From Browsing to Bingeing: A Customer Journey Fueled by Netflix’s Value Proposition

This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Courtney LeBlanc, Senior Customer Support Manager at Willful, a Canadian online platform that enables users to create powers of attorney and last will and testament documents without the need for a lawyer. Our conversation delved into how Willful leverages a small but mighty support team to deliver empathetic, efficient service to customers navigating a complex and often emotionally charged process. Here are the key insights from our discussion:

It’s majorly impressive how smoothly UNIQLO has adapted to the overseas market — global expansion is a task most brands tend to struggle with. And while their products are great, their product line isn’t necessarily the main reason for their success. The truth is — UNIQLO does a fantastic job of utilizing data to fuel its customer experience strategy — so much so that it’s allowed them to connect their physical and digital touch points in a seamless way. BUT there’s always room to improve, and here’s how.

If you’re an avid Pinterest user, you might have noticed that over the years, their algorithm for personalizing users’ feeds has become more and more precise, making it all the more addicting. You probably wouldn’t have guessed that you have THE YES, an AI-powered shopping app, to thank for these improvements. In 2022, Pinterest acquired THE YES, but before this acquisition, THE YES was on its way to revolutionizing the average shopper’s customer journey and experience. But turns out — making a perfectly personalized shopping experience for every single user was no easy feat. So let’s break down one particular challenge they faced getting their platform off the ground.

When competing in the same industry as Shein and Temu, a brand like H&M must do one of two things to survive: 1) match these competitors’ prices (which is near impossible) or 2) justify higher prices. And in order to justify higher prices, H&M has had to do a lot more than simply improve the quality of their clothing. For them, it’s all about customer experience. And while H&M’s customer experience initiatives have been receiving tons of hype from investors and shareholders, there’s a bit of disconnect between the opinions of customers and investors.

Last week we had the opportunity to chat with Steve Davenport, who leads Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiatives at PTC. PTC is an enterprise software company that provides solutions for digital transformation across engineering, manufacturing, and service operations. Given their focus on enabling customer success, it's no surprise that VoC plays a critical role. Here's what we learned.

Have you ever waited for a dashboard to load for so long that you forgot what you were even looking for? I think we all have. It can be incredibly frustrating (especially if your organization is using Redshift…).

Outdoor Voices, a loved outdoor apparel company, recently made the decision to close ALL physical retail stores, all while barreling toward bankruptcy. Unfortunately, their reckless spending decisions caught up to them this year, and a once very successful apparel brand suddenly ran fresh out of cash. So let’s look at how their marketing efforts contributed to this unfortunate turn of events and what they can try to do to make a comeback.

As a CX leader, what do you do when you're tasked with building out customer support for a company that hasn't even launched yet? We sat down with Emily Stubbs, who is currently doing exactly that as she stands up the CX function at Aerflo, a new sparkling water hardware startup. Emily shares her playbook for learning a new product inside and out, building a knowledge base from scratch, and using data to proactively surface customer pain points.

Predicting the next time that a consumer is expected to buy a product allows you to make well timed offers that boost conversion. Here's how to do it.

Just this year, HelloFresh was fined £140,000 for sending over 79 million emails and 1 million SMS messages that violated privacy regulations. More specifically, HelloFresh had not been given direct consent from a huge chunk of their customers to constantly send marketing content to their inboxes but continued to do so anyway. And the truth is — not only were these aggressive marketing tactics unauthorized, but they weren’t exactly effective toward reducing churn either. In fact, HelloFresh has historically had huge issues with customer retention — seemingly more so than Blue Apron. So just like we did for Blue Apron, let’s break down why.

Snowflake have launched an LLM function feature, they call it Cortex. The idea is it lets you create a new column with a plain old SQL expression, which makes it super flexible. It's in public preview, so anyone can try it out.

Warby Parker is just one example of a digitally native brand that is absolutely demolishing the game, with revenues up over 12%, average revenue per customer up 9.3%, and their total customer base up over 2% in just 2023 alone. Rather than focusing on e-commerce alone, Warby Parker opened over 230 stores used primarily as showrooms for their products. Using stores as showrooms rather than the primary point of sale also means they can open smaller (and therefore more inexpensive) stores in larger volume. This method of balancing e-commerce with physical retail has been more than successful for the brand. But this isn’t the only way they’ve been able to intertwine the digital customer experience with the physical customer experience.

Last week we had a conversation with Josh Kernan, who is a VP and Head of CX & Marketing at Catalant Technologies. Catalant is a fascinating business一they run a platform to connect businesses with top-ter freelance consultants. Think an ex CMO or ex-VP of Supply Chain that has gone into independent consulting and is running 6 month projects for Fortune 500 companies.

To understand the reasoning behind the price increases in the luxury industry, we first have to understand what makes luxury, luxury. And it’s clear that at the center of it all, exclusivity is a major component of any luxury good or service. To make a product or service exclusive, it should be a) limited in supply and b) difficult to acquire. Because the supply for luxury goods is typically very limited, demand often surpasses supply, and as a result, prices continue to shoot up. And a lack of exclusivity is exactly why Farfetch, an e-commerce space for luxury brands, didn’t perform nearly as well as expected.

In the dynamic landscape of business, understanding your audience is crucial. Picture this: you have the key to uncovering the complexities of consumer behavior and preferences. This key is none other than the transformative field of segmentation research! 

So, you've got an online store, and you're pumped about it. People are adding stuff to their carts, but after a little while...poof! They vanish without completing their purchases. What happened? This phenomenon is called Shopping Cart Abandonment, and this article will cover what this metric is, why it’s a big deal, and how you can prevent it.

For the past 8 years, Walmart has been pretty insistent on keeping its number of stores constant. But recently, the company has made plans to open up over 150 stores across the country. This might seem like a strange move considering how rapidly e-commerce is growing and how steadily in-person sales seem to be declining, but here’s why it makes sense for Walmart.

A case study of Cotera's lifecycle segmentation model. Learn how we helped companies decrease churn and identify upsell opportunities.

Nowadays, AI is absolutely everywhere - and everyone knows it. But here’s a common misconception. Lots of people believe that AI takes away the element of personalization by removing human-powered touchpoints entirely. But the truth is, it’s actually quite the opposite. Amazon — a company we’ve touched on before — just launched Rufus, a new AI-powered shopping assistant. And it’s a prime example of how AI is an incredibly powerful tool for personalization.

Content-based filtering considers item features and characteristics to find similar items that you might like. In this article we take a deep dive into how they work and how to use them effectively!

Whenever a customer interacts with a business, a unique record is logged in the business’s database. Sometimes, this results in two different data points such as “T. Cruise” and “Tom Cruise” referring to the same Tom Cruise. If you want to get a more accurate, comprehensive view of customer behavior to improve your customer service and marketing, you may need to resolve these two points into one distinct entity. This is one example of what is called entity resolution, the process of merging various records into a single entity.

Last week, I wrote an article about why Macy’s is laying off employees out of a desperation to save up for a new customer-centric strategy this year. And it turns out this leading retailer isn’t the only one. Just a few days ago, Levi Strauss announced that they would be cutting over 10% of their workforce — almost 2000 employees — this year for the very same reason. But if all of these companies appear to be struggling with the heavy financial burden of an effective customer strategy, why even bother? Well, as Levi’s recent transformation shows, the returns clearly outweigh the costs.

Macy’s recently announced that they plan to lay off over 2000 employees AND shut down several stores entirely. But why? The answer is simple. Traditional marketing, sales, and growth strategies were simply no longer cutting it, so they *had* to cut down on costs to fund new projects that would completely change their business strategy for the better.

In today’s data-driven landscape, mastering key metrics is vital for any successful business. And out of the countless number of metrics out there, the sales conversion rate is one of the most important metrics that e-commerce businesses should master. 

In the dynamic commerce world, businesses are strategically implementing programs with complimentary gifts, advanced technologies, and surprise programs to enhance customer satisfaction, promote brand loyalty, and differentiate themselves from competitors.

Imagine you’re at a bookstore to find your next read, and your friend recommends you an action novel promising that it will be just as fun as the typical romance novels that you read. Although it’s a completely different genre, your friend knows you enjoy dramatic, emotional stories and promises that this action novel will be enjoyable. Surprisingly, you end up loving it and look for more action novels with similar emotional depth. Amazing, right?

If you follow the luxury industry at all, you might’ve heard a little something about 2023’s best performing company in the industry, Hermés. Now, luxury brands aren’t necessarily known for their retention efforts. Most customers buy one or two luxury products from a brand and say that’s enough. But Hermés isn’t just a winning brand because they play it safe when it comes to pricing and strategize carefully when it comes to marketing. They’re also well known for their discrete loyalty and retention frameworks that keep their customer loyalty rate sky high.

Customer experience, CX, is not customer service. Yes, that’s right. Though they seem to imply the same thing, customer service is actually just one part of what customer experience entails.

In prehistoric times when things like AI, ChatGPT, and models weren’t quite as hot, data collection and analysis was – and often still is – very manual. We’ve all probably seen massive datasets filled with hundreds of thousands of rows and thought, “Geez, how am I gonna get through all of this?” Now, though, the data analysis landscape has massively improved with the rise of AI! But don’t worry, you don’t need a computer science degree in order to keep up. If you’re interested in learning more about basic AI tools and how they can be used to unlock your customer insights, you’ve come to the right place.

When starting a business, the main goal is to bring in as many customers as possible, probably through extensive marketing and campaigning. But, at some point, the next biggest hurdle becomes keeping these customers so that your business doesn’t limitlessly expend what may be a limited budget on acquiring new customers.

You open your favorite online shopping app, and there it is: a curated selection of products that perfectly align with your style and preferences. It’s almost like your digital genie, knowing exactly what you’re looking for before you do. This isn’t by mere coincidence or luck; it’s the brilliance of product recommendation engines at work. These clever systems work by sifting through data, and bringing you those perfect picks. And, they’re the reason your online shopping feels less like searching and more like discovering. 

If you listen to music often, I’m sure you know of the Apple Music vs. Spotify rivalry in the music streaming industry. And usually, you’re on one side or the other—but not both. In this multi-billion dollar industry, companies like Apple Music and Spotify are forced to regularly produce updates and keep their subscribers happy. Then, in 2016, some researchers looked into what makes each company successful, and they found that Apple Music had a churn rate that was three times higher than that of Spotify. But what exactly does that mean, and what made this information useful for the researchers at the time?

When a leading supplement brand was in need of an easy way to send out emails right when a customer was most likely to have run out of a product, they came to Cotera. Their retention team had tried exploring different ways to optimize email schedules manually, but estimating the right timing on their own was near impossible. This meant that there was so much wasted potential for campaigns sent to their top customers — but they knew they couldn’t make the needed predictions on their own.

Recently, we had a large food & beverage e-commerce company come to Cotera looking for a strong segmentation model. The Head of Marketing needed to bring down a high one-and-done and churn rate. She knew they were facing an abundance of customer churn but that her team wasn’t proactively identifying these at-risk customers until it was too late. With a company-wide focus on retention, she knew they needed a dedicated tool that specialized in customer segmentation.

Around a year ago, an apparel and accessories brand came to Cotera looking for a new, strong recommendation model to replace its current one. The Head of Retention knew they should be generating higher incremental revenue from moving customers across different products. Yet they found themselves stalled leveraging their ESPs’ recommendation engine, as it was unable to adjust for the nuances of their business. And any attempts at testing stand-alone recommendation engines lacked the turnkey integration with their ESP.

Whether you still use Pinterest or no longer do, I think we can all agree that their content recommendations are absolutely spot on. But how does their algorithm work, and why is it even important in the first place? Pinterest’s mission as a company has always been to deliver the right content to the right people — meaning that a strong content recommendation system is essential to the success of their brand. But this is not to say that content recommendation models aren’t useful for B2C companies selling services or tangible products either. In fact, it’s just as important.

It’s one thing to get someone to purchase your product, but how do you get them to keep buying? Most companies send out occasional email campaigns, abandoned cart reminders, or special promotions to re-peak their customers’ interest, but there’s still another approach we haven’t touched on just yet: replenishment.

I’m sure at some point, you’ve gone through Yelp, or Trip Advisor, or any other review platform of some sort before committing to a purchase or a visit. I know I do (and I can’t live without them). But what you may not have thought about is how these reviews help that company just as much as they help you as a customer. But how? Sentiment analysis.

Now, we all know and love Netflix the same way Netflix shows that they know and love us. And why is proving their love toward their customers so important? For any subscription company, the key to success is making sure their LTV (lifetime value) stays relatively high. But it’s not just about how they increase those numbers that makes Netflix such an outstanding company - it’s even more-so about how they measure those very numbers and how deeply they analyze them.

In Las Vegas, CA, tourists from all around the country line up outside the doors of the Coca-Cola Factory right before it opens. Why? To try Coca-Cola’s ATW (Around the World) Tray. On each ATW Tray, customers get to taste a cup each of the various flavors of Coca-Cola offered in different countries across the world. What makes it so special is that each country’s Coca-Cola drink has a distinct flavor catered to the tastes, preferences, and sometimes even the traditions of the people living there. But why is this effective?

Everyone knows that these days, if you’re NOT using data and integrating tech into your company, you’re doing it wrong. On the other hand, there’s also a pretty big misconception here. Sure, we’re in the digital era, but that doesn’t mean we can just brush away the importance of human judgment. Instead of letting new technologies take over your entire business, you can use data more effectively by complementing existing human judgment and decision-making processes with it. And Whole Food’s recent merger with Amazon tells you exactly why.

It’s pretty clear that in the dynamic world of marketing, success today is driven by data. When we look at trends in the consumer retail industry especially, companies are beginning to up their digital game to keep up with their competitors. In other words, many traditional methods simply don’t cut it anymore. This is where data enablement steps in. Let’s dive into what exactly data enablement is and how it’s changing the way companies go about marketing.

Everyone knows the brand Lululemon — I mean, they’ve made quite the name for themselves (among both men and women) in the last decade. But in the past, Lululemon certainly wasn’t for everyone. In the very beginning, they had quite the focused target market — younger active women aspiring to live healthy lifestyles. And having a focus strategy (one that’s focused on a niche market) isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, it’s how most great companies first start out. But let’s explore what tactics Lululemon ensued to broaden their focus strategy without diluting their brand.

Email Service Providers (ESPs) are a great starting point when trying to segment your customers, but nowadays, you're going to need more than just an ESP to make your campaigns the best of the best. We can't live without ESPs — I mean, they’re absolutely critical for delivering messages to consumers across various platforms. And while ESP’s are great at delivery and compliance, we’ve found the key to amplifying their existing impact even further: a robust RFM (or AI) model that enables brands to have more granular and predictive user segmentation.

If I just said the word “marketing,” what would first come to mind? Maybe some terms like marketing campaigns, email campaigns, social media, and word of mouth, right? But marketing certainly isn’t limited to just these few ideas and methods. And Lego as a company makes this very clear. More often than not, company diversification is usually seen as a way to minimize risk or generate new sources of revenue. But over the years, Lego’s taken a different kind of approach. Let’s look at some of the innovative ways they’ve diversified their brand, and what other benefits they reaped.

The global e-commerce landscape has seen unparalleled growth in recent years, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the world emerges from the pandemic's shadow, the once-exponential e-commerce growth rate has dwindled to a mere 7% in the last year, leaving businesses grappling with a significant sales slump. In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at the journey of e-commerce during the pandemic, the factors that fueled its initial surge, and the shifting consumer behavior in the post-pandemic era. Moreover, we'll explore effective strategies for addressing this sales downturn and how Cotera can play a pivotal role in reigniting e-commerce success.

No matter how intertwined personalization and segmentation are, they are certainly not one and the same. Sure, they both accomplish the same goals — improving customer experience, increasing AOV per customer, strengthening customer loyalty, driving repeated purchases, and etc. BUT differentiating the way they’re used is key to use them together more effectively. One other way to think about it is, segmentation answers the question, “What types of people am I selling to?” and personalization answers the question, “How will I sell to this specific person?” Often, you’ll see through the way these two strategies work together, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Let’s get into it.

What if I told you that nearly half of Gen Z adults are eager to pay for subscriptions to internet personalities or content creators? It's a statistic that reflects the evolving preferences of this influential generation. But there's more to it than meets the eye. From spending over four hours a day on social media to their unique loyalty to brands with subscriptions, Gen Z is redefining the retail landscape. In this blog post, we'll uncover the fascinating world of Gen Z and subscription boxes, exploring how these trends are shaping the future of shopping. How can your business tap into this Gen Z revolution and harness the power of subscription boxes to captivate this dynamic audience? Let's dive in and find out.

I can almost be 100% sure that you, *yes you*, have either made a purchase through Amazon before or at least know someone who has. And if you have, there’s a good chance you’re a Prime member who’s not planning on churning any time soon. I mean, why would you? Amazon is the ultimate, go-to one-stop shop that *you know* you can rely on. When I think about companies that absolutely master customer loyalty and retention, there’s no doubt that Amazon takes the win. But how does one just suddenly win over the hearts of hundreds of millions of customers around the world?

Here’s a question for you - why would you offer a coupon to a customer who you *know* would buy from you even in the absence of a deal? I guess the hard part would be determining which customers you *actually* need to offer promotions to and which you don’t. But it’s wrong to think that it’s a waste of your time to figure this out. By handing out coupons left and right, you’re simply losing money - and this is a mistake many companies (like Blue Apron) have made and continue to make. BUT there’s a solution! Just like for many problems we’ve covered in the past, segmentation is the key here. Let’s use the company Everlane as an example.

If you go back just several years, you’ll remember that it used to be WAY harder to whip up a design on command. What changed? For me, the first game-changing platform that comes to mind is Canva. So how exactly did this tiny startup transform into a multi-billion-dollar unicorn? They’re not only smart about what target market they decided to capture, but they also do a pretty solid job of keeping their users active and eager for more. Let’s dive further into what innovative strategies Canva puts into place to attract and keep users like me engaged.

In 2021, Costco had a 91% membership renewal rate in North America and 89% worldwide. Recently, Costco released their 2023 Q3 reports, and rates were up even higher, with a 92.6% renewal rate in North America and 90.5% worldwide. The statistics in 2021 already established Costco as the master of customer loyalty programs, but to see continuous growth over time really begs the question of what is Costco’s secret sauce. How are they able to make their customer loyalty program even more enticing than it already is?

The film industry has been on fire recently. We got Barbie and Oppenheimer and Spiderman this summer, with even more coming along the way. However, even for those of us who aren’t cinephiles, one studio has been producing hit after hit after hit, such as Oscar Best Picture Everything Everwhere All at Once and Academy Award-winning Moonlight. Despite being an indie film studio, A24 has been blowing everyone’s minds away with their top-notch movies. So the question is: how did they blow up?

What’s shocking is that according to a recent study, chances are high that only 3 out of 10 individuals will end up pulling the trigger to make the final purchase. That’s 70% of customers who end up abandoning their carts — a very worrying statistic. But don’t let this discourage you — there are solutions you can implement to nudge customers further toward that final trigger. And why go the extra mile to do so? Imagine being able to turn that 70% into 0%. That gives you and your company the ability to more than double your existing revenue — something that would be *significantly* more difficult and expensive to accomplish through a customer acquisition or brand awareness campaign.

ButcherBox is an online meat-seller that’s absolutely killing it in the industry. But unlike Blue Apron, ButcherBox did something a little different — and this little difference made a huge difference in the long run. Rather than focusing on acquiring new customers in their marketing campaigns, they targeted existing/past subscribers and website visitors to get them to keep coming back, order more and more, and stay for good. Let’s take a look at how this company avoided coming face to face with the same issues as other companies in the industry.

Most people attributed the fall of Allbirds to poor quality, but the truth is, the source of their problems was more than just the material of the shoe. Allbirds, originally a sustainable sneaker company, had not only failed to pay attention to the underlying needs and values of their ICP, but had also lost its way by attempting to expand the brand to irrelevant segments. Much like what we described for Nike, trying to enter new markets too quickly fogged up Allbirds’ core brand image and diminished overall perceived quality. But even this is too short a summary of what truly happened to Allbirds — so let’s break it all down.

In addition to high consumer spending, the customer acquisition landscape was quite different from what it is today - platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram offered clever segmentation tactics to target customers effectively, which gave these companies comparatively lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) than they had seen in the past. If you’ve been operating a business, you’ve got a plethora of data that you can use to your advantage. Here are some ways that our customers have seen growth from their existing customer base.

One of the most common challenges we see retail and ecommerce businesses experience is their inability to sustain their initial momentum. I mentioned this idea very briefly at the end of our Glossier case study, but in this case, Glossier lost its reputation due to bad HR and internal operational decision-making. More often than not, though, brands cannot maintain their brand image or awareness because of rigid, inflexible marketing strategies. That’s why we’re going to dive deep into Pokémon GO and how it went from having over 200m active players at its peak to there now only being 80m remaining.

There has been a lot of talk of building 'data apps' on the modern data stack. It's not clear who exactly is to be blame but it may be Martin Casado [1] and Benn Stancil [2]. But what does it even mean to build a data app? Are there any benefits or downsides? What are the technical challenges? I think the proposition is interesting... but these are tough questions we must answer if the concept is to be taken seriously.

The beer industry is one where people either care deeply about the brand they consume or don’t care at all. For the folks who do care, there’s a set of criteria they typically use to decide which beer to purchase: quality, taste, price, brand image, tradition, and authenticity. For Mountain Man Lager, it was clear that they absolutely nailed every one of those factors. For nearly a century, Mountain Man never once deviated from its core identity as a family-owned quality beer brand with a consistently strong, bitter recipe and a local bond to East Coast consumers. So when Mountain Man Lager suddenly started to consistently lose 2% of its revenue every year, Chris Prangel, the next inheritor of the family-owned brand, began to panic. For over 75 years, Mountain Man never once saw a decline in sales - so there was clearly a reason to be concerned. But what exactly happened?

LTV is one of those concepts that can easily be understood at surface level but often misunderstood at its core. But what exactly makes it so difficult to grasp? 1. LTV is hard to calculate, and nobody knows what to do with it. 2. There’s no way easy way to use it to measure growth. 3. Fixing (1) and (2) is much easier said than done.

Realistic movies are usually comedic and dramatic spins of real life, but if you’ve ever watched “The Devil Wears Prada,” you’ll know the film has quite accurately captured how intense and almost cultish the fashion and beauty industry can be. Glossier’s rise to fame, though, is largely attributed to its defiance of this cultural mindset. But it’s a little ironic - Glossier set out to escape from the echo chamber of the beauty industry, yet its own customer base is known for being extremely obsessed with the brand. Let’s dive deeper into what exactly triggered Glossier’s explosive takeover.

RFM is a customer segmentation methodology for e-commerce businesses. The insight behind this framework is that customers who purchased recently are more likely to purchase again. Equally, big and frequent spenders are more likely to respond to promotions than small and infrequent spenders. Together, the three metrics give you a way to create lifecycle segments that let you answer questions like: Who are my best customers? Which customers am I at risk of losing? Which customers are best to target with promotions? Which customers can I entice to spend more?

I’ve been a proud Spotify user since 2015 and have never reverted to another music streaming platform since then. There’s a reason Spotify is so skilled at converting customers into premium users and retaining them. Being a music platform, Spotify has mastered the art of personalization. However, what truly differentiates them from the competition is the way they manage to personalize both individual user experiences on the platform and the marketing content every user receives.

The problem we see with most brands is that they take an “everything to everyone” approach to retention marketing, which means they try to appeal to all their customers with the same generic campaigns and messages, rather than tailoring their marketing efforts to specific customer segments. We find that this approach leads to poor engagement and low retention rates, as folks aren’t likely to respond to messages that aren’t tailored to their interests. And thus, we see the importance of segmentation!

Robinhood was the first trading platform of its kind. With its goal to “democratize finance for all,” the platform enabled any user, regardless of financial expertise, to invest in stocks, crypto, options, and more. Of course, any company’s downfall is a result of a combination of multiple factors. But according to Robinhood’s CEO, Vlad Tenev, one of their critical mistakes was assuming that heightened user engagement in the pandemic would continue… post-pandemic.

99.9% of businesses are in the business of selling something, and the person on the other end of the transaction is a customer. Now, different businesses have different numbers of customers: Delta flies hundreds of millions of customers around the world each year (I’m writing this on a Delta flight right now), while a company that creates missile defense systems might do so for very few but usually very large countries over the course of a given decade. Most of these companies also experience what’s called “churn.” The term is most often attributed to companies that sell a subscription, but is also present in most other types of business, just with differing amounts of importance.

We were working with a +$40M e-commerce brand last year that sold coffee and tea online, and we found that their customer re-targeting strategy amounted to taking every person who hadn’t purchased in the last 6 months and sending them a coupon for 10% off the highest selling product that the brand had (or sometimes a product that was in overstock). This, while better than nothing, was leaving money on the table.We’ve also found this on the SaaS side. The retention strategy for surprisingly large companies can whittle down to effectively a poke/prod to anyone who hasn’t logged in in a few weeks. We’ve found that you can increase engagement by double digit percentages by making sure that you target the right customers at the right time.

What’s the first brand that comes to mind when you think of footwear? There’s a good chance you immediately thought of Nike (or Adidas, but let’s save that story for another day). And who can blame you? Nike is not only the largest shoe brand in the world, but they’re also one of the most well-known brands as a whole. At least in the footwear industry, their brand awareness is truly unparalleled.

Let’s take a look at one of the most successful retailers in the world - Target. Target’s decision to use data to both identify its customer segments and personalize its advertising efforts truly revolutionized the way data could be used in the retail space.

We think that there are three “quick win” areas where you can leverage data segmentation to improve aspects of strategy. We’ll start by looking at how data can help you optimize customer acquisition by identifying which products are most likely to lead to repeat purchases. Next, we'll dive into how leveraging data on customer behavior can lead to product decisions that keep your customers engaged and loyal. Finally, we'll discuss how data can help you decide on pricing and promotions that strike the right balance between short-term revenue and long-term profitability.

Just a few years ago, this niche industry was shocking the world with its sudden explosion in growth, valued at over $1.5 billion in 2016 and nearly doubling the next year. What’s crazy is that while HelloFresh now dominates the meal kit sector, this wasn’t always the case.

Finding new customers can be infuriatingly difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. While it’s always good to be on the lookout for potential ICP candidates, it’s also crucial to drill down on your current customers. After all, if you fail to cater towards your current customers, you might just lose them.

You just purchased a pair of sneakers from Allbirds, and you immediately receive a post-purchase email in your inbox. There’s about a 45% chance you even open the email in the first place, but let’s say you do. Which one of these emails would you be more likely to look through? Which would leave a more lasting impression?