Case Study: Boosting The Automated Replenishment Rate By 101% For A CPG Snack Brand With Just One Powerful Unconventional Flow - Email Engineers

CASE STUDY

Boosting A CPG Snack Brand's Automated Replenishment Rate By 101% With Just One Powerful Unconventional Flow

Niche

Better-For-You Snacks

Size

6-Figures

Nationwide Presence In Major Retailers (USA)

101%

Increase In Automated Replenishment Revenue

The Mission

The direct-to-consumer world for CPG businesses is though.

Increasing advertising costs are making it a must to have a solid back-end to improve customer's Lifetime Value beyond the first sale.

Low AOV products require either a compelling front-end offer to keep margins healthy and Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) low or a solid post-purchase follow-up journey to boost a customers' value. Ideally both.

As we always do with new clients, we started our project following our 4D Phases: Discovery, Design, Deliver and Dissect.

Let's dive in...

Phase 1: Discovering The Problem

Sections

Initial Audit
Understanding The Business
Understanding The Numbers
Understanding The Customers
Understanding The Journey

Initial Audit

We started with an audit of their Klaviyo account to get an overall idea of their current performance.

At this point we had our thoughts already, but we don't skip ahead until we've followed all the steps to get to the root of the problem.

Understanding The Business

Although there are hundreds of different niches in eCommerce, we can sum up the underlying drivers of growth in a simple formula:

Revenue $$$

# Of Customers

Purchase Frequency

Average Order Value

We use email to push these levers in different ways:

Lever 1: Number of New Customers

This is the top-of-funnel strategy, and it starts by converting site visitors into buyers. We do this through advanced pop-ups and optimized long welcome sequences and abandon sequences.

Then our segmented campaign strategy is constantly supporting the goal of driving the first purchase for non-buyers.

Lever 2: Purchase Frequency

Here's where email shines. The cost to reach a person through this channel is virtually zero.

Does that means we should just blast everyone on your list? Absolutely not. That's what we call "burning a list". And it leads to high unsubscribes, low engagement and landing on the spam folder.

First, we leverage automated behavioral sequences as much as possible to keep relevancy (and sales) high – in some cases implementing over 100 emails across flows with different styles of messaging: education, engaging content, brand-building, UVPs, storytelling, promotions, subscription pushes, community-building and more.

Then, we send laser-targeted campaigns leading customers to their next logical purchase while keeping engagement high.

Lever 3: Average Order Value

After organic traffic, email marketing is usually the 2nd highest AOV channel. There are many tactics we use to improve our client's AOV:

Upsells: selling them a better version of the product
Cross-Sells: selling them a complimentary product
Bundles: selling them a combinations of products they might have not tried otherwise
AI Product Recommendations: leverage artificial intelligence for product recommendation ideas
Tiered Offers: pushing them to spend over a certain threshold to unlock something (a bonus, free shipping, etc)
And more (to be covered in another article)

But what are the common elements behind all these tactics? First, your customers have to like your products, your brand and what it stands for.

Findings

After analyzing our client's business, we determined we needed to put our focus on improving the Purchase Frequency and the Average Order Value – using a combinations of the tactics we covered above.

In simple terms: get customers to buy more and more frequently.

This strategy also applies for any consumable product brand: food, drinks, supplements, perishable products, etc.

Understanding The Numbers

Then, we put the Engineering part of Email Engineers to work.

At this stage we'll crunch the numbers to get answers to questions such as:

Which products have the highest CLV (customer lifetime value)
How can we promote them?
Which product combinations are proven to work? So we can create cross-selling flows and campaigns that boost CLV
How much time should we wait to trigger the replenishment automation?
What’s the behavior of our best customers?
What makes them different?
How can we model them?
How can we lead all customers toward that behavior?

With this, we're confident we're creating a strategy based on numbers and not guesses.

Understanding The Customer

After we know which levers we have to push to grow our client's business, we dive deep into understanding their customers' motivations to buy.

Skip this step and everything else falls apart.

The only way to connect with your customers is by getting inside their heads.

Here we take a 360º approach and research what their customers are saying and what the competition's customers are saying, and send surveys if necessary.

By the end we want to know:

What do they want to achieve with your product?
What makes them buy?
What's preventing them from buying?
What unexpected factor is convincing them to buy?
Why should they prefer you over someone else?
What are the main features they're looking for?
What are the underlying benefits?
And more...

For some businesses (such as lifestyle brands) we answer a different set of questions.

Understanding The Journey

The email marketing strategy should support the natural customer's journey as much as possible.

As the late, great copywriter Robert Collier said in his famous advertising book Robert Collier Letter Book: "Always enter the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind".

Emails should be relevant. That's why we first map out our client's customer's journey to clearly understand:

Where are they coming from?
What are the next logical steps?
What piece of information do they need to take that step?
What will happen after they take that step?
How can we make it easier for them?
How can we push the 3 Levers of Growth at this stage?
Are they a subscriber, a buyer or a customer? (repeat the questions above for each group)

Ideally we want to automate as many emails along their journey.

Behavioral-triggered emails have – on average – 11x higher revenue per recipient than campaign emails. Why? Because they're relevant – we already know the customer's context.

Ready To Grow Your Business With Profitable Emails?

Book a 15-minute Discovery Call with us and let's talk about the ways we'll be able to help you grow.

Book A 15-Minute Discovery Call

Ready To Grow Your Business With Profitable Emails?

Book a 15-minute Discovery Call with us and let's talk about the ways we'll be able to help you grow

Book A 15-Minute Discovery Call

Phase 2: Designing A Solution

Now comes the fun part.

Here at Email Engineers we always start by implementing the changes that will lead to the biggest returns in the least amount of time – the 80-20 if you will.

We want for our service to get paid by itself even before we've delivered the full project.

Sounds crazy, but we've done it multiple times now.

After Phase 1, we discovered our most immediate course of action was to improve the Purchase Frequency or Replenishment Rate.

For this, we designed an optimized sequence to replace the one our client had. Even though it was good already, we saw many opportunities to improve it.

Phase 3: Delivering The Solution

This new flow leveraged many advanced Klaviyo features to make re-purchasing as frictionless as possible for their customers.

We also included some direct-response marketing principles and some of the findings we gathered during our customer research at Phase 1 to address some motivations points and triggers.

Here's the end result (blurred for privacy):

Results

This new flow outperformed the previous one by 101% (as measured in revenue per recipient) and it alone contributes 5% of the total brand's revenue.

(Imagine what having 8+ profitable flows could do for your brand)

Now, our client has an asset that will continue to work day and night for years – no matter the channel they use to attract customers – and keep the Purchasing Frequency high.

Phase 4: Dissecting The Results

As you can see (we'll lend you a magnifying glass if you need one 🔎) we implemented some A/B tests inside this flow to test different offers and messing angles.

This allowed us to further improve the Conversion Rate by an extra 1% – not bad.

We'll now add these winning test to future clients by default.

Takeaways

This case study covers only one of the solutions we implemented.

Additionally we set up the complete backend system for Recharge through Klaviyo to create excitement for product subscribers, automated a Loyalty Program through Smile.io to incentivize repeat purchases and referrals and much much more.

CPG brands (and replenishable products in general) must leverage the high ROI channel that is email as much as possible to keep their customer's lifetime value high and margins healthy.

Ready To Grow Your Business With Profitable Emails?

Book a 15-minute Discovery Call with us and let's talk about the ways we'll be able to help you grow

Book A 15-Minute Discovery Call

Clients Featured In

Who We Like To Work With?

The businesses who we form great partnerships with are often lead by marketers who:

First, they realize that their focus should be placed on customer retention and lifetime value. This is true for any D2C brand looking to thrive in today's environment.

Second, they view our service as a source of profit and not cost. They see our partnership as an ROI-positive investment, because it is.

Third, they treat us with the respect that someone generating a big chunk of their revenue deserves.

Why Work With Us?

It has taken us years to master email marketing. We've accumulated the experience of working with dozens of businesses and their failures and wins. We're nerds for this email & retention stuff. We're in the front line, seeing what works and what doesn't.

When you work with us you're investing in a team of professionals. You're benefiting from our systems and processes that let us get consistent results for brands in multiple niches and sectors.

Just as you wouldn't trust a general physician to remove your wisdom teeth, you wouldn't partner with an "all-in-one" generalist digital agency to handle your email marketing.

What Are Our Prices?

Yes, we'll help you stay top of mind (and you'll see a better return on all your marketing efforts).

Yes, we'll design beautiful emails for you (made by an elite team of designers that are always up to date on the latest design trends).

And yes, we'll get you more sales (that's the whole point, right?).

Yet paying $2000 to $6000 per month is not what people would consider cheap. So why do clients still stay with us – and are happy pulling out their credit card at the end of the month?

Simply put, the return they get from our service outweighs our fee by a high multiple (better than most forms of paid advertising in all cases).

With a 10x, 7x, or even 5x ROI, wouldn't you be happy too?