- Moments Covered: Replenishment, Lapsed Customer
- Plays Used: Replenishment Reminder, Late Replenishment Reminder, Lapse Prevention Flow, Show Dynamic Products
- Business Impact: Reduced need for discounts, improved LTV and margins
When Black Girl Vitamins Co-Founder Nnamdi Ugwu talks about retention, he does so in a way that’s similar to the team that famously reignited Yum! Brands: "Sales Overnight, Brands Overtime."
The SOBO system, as it’s called, is designed to remove constant discounting and a heavy reliance on performance marketing, instead using marketing touchpoints to reinforce the brand.
"We are not the most unique product in the market,?" Ugwu said. "And if we become a product that people are buying on price, you know they're going to go somewhere else, and buy it,?"
While that sounds good in theory, it’s more difficult in practice.
One-Size-Fits-All Timing Fails to Deliver
To pull it off, Ugwu and the Black Girl Vitamins team decided to focus on activating sales at key Moments of the customer’s lifecycle—and using the remainder of its retention marketing calendar to focus on community and brand building efforts.
The challenge was identifying when specific customers entered specific Moments. Because the team is lean, there wasn’t time to analyze the timing around key Moments like Replenishment or Lapsed Customer, leaving the team with the task of optimizing around a single timeframe—45 days—for all customers, regardless of what they purchased.
"I think we looked at a conversion rate. It was not very impactful," Ugwu said. "I think we might have learned that down the road, but what we were doing was not working."
So, they partnered with Repeat.
Personalizing Moments for Every Customer
Repeat is the event generator for lifecycle marketers who want an easy way to activate customers during high leverage retention moments. For Black Girl Vitamins, this meant monitoring when customers were most likely to be in key Moments, like replenishment and lapsed customer prevention, and personalize email efforts during those Moments to help the brand meet its "sales overnight, brand overtime" goals.
Using Repeat, Ugwu and team not only better timed key emails, they also streamlined their processes for doing so and personalized the contents using Repeat’s dynamic content blocks.
To do it, Ugwu and team leveraged Repeat’s triggers for Replenishment and Lapsed Customer Moments, personalizing the timing of each email to the customer, based on their past purchase history. They also streamlined flows for these Moments by using Repeat’s dynamic content blocks, which allows Black Girl Vitamins to show their customers products they’re due to replenish or products they previously purchased. All with little work from the Black Girl Vitamins team.
"The product works," Ugwu said. "It does what it's supposed to do with minimal effort from our team."
The results weren’t just better personalization, but better business performance, too.
Repeat’s Better Personalization Allows for Less Discounting
The personalized approach to key Moments in the customer lifecycle allowed Black Girl Vitamins to pull back on discounts for returning customers. And the results are drastic: In Q1 2022, discounts accounted for nearly 30% of returning customer gross sales. In Q1 2023, that figure dropped to just 6.5%.
The result is a massive difference to LTV and margins.
"Once you've purchased from us, it's more about keeping you in the community with education , because I know Repeat is coming behind with, ‘It’s time,’" Ugwu said. "So, I don't want to be like here's 30 percent off. I've sort of delegated all that work to Repeat and I'm just focusing on product launches, interviews, and all of that. So, I think we're on brand building and Repeat is on the sales side of it, and I don't worry about it."
