The 4C Framework: Catch, Connect, Close, Continue

Short answer. The 4C framework splits an ecommerce brand's email strategy into four stages of the customer life journey: catch (collect quality consent), connect (bring the contact into the brand's world), close (remove the objections blocking the purchase) and continue (engineer repeat purchase). It covers email, SMS, WhatsApp and print. Its sequencing rule: which C you prioritise depends on how often your product category is naturally repurchased.

This article is based on the video "Le framework Emailing des e-commerces à +10M par an", published on 29 January 2026 on the group's YouTube channel. The video is in French. The method below is the one Maxence Vanderswalmen lays out there. We structured it, named each stage, and added the Klaviyo and Brevo implementation that does not fit a spoken format.

Where the framework comes from

Maxence Vanderswalmen founded a performance marketing agency in 2021. Before that he was CMO of an ecommerce brand he took from 2 to over 60 million euros in annual revenue. The 4C are the formalisation of what he applied on that account, then across client accounts.

The starting point of the video is a field observation: plenty of brands reduce their email strategy to two pieces, a newsletter and an abandoned cart email. Two pieces cover neither collection, nor brand discovery, nor the relationship after the first order. The 4C exist to make those gaps visible before anyone touches a template.

One note on numbers. You often read that email should account for 30% of an ecommerce brand's revenue. Maxence Vanderswalmen calls that statistic thoroughly vague and has debunked it on the channel. The framework organises a system rather than aiming at a percentage. If you want orders of magnitude to place your own account, our ecommerce email benchmarks explain where the public figures come from and what they are worth.

The four stages at a glance

Vocabulary matters here. Until someone has bought, they are not a customer. The video is explicit about it: calling contacts "customers" during catch and connect is a figure of speech, and conversion has not happened yet. Keeping the distinction stops you sending prospect audiences messages written for buyers.

1. Catch: capture good data, not the largest possible list

Before any contacting strategy, email or direct messaging, you need contacts. In Europe that means consent given voluntarily, in the GDPR sense. You cannot target someone simply because you hold their phone number.

The image used in the video is a kitchen one: catching the right ingredients to cook a good recipe. What counts here is the quality of the pool rather than its size. That pool is capital, because it lets you reach people without going back through Google or Meta, who charge you again every time you appear in front of the same audience.

What destroys a catch

Buying contact lists. The question comes up regularly and the answer is no, for two compounding reasons. First GDPR compliance, rarely demonstrable on a purchased list, so a legal exposure. Second deliverability: you send to an audience whose origin and expectations you do not know, you land in spam and you damage the brand.

Clickbait. Pulling signups with a promise unrelated to what the brand actually sends produces a pool that never engages.

An unexamined discount code. Many brands trade a discount for contact details. The video asks the real question: had that person already decided to buy, and do they simply want the discount? That is margin cannibalisation dressed up as list growth. It has to be measured, not assumed.

The collection points to cover

The recommendation is to run several collection routes, each calibrated to the page context:

• Easily accessible forms across the site.
• Exit intent popups, fired when the cursor crosses the URL bar on desktop, or when the user scrolls back up on mobile. Mobile carries a large share of traffic, so that trigger cannot be an afterthought.
• Discreet capture on product pages. A product page exists to convert first. You do not want an intrusive popup breaking a conversion, but you do want the person who is missing one piece of information to be able to leave an email or a phone number without friction.

The strongest lever remains genuinely valuable content: a buying guide, a checklist, something that actually helps. A skin type diagnostic in cosmetics, a renovation guide in home improvement or interior design. People are used to trading contact details for value. If your brand is strong enough to skip the magnet, the work shifts to wording.

Implementation in Klaviyo and Brevo

In Klaviyo, collection is managed under Sign-up Forms. Each format maps to a moment in the journey: popup and flyout for exit intent, embed for a form built into a page, teaser for the discreet version that does not take over the screen. The exit intent trigger sits in the form's Behaviors, with separate desktop and mobile settings. The Form analytics report gives the submit rate against views, and Klaviyo can run two variants of the same form as a native A/B test.

In Brevo, the equivalent is built with signup forms tied to a list, with double opt-in enabled at list level. Submission tracking runs through list statistics and through workflows triggered on contact addition.

Two rules hold in both tools. Test with and without an offer, on the same page over the same period, otherwise you are comparing two seasons rather than two forms. And treat your form conversion rate, meaning how many people leave data per 100 site visitors, as a permanent metric: the video is firm that optimising collection is never finished.

Form construction is covered in our email popup and signup form guide. For the SMS side, the French rules sit in SMS and GDPR.

2. Connect: bring the contact into your world

You have contacts. The question becomes what you send them.

The flaw in a newsletter-only strategy is simple. Someone who has just entered your world knows nothing about the brand, and a newsletter assumes they already do. The job of connect is to reduce the cognitive load until the contact can say three things: I understand what this brand does, I understand why I would buy this product, I understand what its ecosystem gives me.

That is what an automated welcome sequence does. Several emails, not one, to show your differentiators, customer results and reviews, why your product holds up against the alternatives and why the brand exists. In a market where dropshipping from large foreign platforms occupies the field, brand strength is the differentiator, and connect is where it gets transmitted.

Connect is not limited to the welcome series. It covers every moment where the contact needs information before deciding. An abandoned cart belongs here: the first message of an abandonment sequence is usually informational, but the real objection sits elsewhere.

Implementation in Klaviyo and Brevo

In Klaviyo, the welcome sequence triggers on Subscribed to List, on the list your forms feed. Each email carries a distinct brand message rather than repeating the same offer. The flow filter not to forget is excluding contacts who have placed an order since entering the flow, otherwise you keep selling to someone who already bought.

In Brevo, the same journey is built in Automation with a "contact added to a list" entry point, wait steps between sends and exit conditions on the order event.

The full structure is in Klaviyo welcome flow and, on the Brevo side, in building your first lifecycle sequence.

3. Close: remove objections, do not just remind people about the cart

The third C is closing, the stage where a prospect becomes a customer. It covers browse abandonment and cart abandonment, meaning every case where someone took a step towards you without converting.

The video's position on Shopify's native recovery email is blunt: it is largely insufficient, because it is purely informational. It says you forgot your cart. It answers none of the questions that actually block the purchase. Will the size of this product work in my room? Are there reviews that reassure me? If I buy a microphone, does it have the specifications my use case needs?

Where to find those objections. The method given is directly usable: read your own negative reviews. They tell you where you are weak, which is where the work is, including outside CRM. Then read your competitors' negative reviews. Whatever you do well that they do badly, the close sequence is the right place to say it.

The timing is counterintuitive. On considered purchases, mattresses, microphones, furniture, the buying journey stretches over a week, two weeks, sometimes more. Sending a reminder at three hours and again at twenty-four hours covers a fraction of the real cycle. The recommendation is to lengthen automations on those categories, while knowing that past three days the statistics degrade. These sequences fire rarely but carry high impact per entry.

If conversion has not happened by the end of the sequence, the most likely explanation is that they bought elsewhere, rather than dropping the purchase. That is a product and pricing problem, not an email problem.

Implementation in Klaviyo and Brevo

In Klaviyo, the Shopify integration feeds the Started Checkout, Added to Cart and Viewed Product events that trigger checkout abandonment, cart abandonment and browse abandonment respectively. Three technical points:

• Mutual exclusions. A contact who entered the checkout flow must not receive the cart flow in parallel. Browse abandonment must exclude contacts who added to cart.
• Order-based exit filter. Every flow needs a "has not placed an order since starting this flow" filter.
• Category-level segmentation. The video recommends detailing objections by product category, provided entry volumes support it. In Klaviyo that means conditional splits on the product properties carried by the trigger event.

In Brevo, cart abandonment relies on the tracking script installed on the site and on dedicated workflows, with the same wait and exit condition logic.

The four abandonment flows are detailed in Klaviyo abandonment flows and the browse mechanic in browse abandonment.

4. Continue: repeat purchase before loyalty programmes

The fourth C opens after the first order. Given acquisition costs on Google and Meta in recent years, retention is no longer optional.

The priority order given in the video matters, because it runs against what many teams do. Referral and ambassador programmes need substantial customer bases and cost real money to launch. They are not the first optimisations. What comes first is repeat purchase.

The arithmetic is the founder's own: a customer who places ten orders a year instead of one gives you nine orders whose margin was not reduced by any acquisition cost, CRM aside. The cash and margin gap is large, and it mechanically strengthens your ability to invest in CRM itself.

The refill calibration formula

This is the most operational detail in the video, and the one most brands get wrong. If you sell a consumable, shampoo, lipstick, a supplement, you know how long a customer takes to finish it. That duration is not what you should schedule.

Trigger delay = refill duration minus the consideration time before purchase minus the delivery time.

A message sent the day the bottle runs out arrives too late: the person has already picked something up elsewhere, or is waiting on a delivery that will not land for several days.

What continue means outside consumables

A low frequency category is not a category without repeat purchase. The video uses mattresses: there is the children's mattress, the guest room, the second home, a common case in interior design. The right question bears less on how often this product gets repurchased than on who your customers are and what their next buying opportunity is. Cross-sell lives exactly there.

The point is not to lose momentum. Without personalised communication triggered by the customer's own timeline, your customers receive only your newsletters, which are the same for everyone. You end up level with competitors who hold those same people in their database without ever having converted them, when the advantage was yours.

Implementation in Klaviyo and Brevo

In Klaviyo, the repeat purchase flow triggers on Placed Order with a delay computed from the formula above, or on a date property. For accounts that meet the data thresholds, Klaviyo also exposes a predicted next order date, described in Klaviyo predictive analytics. That prediction does not replace the manual calculation on a single-product category; it earns its place when the catalogue is broad.

In Brevo, the same logic runs through a workflow triggered on the order event, with a configured wait step and a condition that excludes contacts who have already reordered.

Going further: the post-purchase flow and the winback flow.

Which C to attack first

The framework is not a checklist run in order. Its sequencing rule is explicit in the video: priority across the C is inversely proportional to how often your vertical is naturally repurchased. The video states that rule and stops there. The table below is our operational reading of it, not video content: the "priority 2" and "still mandatory" columns are our own application, the founder never states them.

On a high frequency category, continue is the top priority: that is where margin is decided. On a long cycle category the reverse applies, and close deserves most of the work because each conversion carries weight. In neither case does any C go to zero. A low frequency category still needs touchpoints to hold the brand in mind.

Reading a programme by vertical this way is exactly what a serious customer lifecycle map produces.

The 4C are not only about email

The video is explicit about scope: the framework covers email marketing in the broad sense, so email, SMS, print and WhatsApp. Every customer contact, loyalty and retention topic.

That has a practical consequence. The same C can run on a different channel depending on the category. A catch can happen through a web form or through an SMS opt-in at the till. A continue can run as a refill email or as an addressed mail piece when the average order value justifies it. The framework describes the job to be done, not the channel that does it.

Want to know which of the four C is the most expensive gap in your programme? An expert reviews your setup in an email programme audit.

FAQ

What do the 4C stand for?

Catch, connect, close and continue. Four stages of the customer life journey: collect quality consent, bring the contact into the brand's world, remove the objections blocking the purchase, then engineer repeat purchase. The framework is laid out by Maxence Vanderswalmen in a video published on 29 January 2026.

How do the 4C differ from a standard flow architecture?

A flow architecture lists automations to build. The 4C start from the job to be done at each stage and the channel that does it, email, SMS, WhatsApp or print. Flows come second, as the means. If you want the list of flows and the order to build them, our lifecycle marketing guide covers that level, and the complete Klaviyo method covers the tooling.

Should you really drop Shopify's abandoned cart email?

The video calls it largely insufficient, not useless. It is purely informational, while the blocker is almost always a specific objection: dimensions, compatibility, reassurance. The close sequence has to address those, over a duration aligned with the category's real buying cycle, which often runs beyond a week on considered purchases.

How do you calibrate a repeat purchase flow on a consumable?

Start from how long the product actually lasts, then subtract the consideration time before purchase and the delivery time. Scheduling the message for the day the product runs out is systematically too late.

Should email account for 30% of revenue?

That figure circulates widely, but Maxence Vanderswalmen calls it thoroughly vague and has debunked it on the channel. Email remains an effective way to generate revenue, and the only percentage that means anything for your brand is the one you measure in your own account, with an attribution window you are willing to defend.

→ Book a diagnostic of your email programme

Further reading

Looking for a team to apply the 4C to your brand? See our CRM agency page.

• Email popups and signup forms
• Klaviyo welcome flow: building the connect
• Klaviyo abandonment flows
• Flows and campaigns: two different objects
• Best time to send marketing emails
• Ecommerce customer lifecycle mapping

Charlotte Rodrigues, CRM Lead at Deliver. Method taken from the founder's video, extended with the Klaviyo and Brevo implementation.