The Power of Testing
Claudica Kenol is a Senior CRM Specialist at Ollie.
Claudica Kenol brings extensive experience in digital marketing, specializing in reporting, analysis, and CRM tools like Iterable. At the summit, she will showcase how Ollie Pets uses Extole to refine referral strategies and optimize marketing efforts.
See the key chapters from Claudica's talk, and dive in where you'd like.
What does it mean to keep referral programs dynamic and fresh?
How Does Ollie Use Extole?
Transcript
All right, we use Extole for our referral program. It gives our active subscribers a way to share exclusive referral discounts with their friends and family. We’re also able to reward our advocates for successful referrals through the Extole program. We’re able to give them store credit off of their own subscription or their future orders.
What Does Ollie Do?
Transcript
Ollie is a company that sells high quality fresh dog food and offers a subscription that’s personalized to your dog so you’re able to get them the nutrition they need with the convenience of not having to figure out exactly what to include in their meals.
Refining Communication with Lead
Transcript
So at the start of our program, there were understandably some growing pains. Whether it was the flow of the user journey wasn’t very clear and intuitive for new users on what to do next, where to go or the expectations of how to redeem the offer, when to expect they would get their reward and what kind of steps would need to be taken for them to actually earn the reward. So with feedback from our users on the advocate and the lead side, we made improvements to how we communicate the details of our promotions, how to redeem the offer, the steps they need to take and the expectation of how long it would take to get an offer. At that time, it was a very manual process. So it could take a few business days with the smaller team we had. So, we started laying out that time period in our marketing. So people would know to not expect to get their reward right away, or to not expect their reward right after sharing referral, knowing that their friend would need to order their first box to be eligible to then earn that reward.
How Does Extole Help Ollie?
Transcript
So, Extole along with providing the platform to run and manage referrals. It’s also really user friendly to make updates and edits to our creative and the offers that we provide on the lead side, the refer friends side and on the advocate subscriber side, as far as rewards that we give out.
How to Clarify Promo Processes
Transcript
We would have people reach out to our customer service team, whether they were referred friends that were sent to referral from a family member or someone they know and they weren’t quite sure about what to do next or what time period to that their friend should be able to get the referral or we would have active customers reach out saying they know they shared this many referrals but they don’t see that store credit added to their account yet. So, we did some work to partner with our customer service team so that they could help educate our users when they would reach out with questions but we also made updates to our workflow and our journey so that people would end up seeing CTAs directing them to go from their referral email to go into onboarding and knowing that the discount would automatically be applied. That would be something that a lot of our leads and referred friends were unsure of how to actually redeem the offer. They weren’t sure whether or not they had to go somewhere else or enter a code that they weren’t seeing. So those were some things we tried to make more clear from the beginning of the journey.
Testing Different Discount Levels
Transcript
In the past, we had a higher offer for League. it’s off of their first box going through the referral program but we wanted to test our hypothesis and see if going down to a lower offer would still be enticing to leads and have them convert, but also match our business goals of improving retention LTV and still keeping a strong conversion for the referral program. So we tested between our BAU Evergreen, 90% off offer against 80% and 70% in our findings, we saw the 70% off discount was the winner. Where we saw higher total conversion, higher retention rates of customers and higher LTV. One of the interesting things about the group that saw the 70% offer, some of that group did not redeem the referral offer but they did end up coming back later after seeing another leads offer in the wild. So the group who saw 70% did have higher intent of buying at some point and because they didn’t take a richer offer necessarily. They ended up having a stronger retention and staying on after the discount was not on their recurring orders going forward. That’s fascinating. Would you have expected that? Was that question. I would not have expected that. I would have expected the lower kind of the lower I would have expected the lower discount to have a lower overall conversion. We think that customers are always looking for a deal but we have found in our industry, when it comes to pets, they’re seen as family. People aren’t always just looking for the best cost and the best deal but they also want the best value.
Driving Urgency With Limited-Time Offers
Transcript
We wanted to add more urgency and more limited time offer messaging into our communications to our leads, when we were doing an elevated offer, for a smaller time period. And through Extole. It was very easy to make quick changes to the messaging and the copy during the beginning of that campaign and then switching it back to our evergreen at the end. This helped create an expectation of when that offer would be available and drove urgency for people to take advantage of that offer during that limited time period.
Why It's Important to Refresh Campaign Creative
Transcript
We are regularly reaching out to our active subscribers about the referral program and we want to keep that fresh and exciting for them so they’re not constantly seeing the same creative when they go back to that share experience. So we have been doing more work to update creative whether it’s designs or seasonal call outs to the different seasons and holidays and elevated burst offers that we run periodically so that it stays fun and fresh and exciting for these customers that keep seeing these messages promoting the program.
The Power of A/B Testing
Transcript
We AB tested personalization through the Extole program. We found higher engagement and more shares when we included customization and personalization, like including the member’s name or the dog’s name or even the friend’s name that they’re sending referrals to. We found better results sending that out versus a generic message that’s more copy and paste. Extole makes it very easy to add this personalization with their handlebar logic so that you can dynamically have that information put into your messages for whoever is viewing it.
Sharing Rewards for Friends and Family
Transcript
This is something that we feel really strongly about. This program, we have a module and a call out to sharing that excitement with your friends and family as soon as the confirmation page. We know that’s a period where people are really excited about their purchase and they want to share that joy with other dog people that they know.
Advice for Referral First - Timers
Transcript
My piece of advice. Ask your representative what the functionality is and what are you able to change yourself and manage yourself and what is something that you have to reach out to their support team. It was really nice to see how much we were able to manage on our own side. The Extole team is very helpful with changing projects and helping get things set up and running but it’s amazing when you’re able to manage your own campaigns and make changes as quickly as you need to yourself.
The Power of Extole's Reporting
Transcript
I would say the reporting is something that I have really been impressed with how there’s been updates on the new different types of reports and the different features and how you can customize them and schedule them. It’s really helpful when you are working on these campaigns, that you’re able to read how they’re performing and share that out with other teams to help build your case about why this program is really necessary to the business.
How Treasury Wine Estates Uses Extole
The Value of Unearthing and Rewarding Brand Ambassadors
The Importance of Leveraging Happy customers
The Value of Rewarding Loyal Customers
How to Keep Customers Engaged with New Offers
How Extole Offers a Hands-On Partnership to Treasury Wine Estates
The Importance of Programs that are Truly Sustainable
In any form of marketing, you always need to be data-driven, and you can never stand still. Referral, or CLG, is no different.
Claudica Kenol
