This is the email I sent to the hundreds of people who had been waiting on the waitlist for months when BrikMentor was first launched. I’m sharing it here as well because I had thought about it at length while preparing it, and it clearly expresses some of my views on certain topics. For that reason, I think it’s worth sharing.
Subject: BrikMentor is Finally Live
Hi everyone. It’s finally time to launch BrikMentor. Thank you all for patiently waiting through three months of development. Honestly, there’s quite a lot I’ve stored up over these three months that I want to tell you about.
Before I get into it, let me say this first: a huge thank you to eljokar and Lincoln for joining the pilot test and for all the help they gave in getting the product right. Both of them sincerely agreed to test BrikMentor on their live, working stores. Their help was priceless.
https://brksoft.com/brikmentor
- Starter: up to 10,000 emails/month, $15/month ($1 for your first month)
- Pro: up to 100,000 emails/month, $89/month
10,000 emails a month will be more than enough for almost any store. Our pilot store, which takes around 100 orders a month, didn’t even use a third of the $15 plan.
What does it do?
Eight automated email flows for WooCommerce, running on the data BrikPanel already collects:
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Back-in-stock notifications, together with a waitlist button on out-of-stock products
- Post-purchase follow-up emails
- Payment recovery for failed payments
- Welcome series
- Win-back for customers who haven’t shopped in a long time
- Popup coupon
- A one-time scan of carts that were abandoned before installation
The moment you install the plugin, the product names on your site are automatically analyzed by Claude Opus 5 and the email copy is written by AI specifically for your store, so you don’t have to bother adjusting any of the text. There are no options in the plugin for configuring flows, adding custom flows, or creating campaigns. I read all the research done on this subject and kept only the flows with the strongest evidence behind them, along with their own proven rules. So there’s nothing for you to configure. You turn on the flow you want to turn on, and everything else comes ready out of the box.
The only thing you need to do during setup is add the 5 DNS records the plugin gives you to your domain, about 10 minutes of work. This step is essential to keep your emails out of spam, which is why I deliberately made it mandatory. If you get stuck at this step, please do reach out to me.
In Omnisend’s 2026 benchmarks, back-in-stock emails generate $9.14 in revenue per email, while abandoned cart emails bring in $3.59. It’s the strongest automation in their tables, and most WooCommerce stores don’t have this feature at all. Tools like Klaviyo and Mailchimp don’t offer it to WooCommerce users, only on hosted platforms like Shopify. Brevo offers it only on its $499 plan. Omnisend makes you add it manually, one product at a time, by injecting a script for each one. On the other email tools it simply doesn’t exist. That’s why I think this feature is a good differentiator. (As of September 2026, from their own pricing pages.)
There’s also a WhatsApp button on your abandoned cart list. When you press it, a pre-filled message draft opens that describes the customer’s cart in your own words, and you’re the one who hits send. No API, no per-message fee. Since the WhatsApp API is expensive, I realized many stores wouldn’t be able to afford this feature, so I tried to find a manual solution like this one. In markets where WhatsApp works better than email, this turned out to be the most used feature in the pilot.
Switching from another tool? BrikMentor can read exports from Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Omnisend, MailerLite, Brevo and Hostinger Reach. It also won’t import anyone who has unsubscribed from you. I paid particular attention to this so that no complaints or spam problems come up. I opened a separate account for each tool and tested them one by one.
The part I actually wanted to write to you about
Over these three months I downloaded and tried the competitors’ tools one by one and read more than fifty reports. Along the way I noticed something.
Whether an email was opened can no longer be measured. Since 2021 Apple has been loading the tracking pixel itself on the user’s behalf, which means an email shows up as “opened” even if nobody read it. Even Klaviyo’s own documentation says this.
Despite that, the industry’s default rule is still this: if the customer opened or clicked the email within five days and then placed an order, that order came thanks to us.
As a result, tools like Klaviyo, Mailchimp and Omnisend show 15 to 25% of a store’s total revenue in the dashboard as “the revenue we earned for you”. Field studies with randomized control groups, on the other hand, say the real effect is somewhere between 3 and 10%.
The gap matters, because a store owner who reads “they’re increasing my revenue by 20%” in the dashboard makes their strategic decisions accordingly.
At this point I found myself in a dilemma.
I could have done what everyone else does. I’d have put a huge number in the dashboard and nobody could have said a word to me about it, because everyone in the market does this. Fewer people would cancel, and I’d make more money.
But then I thought about this. Is my most fundamental goal to look for ways to make more money, or to add value to the customer and try to help them? When you help someone and add value, doesn’t the money come anyway? Frankly, I’ve always believed that. I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong, but that’s what I’ve always believed.
So I made this decision. It’s almost impossible to cleanly calculate how much an email tool actually earns you. So I said, let me show both of them separately. Two numbers sit side by side in the dashboard, and the question mark next to them explains the difference.
Click-proven revenue: the customer clicked the link in the email, then placed an order. This is the main number. Refunds are deducted, every order is listed with its order number, and you can open them one by one in WooCommerce and check for yourself.
Post-send revenue: the email went out, there’s no click record, but they placed an order afterwards. Klaviyo and Mailchimp show this as the main number. I show it separately, because I can’t prove that order came from the email. But the money is real and it came in after the email.
Which one you take as your basis is entirely up to you. As for open tracking, it isn’t in the plugin at all. I don’t collect that data. So what’s the real number that BrikMentor earns you? It’s somewhere between these two numbers, but I can’t tell you clearly what it is, and I don’t think you need to know the exact figure either. What actually matters, in my view, is knowing that the tool works and pays for itself.
There’s a price to this: the number in my dashboard will look smaller than my competitors’. But it will also be the only number you can open up and verify one by one. The dashboard shows which order each number came from. On top of that, BrikMentor is GPL licensed and its code sits on your own site. You can open the files and see line by line how that number is calculated. With tools like Klaviyo and Mailchimp you don’t have that option, because the calculation happens on their servers rather than your site, and that code is closed.
This is something everyone in the industry does without exception, and I didn’t want to be part of it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not accusing or badmouthing anyone, but by my own worldview I don’t find this practice right, and I wanted to tell you that openly.
If you get stuck anywhere during setup, you can reach me wherever you like. And if any suggestion or complaint comes to mind for improving the plugin, please do write to me, it will help me a great deal.
$1 for the first month on the Starter plan, and you can cancel any month you want.
https://brksoft.com/brikmentor
Salih (latti), Founder, Brksoft
