The Mezenger

At The Mezenger, we rocket sales for eCom brands so they increase profit margins, lower CAC and sell on autopilot.

Founder

Townsquare Interactive

Inside Sales Representative

Tei Consulting Group

Outside Sales Rep / Team Lead

GLOBEX TRADING

Director Of Sales and Marketing

Founder at The Mezenger | Building lean & profitable eCom brands/communities. Sharing my lessons along the way.

Over the last half-decade, I’ve helped DTC brands build data-driven acquisition machines. 

Recently partnered with Dakota Watch, a small family business, and helped them increase their growth by 500%.

Here are a few ways I can help you do the same: 

Formtoro.com/grow (free 30-day trial) - collect better data and produce better customer insights on autopilot so you increase conversion rates and lower CAC

Luis Fernando Albuja

When was the last time anyone questioned the financial outcomes of retention marketing activities?

Going by the logic:

Every action you take must have a future expectation of results...

Nothing should be left to best practices or "experience".

This is the baseline of all good marketing.

And no one should ever settle for less.

Yet this is pretty typical for many agencies...

Trust-me-I'm-an-expert "strategy".

Nurturing customers, meeting the customer where they're at in the journey, personalisation.

Makes sense in theory, but what’s the incremental lift?

Is it the most efficient use of your limited resources?

At the 7-figure mark, trying to break 8-figures, this is an ever more crucial time.

That's what CTC's Global Accelerator Program solves for.

1. Better alignment with traditionally siloed growth <> retention teams.
2. Better agility to support a very dynamic marketing calendar.
3. Better analysis of activities that impact your P&L.

Together with Growth Strategists, Retention Strategists make this work.

At CTC, we always sign our names on the bottom line.

Because we know that’s what it really means to win.

If this speaks to you, let's chat and see if we'll be a good fit for each other.

Josh Tay

Getting people onto your subscription program is only one part of the equation.

Making them stay is the another.

Now, making sure you MAKE MONEY from them...

That's something commonly overlooked.

Often brands look at subscriber retention.

But the other metric that's missed is:

Subscription orders.

Because that's where your MRR comes from.

If someone skips their subscription, they're still considered an active subscriber.

When they skip the month though, it means you didn't get money.

Many people skipping cumulatively becomes a problem.

That's when you need to solve for it.

Director of Retention, Common Thread Collective | Building the world’s strongest retention program for 7 & 8 figure DTC brands

People sleeping on direct mail in the welcome series.

Here's a playbook you can copy:

1. Look at your time to first purchase chart

2. Locate the point where subscriber conversion almost stops
- Or when revenue from the cohort plummets

3. Trigger direct mail sequence at that point
- Do a sanity check with your existing email/sms welcome flow.
- You'll likely see the same occurrence.

4. Conduct a holdout on postcards if you're trialing for first time
- Once you see positive iROAS and iRPR, you can go 100% treatment

5. If no incrementality identified after maturity period for trial, kill campaign

We normally start with one-time winbacks as a trial to show proof of concept.

Then proceed to automate segments that hit our target iROAS.

Then move to mailmatch on welcome/cart abandons.

Then finally trial prospecting campaigns.

We've got skincare, accessories, fashion, furniture, babycare all on direct mail.

If there's anything cyclical, there's opportunity.

When disengagement happens on email, sms, app push, try a new channel.

This way you don't hurt your deliverability.

Or complain about long repurchase cycles because of the nature of the product.

Your strategy is only as strong as the playbooks you can piece together.

Offers are the biggest driver of retention.

Results speak for themselves.

Turns out Joy Sharma and I are pretty ok at what we do?

Points-based loyalty programs don't mean much to your customers.

Incremental? Doubt it.

It seems to be more a place where high LTV customers with repurchase intent congregate.

Correlation ≠ Causation

Look into your loyalty program.

Don't compare loyalty program LTV vs non-loyalty program LTV.

Instead:

Compare loyalty program 2+ customer LTV vs non-loyalty program 2+ customer LTV.

There you'll see the difference in LTV, which reveals the truth.

Membership programs are slightly different.

These are paid plans.

Where customers pay a monthly/quarterly/yearly fee for benefits.

(not to say loyalty programs are useless. "points" are just more effective when paired with memberships. because from a customer’s pov, points mean practically nothing but a discount. which you also could argue, you might as well just send a discount code post purchase with cumulative spend threshold)

This is where bonus stacking comes in very handy.

We see that there actually is a huge portion of customers who come in with membership already on first purchase.

And there is significant incremental lift in LTV for these customers.

Over 60 days, 180 days, 365 days.

This can't be a set it and forget it program though.

You need to plan moments around this.

And campaign calendar to push the growth of this program.

Flows updated for this as well.

People think that this should be an upsell post-purchase.

Data shows otherwise.

Making back your cost of membership program is also fast.

Eg. if program is $500/mo, at $49 per subscriber, you only need 10 subscribers per month to breakeven.

Drive adoption and factor in benefit costs into your unit economics.

- feature membership program in nav bar
- include section on perks in middle of home page
- add membership program to cart drawer
- traffic running to dedicated membership program LP with different angles for different personas
- email flows pushing membership program both pre and post purchase featuring exclusive products
- campaigns with different angles to drive adoption targeting non-members/product highlights with cta to membership page

A 1% adoption rate in your customer list isn't unattainable.

With additional LTV front-loaded from membership fee + LTV from repeat purchases, this is a playbook worth looking into.

Memberships work great for highly consumable brands even with subscription program, and cyclical businesses where novelty is a big factor for returning customers.

Emails and SMS are a tiny portion of the much bigger retention play.

Offer structure, unit economics, looking at new vs legacy repeat rate to caculate rev potential...

These need to be considered.

Think deep.

Take big swings.

Make big money.

---
Client Niche in image: Accessories

Just because you sell skincare, doesn't mean you need to only talk about skincare.

In this example, we tested running traffic to 2 quizzes.

Quiz 1: Which smoothie matches your personality
Quiz 2: Which beauty routine is right for you

We didn't expect the smoothie version to outperform by so much.

Most people would've stopped just after creating a quiz.

Or maybe compared quiz AOV/LTV vs non-quiz takers.

But we thought this would be a worth-while test.

Lesson: Think about your customers' lifestyle. 

And alternatives (not complementry) for your product. 

Weave them together.

Now this is a fascinating insight that our retention team passed to the growth team.

Client industry: Apparel

And we found that customers who bought designs with dogs had much higher LTV than those who didn't.

What brand will be doing:

- Add new filter for dogs for easier nav
- Test new designs with dogs

What we'll be doing:

- Dedicated dog ads
- Find more of such niches

How much time is your team investing into drawing insights?
Is your team reporting on metrics or taking action?
Are you asking the right questions?

When creating any post-purchase upsells/cross-sells, always rely on your product journey map.

The common way:

Person adds sample > They buy regular next

Data might show otherwise.

In this case, person goes straight into bundle.

Even for singles, they seem to not replenish the same product.

Instead, they gravitate towards bundles, and stay on bundle orders.

This could drastically change the way you push for repurchases.

Repurchase rate as a metric is a lie.

Split that out into two:

1. Early retention

Typically within your first 60 days.

Look into your time between orders chart.

Majority of LTV growth and repurchases happen here.


2. Legacy re-activation

Depending on your product cycle, this could be 180-365 days.

Marketing moments matter a lot here.

So consider your event-effect.

Only when you split them out, do you know where your gaps and opportunities are.

Then set a target and implement to shoot towards that number within a given timeline.

The execution of these activities means that your rev targets need to take these into account.

So sync with your growth team on revenue expectations.

Now it's a matter of prioritisation.

And resource allocation.

So you can focus your retention activities on achieving this number.

While balancing your monthly rev goals.

Interestingly, this mystery item was the fourth most purchased item.

This item's added to the cart drawer as a default upsell on every product.

Avg item price: $35
Mystery item: $15

Objective: How can we liquidate slow/dead inventory faster?

Go-forward questions:

1. Should we create a mystery bundle option too?
2. Can we create "mystery gift" as a front-end offer?

These will all be tests to be conducted.

Ask the right questions...

... Come up with the right hypotheses

... Test the right things

... Take the right actions


Client niche: Accessories

Here's the thing that everyone needs to understand.

Majority of your pre-purchase flow revenue comes from new rev targets.

And for post-purchase, it's from past cohorts.

Which makes it predictable to forecast.

This gives you extreme ownership over your campaign revenue targets.

Based on your projections, what's the delta between expectations and actuals?

Then you solve for it with moments, volume, or reallocate budget elsewhere if your list can't take the squeeze.

Predictability gives you the ability to execute correctly.

Email revenue targets must roll up into total daily/weekly/monthly targets.

Just like all other demand capture channels.

If there's no expectation of results, you're shooting blind.

And any post-mortem reporting holds little value.

It's easy to look backwards and come up with reasons as to why it didn't work.

Sometimes that'll be too late.

You missed your goals.

Proactivity starts with the forecast, based on the growth plan.

Are you holding email accountable to performance, or justifying fluke performance after the fact?

Now, next big problem to solve is this:

How do we determine demand elasticity of the list?

1. Are we just redistributing revenue to email when it would already have come through?

- send frequency vs organic revenue baseline
- residual correlation of rev lift when stripped of seasonality and normalised for evergreen spend

2. Are we just bringing forward LTV from future months?

- early warning signs of list and offer fatigue

3. Are we accounting for revenue dips post high-volume/promo periods?

- revenue curve over time, revenue reversion pattern


How would you solve for these?

Always nice to know we're pacing on target, within <10% delta.

We still have big moments we're expecting towards end of month.

Tracking performance this way takes away guesswork.

The worst thing an agency can do is to come up with excuses to justify underperformance.

Over and over again.

When all that was needed was accountability.

No fluffy customer journey theory.

Just real stuff that you can implement right now.

And all the data points you need.

Feel free to take this and run with it.

Client niche: F&B, subscription

How to overcome weak subscription program take-up rate

Are you levergaging Web Push notifications?

- Welcome
- Browse abandons
- Cart abandons

If you find your lead:conversion rate on these email/sms flows are weak, it might make sense to have another channel to support.

At the end of the day, it's about impressions.

So where do your customers hang out, that you also be on?

Show up there and drive them back to site.

Then track lead:conversion efficiency

The way you structure a tiered loyalty program must take psychological triggers in mind + factor in unit economics.

Weak participation rate = Poor incremental revenue

= unnecessary complexity 

= useless extra cost to run the program

Three post-purchase micro surveys conducted across three different brands.

All had one same option:

"When there's a sale on"

In all instances, that came up as the highest volume response.

This is probably the reality for most ecommerce brands.

People are most likely to shop when there's a sale or a discount.

Knowing this, it's ever more important to bake the discounts already into the price of your product.

So that you can afford to "discount" when necessary.

Without having a really strong, notable brand, is it really possible to never go on sale, and still maximise your growth potential both on new and returning rev?

What do you think?

Your cart drawers, checkout upsell, post-purchase upsell funnel will bump your LTV up more than a bounce-back post-purchase email will.

On these pages, you have 100% open rates.

With the highest purchase intent.

Take advantage of it.

Different products in cart might need different upsells based on:

- LTV growth by product
- Total LTV by product (including AOV)
- Balance with product demand (volume)
- Product journey
- Frequently bought together

Then once you have your various funnels/upsells in place, there should be monthly measurement to identify what needs improvement.

How equipped are you and/or your retention team right now to execute this?

taplio

The Battle

Luis Fernando Albuja

Josh Tay

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taplio

The Battle

Luis Fernando Albuja

Josh Tay

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Josh Tay's LinkedIn Performance

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