In our eCommerce Evolved webinar series, we go behind the scenes with some of the best brands in the UK and Europe to find out how they’re leveling up their retention strategy.
Recently, Yotpo’s EMEA Marketing Director, Talia Shani, sat down with Ash Madhav, Head of Customer Insight and Engagement at Revolution Beauty. They discussed how the beauty brand built a resilient loyalty strategy that has kept customers coming back for more. You can catch the full recording here.
Inside RevRewards, Revolution Beauty’s winning loyalty program
Revolution Beauty is a cruelty-free makeup brand that embraces accessibility. Since launching their loyalty program, RevRewards, two years ago, it has become a key growth driver for the brand. Ash believes its success is largely because of two reasons: Great timing, and continued data-driven optimization.
The program was launched just after COVID, and, as Ash explains, “At that point, online growth accelerated and customer acquisition was at its peak. So retaining as many of these customers as we could was my biggest priority.”
In RevRewards, customers earn points through purchases or by signing up for emails, downloading the app, referring a friend, or leaving a review. Every 100 points is worth five pounds, and as customers earn more points, they move up in tiers, each of which features different rewards and benefits.
From the start, they were strategic in how they structured their program: High-value activities like referrals are worth more points, because they’ve learned from their data that referred customers have a higher lifetime value versus non-loyalty members.
“Naturally, between 55-60% of our highly engaged and active customers refer friends,” Ash says. “But we wanted to go one step further to give them an extra reminder and incentive to do so.”
How Ash continually optimizes the brand’s loyalty program 2 years after launch
Ash joined Revolution Beauty four years ago, bringing more than 15 years of multi-channel retail experience and a strong background in data analytics and customer experience to the company.
She has been key in helping Revolution Beauty deepen their understanding of their customers’ behavior so they can more effectively acquire and retain customers.
Right now, her number one objective is to increase awareness about the loyalty program among Revolution Beauty customers. She’s experimented with how to improve growth through paid ads, website optimization, email banners, direct mail campaigns, and more.
“As our loyalty program has evolved, we’ve come a long way in terms of how we engage with our loyalty customers through personalized and timely content across various channels.”
One of the main growth drivers was optimizing for mobile. Diving into the data, Ash knew that 87% of their customers shop on mobile, so she tested what would happen if she added a loyalty slot as the number one position on the mobile menu. Making just this single change led to a 10% increase in participation across the board.
Additionally, Ash has tested different paid creatives to see what works best for their customers.
“It’s difficult to educate a customer on social media about our brand, let alone explain what our loyalty program is,” she says. “Our top-performing ad simply introduced the program with a few screenshots and benefits, but the performance was amazing. It had a click-through rate of over 8%, which is huge for a paid ad on social.”
As time has gone on, they’ve continued to optimize this ad further, targeting their audience to reach lookalike prospects and people who were not already members of the program.
The huge impact of hosting a dedicated loyalty week
Revolution Beauty’s largest – and most successful – awareness initiative is their Loyalty Week event. Twice a year they run a multi-channel campaign to encourage loyalty program sign-ups where they highlight the opportunity to take part in Loyalty Week, an invite-only event that features daily deals.
They advertise Loyalty Week through a combination of lead gen campaigns, paid social, push notifications, on-site placements, and outreach emails.
In addition to targeting non-members of the program, they also send emails to former members in the middle of the week showing what they’ve missed out on.
“We’ve seen a surge in sign-ups in the middle of the week because customers see that we’ve been doing daily deals and they don’t want to miss out.” Overall, Loyalty Week has led to really positive results all around: Beyond increased participation in the loyalty program, Revolution Beauty has also seen an increase in email opt-ins, account creation, and repeat visits to the website, as well as a boost in site conversion and sales.
Why personalization is a top ingredient for retention & loyalty
It can’t be stressed enough: Every customer is unique. Messaging must be personalized to where they are in their customer journey.
“We’re talking to customers based on what lifecycle stage they’re at,” Ash explains. “Customers who have abandoned their cart need to get different messages than those who have already made a purchase.”
One example of a personalization campaign they run is their replenishment program, which reminds customers who are running low on their favorite beauty products that it’s time to order more. Using well-timed reminders has helped them bring customers back at just the right moment.
With tight marketing budgets in a recession, making every interaction with a customer count is more important than ever.
“Personalized customer journey data is key,” Ash explains. “You can never get a truly single customer view, but striving to get as close to that as possible is really important.”
Tackling common challenges with loyalty programs
One challenge they often see with their customers is getting them to redeem the points they already have.
“Customers forget that they have points, but the more they redeem, the more active they are in the program, which results in higher order frequency and higher lifetime value,” Ash says.
In recent months, they’ve made progress with targeted initiatives to encourage customers to redeem their existing points.
“Our loyalty redemption has gone up by 40% through initiatives like points expiration reminders and offers to swap points for products.”
During peak season, they ran a multi-channel marketing campaign with the goal of points redemption. They sent a direct mail to their loyalty point holders with a simple Advent calendar showing how much money they could save by redeeming their points balance. They then connected this to the web experience, so when shoppers came to browse the site they would see a pop-up reminding them about the reward again.
The campaign didn’t include any additional discounts but simply reminded customers how much they could save using points they already had. However, because it was personalized with their account balance, it became one of their best-performing direct mail campaigns.
“We saw a 20% increase in redemptions versus the control group that didn’t receive the campaign,” Ash says. “We’ve done so many campaigns throughout the year, but this struck just the right combination of personalized points balance and what was relevant and timely.”
Revolution Beauty’s retention goals for next year
Through personalized campaigns, relevant messaging, and constant testing, Revolution Beauty is consistently setting a high standard for performance benchmarks, and then raising them. This sort of striving for constant improvement sets them apart in an industry where you can never risk becoming complacent.
Looking ahead to the coming year, they’re focused on ways to continue increasing participation in their loyalty program. They’ll continue to test and optimize in order to learn what works best for their customers.
