We spoke with Jacques Schaeken, founder of Essence Retention, an AI-augmented email and SMS marketing agency for ecommerce brands.
Essence Retention helps brands create lifecycle campaigns, popup forms, email flows, and retention programs that feel native to each customer's identity. To do that well, the team needs more than a company name or a logo. It needs brand context that can flow into AI-assisted research, onboarding, creative briefs, and campaign workflows.
That is where Context.dev plugs in.
What Essence Retention Needed
Essence Retention works across email, SMS, and retention marketing, where every output has to feel specific to the brand it represents. A popup form, welcome flow, or campaign concept can look technically correct and still feel wrong if it misses the brand's typography, visual density, imagery, or tone.
Jacques wanted a reliable way to turn a domain into usable brand context for those workflows.
The key inputs were:
- Brand identity
- Logos and visual assets
- Colors and fonts
- Website screenshots
- Style-guide context
- Scraped page content and supporting brand details
Context.dev gives Essence Retention a single place to pull that context before its AI-assisted workflows generate anything.
Where Context.dev Plugs In
Essence Retention uses Context.dev as the brand-context layer behind its AI-assisted workflows. Instead of asking a user or team member to manually collect assets, the workflow can start from a company website and retrieve the information needed to personalize the next step.
The integration touches several parts of the process.
Brand discovery: Context.dev's brand API gives Essence Retention structured company and visual identity data from a domain.
Style extraction: style guide data helps the team understand colors, fonts, and visual rules before generating client-facing concepts.
Screenshot context: screenshots provide a practical view of how the brand actually presents itself on the web, including spacing, layout, imagery, and tone.
Web scraping: scraping helps pull supporting website context so agents can work from real brand material instead of generic assumptions.
Those inputs become the starting point for downstream work: popup form concepts, campaign briefs, onboarding flows, and other retention marketing assets.
Lead Magnet and Popup Workflows
One of the clearest places Context.dev fits is lead magnet generation.
When Essence Retention wants to create a popup form concept for a brand, the workflow can pull brand context first, then use that context to shape the output. Instead of producing a generic form, the system can work from the brand's real visual identity and website context.
That means the concept can account for:
- The brand's colors and typography
- Existing website tone
- Product and category context
- Visual direction from screenshots
- The kind of experience the brand already gives visitors
Context.dev is not the final creative decision-maker. It provides the context layer that helps the next step start closer to the brand.
Client Onboarding
Context.dev also helps during onboarding.
When a new brand enters the workflow, Essence Retention can retrieve the brand details needed to personalize the first pass of planning materials and campaign direction. That reduces the amount of manual collection needed before the team can start shaping ideas.
For an AI-assisted agency workflow, this matters because the first prompt or brief is only as good as the context underneath it. If the system understands the brand from the beginning, every downstream step has a better chance of feeling specific.
Why Screenshots Matter
Logos and colors are useful, but they do not capture the full brand.
A live website screenshot can reveal information that structured fields alone miss: how dense the design feels, how product imagery is used, how much contrast the brand prefers, whether the visual system feels minimal or expressive, and how the site creates hierarchy.
Essence Retention uses that screenshot context as another input for AI-assisted creative workflows. It helps agents and humans reason from the actual customer experience, not just a palette.
Why Context.dev Worked
The value for Essence Retention is not just fetching assets. It is having a dependable way to turn a website into structured, reusable context for creative workflows.
For Jacques, Context.dev helps with:
- Starting from a domain instead of a manual asset-collection process
- Bringing brand identity into AI-assisted workflows
- Grounding popup and campaign concepts in real website context
- Giving AI-assisted workflows better inputs before they draft or brief anything
- Keeping brand context available across repeated marketing workflows
That lets Essence Retention keep its focus on retention strategy and creative execution while Context.dev handles the brand-context layer.
The Result
Context.dev gives Essence Retention a practical foundation for AI-assisted email and SMS marketing work.
The workflow is straightforward: pull context from the brand's website, use it to inform the next creative or onboarding step, and keep the output closer to the customer's actual identity.
For teams building AI workflows around marketing, ecommerce, onboarding, or creative production, Context.dev provides the brand context your agents need before they act.