How Cornbread Hemp drove $743K in repeat purchases with Dataships

Turning every checkout into a retention opportunity

Cornbread Hemp is a family-owned CBD and THC company built in Kentucky, focused on helping customers live better through plant-based wellness. Their product line spans CBD gummies for sleep support and THC products for relaxation — consumables that only deliver results with consistent, repeated use.

That commitment dynamic makes retention the lifeblood of the business. CBD builds up in the body’s endocannabinoid system gradually — customers need at least two weeks of consistent use before they feel the full effect. If a first-time buyer drops off before reaching that threshold, the product never gets a fair chance to prove itself.

Katherine Goodman, Senior Director of Retention and Customer Experience, was Cornbread Hemp’s first dedicated retention hire. She came in to overhaul the email program from scratch, knowing that email was the only reliable channel to educate new customers, drive repurchase behavior, and build long-term value. SMS wasn’t an option — telecom carriers restrict CBD messaging, making text-based outreach a non-starter.

That constraint made list growth even more critical. Every email address captured at checkout wasn’t just a marketing contact — it was the only reliable way to educate new customers, drive repurchase behavior, and build lifetime value.

The team had explored aggressive top-of-funnel list growth tools before. A stint with a third-party pop-up platform delivered a 3x increase in email signups, but the quality told a different story: conversion rates from those contacts were poor, and the unsubscribe rate signaled that volume alone wasn’t the answer.

“The folks going through checkout are taking their time and spending their money on our product. The fact that we can capture that additional group of customers — if we hadn’t, we just would have missed them entirely.”

A frictionless addition to a scrutinized tech stack

Cornbread Hemp doesn’t add apps lightly. When the team conducted a comprehensive tech stack review, every vendor was evaluated on cost, site speed impact, and whether the results they claimed were genuinely incremental.

Dataships faced the same scrutiny. The team had been a legacy customer before Dataships introduced its A/B testing capability, so when the evaluation came, the timing was right to put the platform through a proper test.

The process was straightforward: Cornbread Hemp compared a period with Dataships active against a baseline without it, then reversed the test to confirm the results. The email consent rate with Shopify’s default checkout sat at 78%. With Dataships active, it jumped to 94.46% — a 16+ percentage point lift in compliant email capture.

For a team that had recently been disappointed by performance from a previous vendor, the transparency mattered. There was no ambiguity in the data: the additional contacts captured at checkout simply wouldn’t have been there without Dataships.

The implementation itself reinforced the decision. In a regulated space where site speed directly impacts SEO — a critical acquisition channel for CBD brands — every added app carries risk. Dataships had zero measurable impact on page load times.

Katherine’s compliance concerns were addressed by the platform’s foundation. While Cornbread Hemp primarily operates in the US where email regulations are more permissive, knowing that Dataships is built on GDPR-grade consent infrastructure gave the team confidence that their practices would hold up under any regulatory scrutiny.

$743K in repeat revenue from 25,498 contacts that would have been lost

Since implementing Dataships, Cornbread Hemp has driven 81,093 total contacts through optimized checkout consent, with 25,498 of those representing net new subscribers the brand would not have captured with Shopify’s default checkout.

The results tell a clear story:

• Email consent rate: Increased from 78% to 94.46% at checkout.
• Net new subscribers: 25,498 incremental subscribers captured through checkout optimization.
• Monthly growth: ~3,000 new subscribers added per month on an ongoing basis.
• Repeat revenue: 8,637 incremental subscribers have already repurchased, generating $743,566 in repeat revenue.
• Repurchase rate: 34% among Dataships-attributed subscribers.
• CLV uplift: $118 per contact when subscribed to marketing vs. not.

Those numbers carry particular weight for a consumable wellness brand. Every customer who repurchases is one who stayed on the product long enough for it to work — and then came back because it did.

The impact folds directly into Cornbread Hemp’s broader retention engine. Katherine’s team doesn’t treat Dataships as a standalone channel — the new subscribers flow into the same onboarding sequences, educational content, and lifecycle campaigns that drive the business.

For a brand that can’t use SMS and relies entirely on email to educate customers, drive subscriptions, and build lifetime value, every additional opted-in contact compounds over time.

“I’m always a skeptic — I’m always going to question everything until I’m proven wrong. Dataships proved me wrong and made their value clear. It’s one of those things we can trust and lean on.”