50% growth in repeat revenue without increase in acquisition

How a leading digital organic food brand increase their D2C retention revenue by 50% without increasing customers acquired per month in 5 months

About the brand

Brand X is a 5-year-old digital-first organic food brand that grows, aggregates and

sells organic food products across channels like their own website, and marketplaces such as Amazon,

Flipkart and farmer markets.

Problem Statement

They approached us with the challenge of growing their D2C web and app revenue without a major change in customer acquisition.

Customer Cohorts had been declining month-on-month with overall repeat customer revenues falling in the same trend

Solution

We implemented a 3 step-focus strategy to increase repeat revenue

1) Identify products and channels with better repeat rates and aligned acquisition strategy: Retention is a function of acquisition and hence we analysed after buying which products from which channels (app vs. web) drew higher repeat rates. We identified

a) A lot of seasonal products although had low acquisition costs but 12m LTV:CAC ratio was poor.

b) App customers had a 30% higher repeat rate than website users. However, CAC for app users was 3x of web users.

We shifted customer acquisition spend and efforts towards products with higher repeat rates and nudged web users to move their buying behaviour to app so as to fix retention at acquisition stage only.

2) Lost customer reactivation: We identified almost 20% of the overall customer base had bought 2 or more times in the past but had not come back in the last 6 months. With of help of brand team, we called customers to identify reasons for not buying again.

We found out 4 kinds of issues for non-repeat behaviour:

  1. Brand messaging was either irrelevant and customers had unsubscribed/marked spam as there was no segmentation in communication
  2. Delivery timelines were very long
  3. A portion of customers were getting products on discount from channels like Amazon and Blinkit

We ensured that all future brand communication on channels like Email, WhatsApp and SMS is contextual, not sent frequently and engagement rates were higher.

We also ran a reactivation campaign with relevant offers to get the customer buy from D2C channel just once more.

3) Customer Journeys to increase LTV – We identified that

  1. Brand was using different software to communicate with customers on different channels. Also, communication was largely generic in nature without any personalisation
  2. 90% of the churn was happening in the first month

We onboarded and implemented a multi-channel engagement software to

  1. Stitch and automate all outbound customer comms in a single unified view basis user data and action
  2. Implement highly segmented non-intrusive cross-sell, upsell, repeat and win-back journeys to prevent users from churning

Results

1) M1 to M6 grew by 45% to 115% on an average

2) Monthly revenue from repeat customers grew by ~44% in 5 months