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Strategy
One auditable plan. Audience, lifecycle, channel mix, budget and measurement, with the numbers attached. So every send, every channel and every rand has a job to do.
What we do
Built to be used, not filed. Your team picks it up on Monday morning, your CFO understands the numbers, and your next agency brief writes itself from it.
What's in your CRM, what's missing, what's wrong, and what to fix first.
Every customer state and the message that should move them to the next one.
The cuts you'll use across email, WhatsApp, SMS, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok, Reddit, RCS and paid, written down, once.
Where every rand, pound or dollar goes, and what return you should expect.
What success looks like, how it's tracked, what to report up each month.
Quarterly milestones, dependencies, owners and KPIs. Built to be reviewed and shipped against, not framed on a wall.
Proof
“The strategy work paid for itself before we'd shipped phase one. They told us to stop doing three things, and that alone freed up the budget.”
Director, Lifecycle · Northbeam
Alternatives considered
Not every business needs a six-week strategy engagement. Here's where it earns its fee, and where it doesn't.
| Criterion | Internal workshopMarketing team runs its own planning sprintGood | Generalist consultantStrategy consultant or advisory retainerBetter | Inboxd strategyDirect-marketing-specific, data-led engagementBest fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Channel depth | Broad; email/SMS usually under-served | Good strategy; often light on direct-channel execution detail | Deep in email, WhatsApp, SMS, RCS, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok and Reddit, our core discipline |
| Data analysis | Depends on team capability; often surface-level | Framework-led; your data may not be examined closely | Full data audit; model built on your actual numbers |
| Execution handover | Easy; team owns it | Document delivered; execution gap common | Document + briefing session; execution-ready or self-contained |
| Objectivity | Internal bias risk, existing stack rarely challenged | Objective, but may not know direct-channel trade-offs | Objective and opinionated, we'll recommend stopping things |
| Time to insight | Slow; competes with day jobs | Variable; usually months | Milestone-driven; we move when you move |
An internal planning sprint is the right call if you have strong execution skills and just need alignment. Bring us in when the data complexity or channel depth exceeds what your team can reliably analyse.
Common questions
The engagement delivers a customer and data audit, lifecycle map, segmentation framework, channel and budget allocation model, measurement plan, and a 12-month roadmap, all in a single, board-presentable document.
Six weeks end-to-end: two weeks for discovery and data audit, two weeks for lifecycle and segmentation workshops, one week for financial modelling, and a final week for presentation and handover.
Yes. We audit what's in your CRM, identify gaps, and recommend enrichment or suppression before we model anything. The strategy is built on your actual data, not benchmarks.
A general marketing strategy sets brand direction. Direct marketing strategy is narrower: it defines which audiences receive which message through which owned and paid channels, what to spend, and how to measure the return. It's operational, not aspirational.
Absolutely. Every deliverable is designed to be handed off to your team, another agency, or used as an internal briefing document. We write it so the logic is legible without us in the room.
Yes. B2C programmes tend to focus on lifecycle stages and RFM segmentation. B2B work centres on pipeline influence, sales-cycle compression, and MQL definition. The framework adapts to your commercial model.
A read-only export from your CRM or ESP, your last 12 months of send data, revenue or order data matched to customer IDs, and access to your analytics platform. If data is messy or incomplete, we document it in the audit and factor the gaps into our modelling assumptions, we won't pretend the data is better than it is.
It doesn't have to lead to us. The deliverable is fully self-contained. If you choose to execute with Inboxd, we skip the discovery phase of any subsequent engagement because we already know your data. In practice, about 60% of strategy clients move into a managed retainer with us within three months, but that's the client's decision, not ours.
Last reviewed: July 2026
Need clarity before you commit?
A free 30-minute strategy review. If we don't spot at least three things you should change, lunch is on us.