribution growth

DTC email-attributed revenue per send, tracked back to Shopify orders

Follow-up sequence conversion rate — how many no-reply contacts convert to a call or response after the automated nudge

New email subscriber acquisition cost from sampling events and trade shows vs paid channels

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Klaviyo alone

Klaviyo handles the send layer well but has no awareness of your retail buyer relationships, no CRM for wholesale contacts, and no way to surface what actually changed week over week without you building reports manually.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot can do most of this but starts at $800/month for the features you need, requires real configuration time, and wasn't built for a founder who's also managing a co-packer and filing deduction disputes.

Mailchimp + Google Sheets + manual follow-up

The default CPG founder stack — works until it doesn't, but you're doing all the segmentation, follow-up tracking, and performance analysis by hand, which is the exact 3-4 hours per campaign Starch is designed to eliminate.

Attentive or Postscript

Strong for SMS and DTC retention on Shopify but doesn't address wholesale buyer outreach, broker communication, or trade show lead nurture — and adds another tool to your stack instead of consolidating it.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent, growth analyst all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Can Starch actually send emails, or does it just organize them?

Both. Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule and the Email Agent drafts replies you send from within Gmail — you stay in your existing email account. For broadcast campaigns to your Klaviyo list, you connect Klaviyo from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live; the actual send still goes through Klaviyo, which is what you want for deliverability and compliance.

My buyer list is a mess — some are in a Google Sheet, some are in my Gmail contacts, some are on business cards I photographed. Can Starch handle that?

Yes. Connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog to import the structured list, and let Starch pull Gmail contacts in from the scheduled sync. For anything messier — photographed cards, a CSV from a badge scanner — paste it in and describe the fields you want. Starch maps and cleans it.

Will Starch know the difference between a retail buyer and a DTC customer in my CRM?

Only if you tell it when you set up the CRM. The whole point of the CRM app is that you describe the contact types and fields that matter to your business. Tell Starch 'I have three contact types: retail buyers, DTC customers, and brokers — here are the fields for each' and it builds that schema. You're not adapting to a generic B2B pipeline.

Does Starch store my customer email list? What about GDPR / CAN-SPAM?

Starch syncs Gmail data on a schedule for CRM thread history and email triage. Your broadcast list lives in Klaviyo (or whatever ESP you use) — Starch queries it live but doesn't store the subscriber list in its own database. You remain responsible for CAN-SPAM and GDPR compliance on your sends; Starch doesn't change that.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified?

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your buyers or retail partners require you to document third-party data handling for a compliance review, that's worth knowing upfront.

What if my analytics are in Google Analytics rather than PostHog?

The Growth Analyst starter app is built around PostHog for product analytics. Google Analytics 4 is reachable from Starch's integration catalog — the agent can query it live. You'd describe what you want: 'Build me a weekly digest that pulls from Google Analytics 4 and Klaviyo and emails me open rates, site traffic by source, and what changed week over week.' Starch builds the custom version.

Can Starch help me post campaign content to Instagram or TikTok as part of the launch?

Instagram and TikTok don't offer APIs for posting from third-party tools in the way that makes this straightforward — but Starch can automate browser-based actions on websites you can log into. A more practical use is automating LinkedIn posts about the launch to your broker and buyer network, where Starch's LinkedIn automation is a first-class feature.