How Ancestral Supplements Drove $300K+ in Repeat Purchases with Dataships

Turning Every Transaction Into A Lasting Relationship

Ancestral Supplements has built a following by offering organ-based supplements from grass-fed, pasture-raised animals, bridging modern wellness and ancestral nutrition.

As the company scaled, it became clear that sustainable growth depended on stronger retention, loyalty, and repeat purchase rate. Their initial approach — engaging external marketing agencies — showed success, but ultimately, with growth came the need for in-house expertise.

That's when they hired Ben Clark as Head of Retention and Loyalty to audit existing email and SMS programs, optimize what was working, and overhaul areas that weren't.

Traditional pop-ups drove top-of-funnel awareness, but Ben saw that the real opportunity was improving opt-in rates where most brands fall short: at checkout and immediately after purchase. If he could improve beyond the standard Shopify templates during checkout and post-purchase, engaged audiences would grow with every order.

Growing the list was important, but Ben knew quality mattered most. With engaged, marketable subscribers, the team could proactively reach out, foster ongoing relationships, and turn one-time purchasers into loyal repeat customers.

At the same time, maintaining compliance was non-negotiable. But, with email and SMS laws changing constantly by state, handling it all in-house would be too complex and risky to do at scale.

Ben needed an opt-in process that was smooth, transparent, and built genuine trust. So when his manager recommended Dataships, Ben immediately recognized the platform’s unique ability to balance growth with compliance — without disrupting the customer experience. Testing what they could do for Ancestral Supplements was an easy choice.

"Lasting growth comes from retention. Repeat customers, subscriptions, and loyalty are the real drivers. If we want to grow, it's about getting more people opted into marketing."

Dataships Transforms Checkout Into A Retention Engine

Dataships integrated seamlessly into Ancestral Supplements' checkout with a code-free setup, requiring no extra work from Ben or his team. Instead of settling for industry-standard opt-in flows, Ancestral Supplements has a privacy-first data collection baseline that grows subscribers directly at checkout — a step most ecommerce brands overlook.

Now, Dataships turns every customer into an opportunity. By collecting opt-ins at the highest-leverage moment, Ancestral Supplements builds a marketing list of high-quality subscribers with every single purchase.

With dynamic consent, every customer is presented with location-specific opt-in language at checkout, ensuring compliance automatically. For SMS, Dataships replaces the standard "Reply Y" double opt-in with a one-time verification code sent during checkout, making the process more secure and frictionless.

Ancestral Supplements' powerful new growth engine amplifies its email and SMS lists, and attaches real incremental revenue to every new subscriber, not just "vanity metrics." This aligns with the brand's values of quality and transparency, building customer trust at every step.

Ben's most "eye-opening" moment was seeing the full scope of lost revenue at checkout — from customers who purchased but didn't opt into marketing. Dataships aggregated those numbers by month and year, revealing previously invisible losses. Even more powerful was seeing how Dataships had already helped recover some of that revenue.

With Dataships, Ancestral optimizes channel usage. SMS became a high-performing — though cost-sensitive — sales trigger at the top of the funnel, driving first purchases and spiking revenue during specials. Email is better for nurturing, education, and repeat engagement — and more cost-effective. Ben now measures ROI by channel, finding the balance that works best for his audiences.

Because Dataships has compliance built into its foundation (not a bolted-on feature), Ben is confident in scaling internationally and navigating evolving regulations as the brand grows.

Ancestral Supplements' experience shows that when brands focus on this critical moment in the customer journey, they set themselves up for sustained retention, loyalty, and growth, unlocking incremental revenue that most competitors leave untapped.

"Our repeat purchase rate has grown dramatically every month since we launched with Dataships. Being able to track the extra people opting in and how much they've spent — that's huge."

Ancestral Supplements Boosts Revenue with 3K+ Net New Subscribers in 5 Months

With Dataships, Ancestral Supplements drives measurable growth in revenue and opt-in rates while maintaining compliance and high-quality engagement.

The results so far:

Email (5 months):

• $300K+ in incremental LTV
• $100K in incremental revenue
• 3,881 net new subscribers
• 92% marketing consent rate

SMS (2 months):

• 8X increase in SMS opt-in rate
• 1,864 new SMS opt-ins
• $11K in revenue from new SMS subscribers

To go a step further, Dataships used Ancestral Supplements' Shopify data to forecast that consent-enabled subscribers will generate $1.1M in incremental LTV in 12 months, a metric that they track performance against with every check-in.

Looking ahead, Ben sees Dataships playing a critical role when Ancestral Supplements expands internationally. He anticipates leveraging the platform to manage complex opt-in rules across multiple countries, optimize engagement timing, and gain deeper insights into customer lifetime value.

"Dataships took an experience everyone just accepted and made it better — not just for compliance, but for ROI. Now, I can see the analytics, the revenue, and the opt-ins we would not have gotten otherwise."