Discover how integrating Mention Me and Klaviyo empowers Wild to nurture brand advocates through better data.
Within just a year of hitting the market, Wild had become the most popular natural deodorant in the UK. Today, consumers can find its eco-friendly products in the likes of Sainsbury’s and Boots.
As business boomed during the pandemic, Wild’s Marketing team knew its fast-growing fanbase presented a golden opportunity to drive long-term growth. To take advantage of this, it implemented Mention Me’s Referral Engineering® platform.
Its referral programme quickly took off, with 26% of customers sharing the brand with friends and 36% of these referrals converting into new customers within the first six months. But similar success wasn’t being had across all its marketing channels.
In the face of iOS tracking changes, Wild was finding it increasingly difficult to target the right audiences on paid social. Meanwhile, acquisition costs were rising fast, showing no signs of slowing down.
We're sitting on a lot of first-party data, but we've lost a lot of the data sources we used to rely on.
Failing to address this meant Wild risked its fast growth dropping off as quickly as it had begun, underpinned by drastically fluctuating returns and a tight-squeezed marketing budget.
To overcome these challenges, Wild turned to its referral platform. "We'd lost many of the data sources we used to rely on, but were sitting on a lot of first-party referral data,” recalls Wouter Schreurs, Head of Performance Marketing at Wild.
The team already knew its referring customers had high lifetime value, spending more and introducing more high-quality customers than the average shopper. To build on this and grow its loyal fanbase, Wild integrated Mention Me with its customer engagement platform, Klaviyo.
It was a seamless integration. We were set up within a couple of days.
“Email marketing is a really important part of our marketing mix – that's how we communicate with our customers,” Harry tells us. “But we weren't leveraging all of our customer data and email database.”
Enter the Mention Me and Klaviyo integration. By combining referral with its customer engagement platform, Wild has seized two key advantages when it comes to nurturing customer advocacy through email.
The first is driving more referrals to acquire more high-quality customers. Once the integration was set up, Wild started promoting referral in its emails, sending automated reminder emails to both referrers and those they’ve referred.
These emails quickly proved to drive strong engagement, with referrer reminder emails getting a 76% open rate and 11% click-through rate earlier this year (compared to benchmarks of 20% and 8%).
Another advantage of the integration is the ability for Wild to grow its database in real-time with first-party referral data.
Within three months of set-up, Wild’s created almost 50,000 contacts, with more than 9,000 opting in to receive emails. Given that these contacts were referred to the brand themselves, Wild knew it was growing its database with customers who had a higher LTV and were more likely to carry on referring — 5x more likely, to be exact.
As well as expanding the number of people the brand can reach, this empowers the team to double down on converting email subscribers into brand advocates who jump at the chance to tell their friends about Wild. By segmenting these customers in Klaviyo, Wild can give them the VIP treatment through engaging, personalised content that nudges them closer to making their first purchase.
Beyond the numbers, the integration means Wild is building stronger customer relationships destined to drive long-term growth.
That’s something Priya Nayyar Patel, Partner Success Manager at Klaviyo has seen first-hand. "Adding referral into Wild’s marketing campaigns has helped to deliver a really engaging relationship with every customer, versus if someone has just stumbled across their website and signed up to emails,” she says.
Referral drives higher engagement, and builds a stronger long-term relationship with your customers.
While driving up referral rates through email was a welcome result for Wild, they wanted to do even more with the integration.
“We could see that referrers are the type of customers we want to go after,” says Wouter. “We know they have a higher lifetime value, so we wanted to use these insights in our email marketing and paid social strategy.”
By targeting audiences that behaved like customers who shared the brand with friends, Wild knew it had a greater chance of increasing conversions and acquiring more customers likely to become brand advocates – hitting short-term targets while building a fanbase that would drive long-term growth.
To enhance its paid social performance with referral data, Wild started targeting referrer lookalike audiences. The integration seamlessly transfers Mention Me’s referral data directly into Klaviyo, to then create these lookalike audiences on Facebook.
Wild’s assessment quickly proved correct: referrer lookalikes convert 17% more than standard seed audiences.
Better yet, these new customers have a 5% higher average order value and cost 15% less to acquire – highlighting that referring customers are more valuable from the get-go.
We saw really positive results straight away. Since then, we’ve widened our audiences and the results are still very, very positive.
As the Marketing team at Wild prepares for the final nail in the cookie coffin in 2023, using customer data to lead its engagement strategy has never been more crucial. And as acquisition costs continue to climb to sky-high levels, driving growth through the brand’s existing customers is at the forefront of its future plans.
Wouter is well aware of how Wild’s strategy will need to adapt. “In an increasingly privacy-heavy world, we’ll need to rely on first-party data and the power of word of mouth even more.”
Wild’s results so far prove the value of its advocacy-first approach – something it plans to build on further over the times ahead.
“There's a lot more we can do with the data, especially in the online and offline omnichannel mix," Harry says.
The team is continuing to test and optimise the way referral data feeds into its email marketing and paid social strategies, helping to drive action and nurture brand advocacy.
One thing’s for certain: the team has no regrets about bringing Mention Me and Klaviyo together.
It completely makes sense to integrate referral into your email strategy. It’s going to become even more important for us as we build out our email flows and assess how customers interact with our referral messages. It's absolutely worth doing.
Within just three months of launching, the Mention Me and Klaviyo integration has:
