New Case Study: How Clients Tackled Gaps in Their Lifecycle Marketing Strategy
No matter what industry—finance, publishing, hospitality, retail, etc.—consumers of your content expect a certain level of personalization and timeliness. In general, most marketers have some sort of automated lifecycle marketing in place; however, the complexity, breadth, and scope can vary from company to company. At WhatCounts, we break up the customer lifecycle into five areas: subscriber acquisition, conversion, growth, retention, and win back. The goal is to create a cohesive strategy across all five areas—feeding a healthy pipeline of new subscribers and a database of loyal, revenue-driving customers. However, this is easier said than done.
The trick with lifecycle marketing is understanding where your weaknesses lie and finding ways to fix them. Our latest case study, Greatest Hits, takes a look at how six WhatCounts clients worked with our full-service digital agency and used the platform to improve particular areas of their lifecycle marketing strategy. While I encourage you to download the full case study, here’s a quick summary:
Subscriber Acquisition
The Situation
BH Media Group, a media firm operating 30 award-winning daily newspapers and websites throughout the United States, wanted to dramatically increase subscribers organically over a 3 month period.
The Solution
Working with the WhatCounts Strategy team, BH Media Group implemented two strategies:
- Adding additional callout banners throughout the site
- Creating onsite pop-ups
The Results
These two seemingly simple strategies helped BH Media Group exceed their stretch goal of 40,000 new contacts in 3 months.
Subscriber Conversion
The Situation
One of America’s multinational corporations (they’re ranked #15 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations by total revenue) wanted to create an “introduction series” for 3.76 million members who had recently had their email addresses appended to their membership profiles.
The Solution
This corporation, which operates a chain of membership-only warehouse clubs, worked with a cross-functional WhatCounts Agency team comprised of Strategy, Creative, and CPS to create a 3-part series that included a coupon incentive.
The Results
This 3-part series raked in over half a million dollars in revenue, 43.6% of which came from first-time customers.
Grow Customer Lifetime Value
The Situation
This apparel retailer, who operates over 600 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, understands the importance of creating loyal, valued customers and wanted to nurture a particular subset of their customer base.
The Solution
This retailer, specializing in lifestyle apparel for teens and young adults, created an automated best customer campaign that triggers when a customer joins the “best customer segment”—customers whose most recent order and the amount spent are in the top quartile for all customers.
The Results
The Best Customer series sees:
- 46% conversion rate
- revenue per email of $1.77
- 5% higher average order value than their overall customer average order value.
Retain Your Subscribers and Your Customers
Situation 1
SouthStar Energy Services LLC, a multi-state, full-service provider of natural gas supply and transportation services, wanted to improve upon their customer experience and find opportunities to gain new clients.
The Solution
Working with the WhatCounts agency, SouthStar Energy was able to create a referral campaign that allowed customers to easily share offers via email (including address book import capability) and social media platforms. We also assisted SouthStar Energy in creating a branded preference site to ensure subscribers were in the driver’s seat regarding the emails they received.
Situation 2
Vionic, a global footwear brand that brings together style and comfort to create fashionable year-round footwear for both men and women, was looking for a way to market all of the different styles while increasing personalization.
The Solution
Vionic implemented a category repurchasing campaign for women’s and men’s shoes to showcase products based on individual customer purchasing cadence. The Category Repurchasing campaign is triggered when a customer hits the repurchase threshold, i.e. based on their purchasing cadence, the customer is due to repurchase soon.
The Results
The Women’s Category Repurchasing campaign has been running for over a year and sees:
- 18% higher average order value when compared to their overall average order value
- 13% revenue lift
- 9% conversion rate
Win Back Churning Subscribers and Customers
The Situation
The fifth-largest beauty company in the world wanted to proactively stop customer churn.
The Solution
This beauty titan created a 3-part Predictive Win-Back campaign which uses predictive data-sets to identify customers with a high probability of churning.
The Results
This Predictive Win-Back series has seen impressive results, particularly when you note that this subset of customers had one foot out the door. Their results included:
- 15.6% open rate
- 14% conversion rate
- 2% higher average order value when compared to AOV for all customers
Putting it all Together
Lifecycle marketing is all about knowing your audience, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your existing strategy, and working to fill gaps and optimize across the entire lifecycle. To learn more about how to optimize your lifecycle marketing strategy, download the full case study, or reach out! We’ve got a team of experts standing by to help.