Million Dolla Motive is a U.S.-based eCommerce brand offering motivational apparel, lifestyle gear, and performance-driven merchandise designed to inspire achievement and confidence. Built on Shopify, the brand focuses on community engagement and high-quality products tailored to a passionate audience seeking both style and purpose
San Diego, California, USA
Million Dolla Motive is a U.S.-based eCommerce brand specializing in athletic apparel, motivational lifestyle gear, and performance-driven merchandise. Designed for customers who value inspiration and self-improvement, their product collections range from apparel and accessories to community-driven merchandise that encourages action and achievement. As a brand built around experience and engagement, Million Dolla Motive needed a marketing solution that could support high-volume sending, strong subscriber growth, and automated lifecycle messaging.
As Million Dolla Motive scaled, their marketing needed to evolve from occasional campaigns to a structured lifecycle system. Their existing tools struggled with high volumes, and they needed a unified platform that could handle multi-channel sends, capture subscriber interest efficiently, and deliver personalized journeys that drove engagement and repeat purchases. They also needed transparency in performance and attribution across campaigns and automated flows at scale.
TargetBay offered a complete lifecycle suite that unified email and SMS marketing, advanced signup acquisition tools, and automated messaging that could operate at scale.
For a brand receiving high traffic and sending millions of messages, having strong deliverability, predictable engagement, and automation that genuinely performs was essential. TargetBay provided the infrastructure, flexibility, and reporting needed to operationalize lifecycle marketing without manual complexity.
During the selected period, Million Dolla Motive increased its email subscriber base by nearly 7%, with over 90% of that growth driven by new signups and an additional 10% coming from resubscribers. Despite natural churn, the brand maintained a positive net growth rate of approximately 3%, demonstrating strong list health and acquisition efficiency.
Top-performing signup sources included desktop and mobile Attention Signup forms, both with and without pre-engagement incentives, highlighting the effectiveness of optimized acquisition experiences across devices.
With a subscriber base exceeding 74,000 contacts, Million Dolla Motive continues to expand its owned audience while maintaining sustainable engagement and retention.
Over the evaluation period, the brand delivered more than 3.2 million emails. Despite the high volume, email performance remained strong with an open rate exceeding 40 percent, demonstrating meaningful engagement from their community. Click activity also supported hundreds of conversions directly from campaigns.
Deliverability stayed extremely clean with negligible bounces and no spam issues, enabling the brand to maintain an enviable sender reputation, even when sending frequent campaigns during peak demand cycles.
Automation became an essential contributor to Million Dolla Motive’s marketing ecosystem. Automated emails delivered over 68,000 sends, generating robust open and click activity. These automated journeys covering welcome sequences, post-purchase messaging, and re-engagement generated meaningful conversions while requiring minimal manual oversight.
At present, the brand runs 25 active automation workflows, each designed to nurture customer relationships, recover engagement, and deliver consistent feedback loops across lifecycle stages.
Across channels, the brand achieved over 1,200 orders during the campaign period, helping drive a 14% year-over-year increase in overall performance. Email campaigns accounted for the majority of engagement, while SMS and automation together contributed over 50% of attributed impact, creating a balanced lifecycle strategy. With more than 400,000 SMS credits used, Million Dolla Motive engaged customers at key decision moments without overwhelming a single channel.
Compared to the same period last year, Million Dolla Motive achieved double-digit growth in overall performance, increasing efficiency and outcomes across campaigns and automations. This demonstrates that their lifecycle approach—centered on strong deliverability, audience growth, and balanced channel use—is not only scalable but also sustainable.
With TargetBay, Million Dolla Motive transitioned from standalone campaigns to a mature lifecycle model. Subscriber growth is consistent and predictable. Campaigns perform reliably at multi-million send volumes. Automations operate seamlessly in the background, contributing a meaningful share of overall engagement and conversions. Lifecycle marketing is now a dependable engine that supports the brand’s growth strategy rather than an overhead to manage manually.
This case study illustrates that large eCommerce operations can scale both audience and engagement without trading performance for volume. With the right lifecycle platform, brands can expand their subscriber base, maintain strong deliverability at scale, and run automated journeys that drive repeat engagement, all while achieving measurable year-over-year growth.
TargetBay empowers eCommerce brands to manage email, SMS, automation, and audience acquisition in a unified, scalable, and efficient way.
