My Retention Playbook

Hi Readers!

We’re at Newsie #12, and I can’t help but pause and appreciate the hell out of all of you for joining.

What I started out of a desire to share my CX and Retention learnings has turned into something special, thanks to the support of each and every one of you. Thank you. 💚

It’s been a solid week so far. I grabbed coffee with a friend from abroad who was visiting NYC. While there, I stopped in to see the folks at Retextion, a subscription tech startup I advise. I also said hey to the folks at Bilt, one of my favorite credit card companies—it allows you to earn points on paying rent!

Cody and I just finished recording a podcast with Matt Bertullii, the CEO of Pela Earth, the parent company of Pela Case and Lomi, 2 companies making massive waves in “unf*cking our earth.” Pela is the world’s first fully compostable phone case, and Lomi is a countertop compost machine that turns food waste into dirt in a matter of hours.

Lomi did 9 figures of revenue in under two years and lives in the kitchens of the Kardashians. Matt is truly an impressive leader filled with humility, kindness and candor.

That episode should be coming soon!

Some other cool guests in the pipeline as well. If you have not checked out the podcast, please do, and be sure to let me know how you like it!

Lastly, we’ve been working on getting a Jones Road community started on Facebook and added the first 100 people, slowly getting places!

It’s been a busy week, and I’m stoked to be curled up in a corner writing the newsie. Let’s get into it, shall we?

This week, I’ll chat about turning retention from a spammy afterthought into a proactive brand-building tool using data and analytics.

As a non-spreadsheet-savvy marketer, parsing data has always been a tough one for me. I can ask questions when I see that something is amiss, but I’m often not quite sure how to tell if something is amiss, or what questions I should be asking to fix it.

So, if you are like me, here are some of my hard-won data insights about using data for retention. As a bonus, I’ll also share some cool things we are doing with data at JRB.

I’ll be splitting it into 3 parts:

1. What data should do for your business

2. How data can tell a story

3. How we use data at JRB

This newsletter is brought to you by my friends at Peel, the automated analytics platform that gives you answers to your questions before you even ask them. We use Peel at JRB and love the product as well as the outstanding support they offer. Join 500+ brands using Peel here.

1. What data should do for your business: 

Put simply; data should be the guiding light in your marketing decisions. On the growth side, data tells you what’s working—getting you more customers who buy more stuff—and what’s not. But how about on the retention side?

When I started doing more retention as part of my job, I needed to take analytics more seriously, and it’s when I turned to analytics tools to help. I needed to know which audience to focus on, how to decipher what’s working and what isn’t, and so much more.

Earlier this week, I asked, “how do you use data to inform your retention strategy?” on Twitter. Here is one of my favorite answers.

I love this answer because it hardly scratches the surface of what data can do for your business, but it gets your gears turning.

2. How data can tell a story: 

When I look at data, I think about it in 3 phases:

a. Questionb. Hypothesisc. Creative Action

Data is often used as a way to understand the way customers engage and interact with your brand. For example, using Peel, we learned that customers at JRB that start their journey with eye products (mascara, best eyeshadow, best pencil) have 53% higher 90-day LTV than our standard customer.

Essentially, people that snag products like that in their order are better customers for Jones Road. By a mile. Once we know that, we can start hypothesizing on why that is, as well as make decisions based on that.

Question: With ad costs rising and iOS 14 making FB ads a lot less effective, what is the ideal customer journey or shopping cart fill to make it more likely that customers stick around and spend more with JRB?

Hypothesis: Based on our aforementioned data as well as conversations with customers, customers stick around and spend more when they are introduced to the brand by buying daily use products. Miracle Balm is differentiated and awesome, but not necessarily a product used as often as Mascara. Because Miracle Balm is differentiated, it makes it a prime suspect for low CAC on FB etc, but is not necessarily the best product for CLTV.

Action: Create sets like the 101 Set that provide the Miracle Balm as well as a mascara to get folks in on it without attempting to sell mascara alone. With the 101 Set, customers can get our bestsellers in one set, and choose their own shades. It solves our acquisition problem and at the same time optimizes for strong CLTV.

We can then use Peel Audiences to define this group of customers, measure & monitor, and dynamically follow these customers throughout their journey with us, picking up any other fun trends along the way. Trends can include:

• How often are they coming back?

• Are they returning during Holiday promos?

• Are they more likely to try new products?

And so much more.

Building with Audiences is more than just creating a segmented list. It’s about building communities of customers who have the same finely-detailed commonalities, engaging them with targeted content that converts, and continuing to measure them with analysis.

In general, I believe that data analysis is cool, but it only really matters to the extent that you can act on it.

3. How we use data at JRB:

As we've been saying, when it comes to data, asking the right questions is just as important as collecting data. Here are a few examples of the questions we ask at JRB:

a. Shade-match:

At Jones Road, we offer two ways for customers to learn about their ideal makeup shades or get general product recommendations. They can either take our website quiz (powered by Octane AI), or reach out to our CX team, where we have makeup artists on call to help folks get shade-matched.

Question: As we have been building out the internal shade-matching team, the question that kept coming up is: “Aside from the better customer experience of being shade-matched by a person, is it sensible to hire folks to do this when we have a quiz that does it using their own data?”

Hypothesis: By creating personal connections with customers looking to get shade-matched by our CX team, we can not only give them recommendations for a full face of makeup vs. one product via quiz, but can also create relationships that sustain for a longer period of time. If that is the case, these customers should definitely have higher LTV than the standard customer LTV.

Creative Action: We tagged these customers in Shopify and then used Peel to track their LTV vs. a standard customer. We found that customers who have been shade matched by our CX team had a 70% above average 90-day CLTV, and 95% above average 6-month LTV (!),

b. Operation FP:

We know that Face Pencil is a strong product for CLTV. Customers absolutely love the Face Pencil, it has rave reviews.

Question: By getting Face Pencil into the hands of customers, can we drive even more customer loyalty and incremental LTV?

Hypothesis: If we can find customers with $100+ in revenue that have not purchased Face Pencil and push them towards it, we can take loyal customers and see if Face Pencil makes them even more loyal.

Creative Action: We used Peel’s audience tool to create this dynamic audience. We can then see the amount of folks in that audience, where they are located, what their overall metrics are, and even see their profiles on Shopify within Peel. We can then sync that list to Klaviyo or Attentive from within Peel to reach out to these customers, and then keep track of this audience and track them vs others in a similar customer journey, minus purchasing the Face Pencil.

c. JRB flagship store:

Question: We have a flagship JRB store in Montclair NJ that is super busy and does quite a bit of revenue. How (if at all) do the in-store customers differentiate from our web customers?

Hypothesis: If we see that in-store customers are more likely to purchase certain things over others, we can possibly assume that trying said product in-store relieves the largest customer objection: “I’m not sure if it will work for me.” Although it is not really feasible to have our online customers sampling those products, we can definitely do better on education around the product and showing what it would look like via video content. When looking at the analysis in Peel, I was able to see Face Pencil sells more than Miracle Balm in-store, and it’s the opposite online.

Creative Action: We can focus more on the education around Face Pencil, ensure customers have a deep understanding of how to choose the right shade, and add more “how to's” in the pre and post-purchase flows.

This week, we have the pleasure of hearing from one of my favorite CX leaders in the space, Jess Cervellon, Head of CX at Feastables.

Feastables is a chocolate company founded by Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast, in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, is a YouTube star who recently hit 100m subscribers and gave away a damn chocolate factory to announce the Feastables launch.

Stoked to have Jess here with us today!

1. What is your CX Philosophy?

Bottom line…I think about it from both the external and internal experience. In order to create great customer experiences, your internal team needs to be able to exude happiness and be effective.

By default, happy people exude happiness, in turn giving you the ability to execute great customer experiences.

When I assess the lay of the CX land, I of course take into account what our customers are saying, feeling and doing. But I also look very closely into how the internal team can efficiently serve those customers. How many roadblocks can I clear for the staff and customers? How easy is it for BOTH the agents and the customer to solve their problems?

I build experiences for the customer that are frictionless and easy. The single most important metric to me for our customer’s experience is the Customer Effort Score. I want to know where it was great and where the breakdown was. With that information, I then assess the internal efficiency rates. Where can I make the team’s lives easier for both their job and to service the customer’s requests with ease?

Another portion of the internal experience is understanding my team player’s drives and motivations. Motivating my team for their current job and setting them up for success for their future roles is one of the most important actions I can take as their CX leader.

Motivating your employees by creating efficiencies in their day-to-day + assigning tasks/responsibilities that they actually want to work on = Happy Employee Experience = Great Customer Experience for YOUR customers.

2. Your favorite Feastables CX story?

When we launched back on January 29th, 2022, we knew that MrBeast’s audience was going to be stoked, but didn’t realize how much they’d love to just talk to us. We also had a very clear CTA on our site that specifically screamed…”HEY TEXT US!”

Just in the first 30 days of being online, we had nearly 30k SMS tickets. You read that right, THIRTY THOUSAND SMS TICKETS! We were rapidly responding to as many as possible, but we just couldn’t engage in the way we wanted to or in the way that we felt would reflect our brand values.

I had already built out a robust website chatbot and had seen 80-90% deflection rates during this time period. Additionally, I was seeing high engagement with our “secret door” channels.

Armed with these two data points, we expanded the chatbot to our SMS channel. It took us a few weeks but we made it happen! Of course, our volume decreased, but our agents were able to have more meaningful conversations with our customers and our customers were able to have a high level of self-service + a branded experience through text.

We loaded the SMS bot with the ability to check order status, track your items and engage in fun pathways like playing rock, paper, scissors with Feastybot, all through texting.

Our customers love it, they love engaging and we have been able to give them so much of what they want while still creating efficiencies for both them and internally. Of course, we are also still there on the other side and quickly reachable if someone really wants to talk to us.

For the month of July alone, we had 42% of our SMS conversations engaged in our “Secret Door” path, which is built with Random Facts, Feasty’s story, jokes, games, etc. 45% of convos were related to order status and/or product information. Plus, the bot still had an 88% deflection rate.

The best part about both the web and SMS bot is not only all these data points, but the customers are constantly leaving feedback, good and bad. With that information, we feed it back into not only improving these bots but to the company. It’s this feedback loop that’s just always on and always collecting valuable information to constantly improve!

Thanks again for tuning in!

Before we go, what topics would you like to see me cover in the future? Until next week,

Eli 💙