How BrandAlley Leveraged Advocacy Data to Supercharge Their Growth

We have a fantastic session, coming up. We're gonna talk about customer efficacy, which is a something that people are talking more and more about, certainly at least in our world, and very specifically, we're gonna be joined by our partner, Mention Me, and Mention Me and our mutual customer, Brand Valley. If you haven't Run in to mention me, they are a referral and advocacy platform, delivering more than two billion in revenue for five hundred grams globally, including Puma, Michael Kors, and, of course, our friends at Brand Valley. And they're gonna talk about the power of brand advocacy and how brands can tap into its benefits and more specifically about what Anneali is doing to use that advocacy data to supercharge growth. So I am delighted to be joined by Ray from mentioned me, who is the director of strategic partnerships, and I can promise you, she will bring an engaging and energetic session. And she has brought with her, Michelle Herney, who's ahead marketing at Brand Ally, who I think many of us know, certainly I'm a customer. So I don't I'm I'm not gonna give you an overview of that. I'm sure she can do it better than I can. That note, Kat, I'll hand things to you to kick things off. Great. Thank you so much, Sarah, and thanks everyone for joining the session today. So just to give a high level agenda of what looking to cover. So I'm gonna start by talking and give you some context around brand advocacy and talking to the power that brand advocacy can have with businesses today. I'm then gonna hand over to Michelle who's gonna be talking about how brand Nelly specifically have been leveraging advocacy over the last six years we've mentioned to me and specific, highlight specific examples of how they've been doing that. And then if we do have time at the end, we're gonna have some time with posing thoughts and potentially some questions Sarah at the end as well. Yeah. Hopefully, really useful session, good balance between context and some tangible examples you guys can be using as inspiration off the back of this call. So I'm gonna start by talking to the power of brand advocacy. So brand advocacy is when your customers are at the stage where they're going out, and spreading the word on behalf of your business. And, you know, this is the most valuable form of marketing. If you're getting your customers to do this, this is the most ideal way that you can drive your Having said that, it's also one of the most invisible forms of marketing, you know, referral, advocacy. It's very difficult to track it can be really difficult to action in any kind of way. And a lot of the time mentioned me, we'll be speaking to businesses where, you know, they know a huge amount customers coming in are coming off the back of recommendations, which is great. But whilst that's great, it's very difficult for them to do anything with that information. Actually very difficult to drive it from a marketing perspective. And so what we're doing it mentioned to me is really helping brands turn advocacy into something they can truly leverage to be the growth drivers of their business. So what I'm gonna do now is talk you through an example with one of our clients matches fashion, and all the data you see on the screen here is real data with our with our client. And I guess just to start off with the small pink dot that you can see I've just highlighted is one of their clients and one of their customers deeper. So, if you were to look at a customer like in your in your database, you would just be looking at that pink circle. You'd be looking at her, you know, behavior metrics, her activity, and you'd be looking at her in isolation. However, when you start looking at aggregated data and start tracking advocacy and understanding it, this is what happens after deeper. You can see on the screen here that deeper three friends who referred on, who referred on, who referred on, and you end up with this incredible network of customers who in this instance with matches actually ended up ending nearly half a million in revenue. And so what, you know, to an extent with all businesses with everyone on on the today, referral and advocacy like this will be happening in your business. And what we do at mentioned me is first we'll make more of this happen and make sure you're able to optimize it. But secondly, and crucially track it. Because if you're able to track this, you're able to start really thinking about how you wanna treat these customers differently. You know, make sure you're engaging them, encouraging them, thanking them doing what they're doing and keep them doing it, keep them referring onwards, but also think about how you wanna really drive this, to really drive that organic growth in the best way possible. And ultimately, that is our vision that mentioned me, is to help all brands think advocacy first. So essentially, when you when you're thinking about how to grow your business, then first thing you think about is how to encourage your customers to go out there and spread the word on the behalf of your business before you're thinking about paid channels. Obviously, pay channels aren't going anywhere, but if you think in this way and if you think in this order, it's a much better way of driving growth. You're gonna have superior economics. You're gonna have a true competitive differentiator in terms of how you're driving growth and focusing on that organic growth first. And in terms of how to, you know, actually action it, there are three key challenges when it comes to driving efficacy. And the first is all around MPS. So I'm sure most of the people on the on the, audience today will know MPS and will be collecting it, but for anyone that and MPS is net promoter score, and it's when a business asks their customer on a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend? And if you've got any customers that you score a nine or a ten, on that scale, they're a promoter. And so the first challenge that you wanna be looking and where a lot of businesses are looking at their attention is how can you get more of your customers scoring that nine and ten? How do you get more of those promoters? And this is where a lot of attention is being focused on. The challenge there or the problem there is a lot of the time people score nine and ten and then they stop there. They don't actually go on to do anything. And so second challenge is all about how do you encourage more of those promoters, the people scoring nine and ten to actually become at about the cuts who are going out and spreading the word on the behalf of your business. And then the final challenge is all about collecting the data. So this is where tracking referral is so powerful because if you're able to shot start tracking referral, you're able to really start understanding. First of all, the metrics that I mentioned earlier and those referrals graphs, but also really start thinking about how you wanna optimize it and how you want to really use advocacy to drive your growth in the long run. And so when you think about driving growth, there are really three key areas where you're able to drive growth. You know, encouraging customers to come back and spend more. It's getting your customers to tell their friends about you and equality customers in. Obviously then there's the customers you acquire through paid channels. And so you can kind of split this into two main buckets. You've got earn growth and you've got paid growth. And, you know, earn growth essentially is the growth that you drive through doing the best by your customers and so that they're kind back spending more and referring friends. So essentially, it's the growth that you drive before one theory is spending on sales and marketing. Paid grants, obviously, the growth you you drive through those paid channels. Now as you all know, I don't need to go into detail here, but paid channels are getting more and more challenging to use. You know, they're getting more and more expensive. A lot of the time, less effective, you know, the cost effectiveness, cost effectiveness of them is not scalable at all. And so really brands need to be focusing more now than ever on earned growth And, you know, what we're seeing is that brands that are doing this are are are performing the best of the market because by focusing on earned growth, not only is it a fantastic way to drive that organic growth that really scales in the long term. There's also an amazing way to gather really unique first party data but then you can use Optimize the performance of other channels like paid, like different paid channels. And actually, Michelle in a moment is going to talk about how Brand Ali have been using efficacy data to do just that But really, earn growth is really where where the opportunity is and where the future of marketing really needs to be when we're focused on scaling and supercharging, brands growth in the long run. And so it mentioned me what we're doing is we're helping brands along that journey and helping them drive that growth through advocacy and and drive growth from all the good that you're doing with your customers so that your your best, your happiest customers don't just stop at leaving you a nine or a ten at NPS all, but actually go to the lengths of going out there and spreading the world apart for business, acquiring customers in, and and generate those referral graphs that I showed earlier. And so in terms of how we approach this, there are kind of four key areas. So we start by tracking and optimizing referral. How we collect the data. That then enables you to identify who your best customers really are. From that point, then you can drive efficiencies across your marketing strategy with that as consumer referral data. And then ultimately, you wanna get to the point where every interaction you have with your customers is trying to encourage them to become that advocate. Now I'm gonna hand over to Michelle in just a second to talk about how Brand Dolly had been on that journey and highlight specific examples of how they've been doing that. But just before I hand over, there's one key piece of data, advocacy data that I wanna highlight. That's really enabling businesses like Brand Valley to have a real competitive to differentiate her when it comes to engaging with customers and driving that growth in the long run. And that data's all about helping brands understand who your best customer truly is. So for most businesses right now, the way they'll measure the value of the customer is based on lifetime value. So, recently, frequency and monetary value. Obviously, that makes a huge amount of sense, but it is quite a limited view of a customer because your customers do much more than just buy with you. And so by applying a whole new lens of advocate data on top, you get a much more holistic view of the value of that customer to your business. And so for businesses like Brand Ally, we're helping them collect a metric called extended customer revenue or ECR for short. Which is looking at a customer's lifetime value, as we know it, plus all the revenue they drive from referring their friends. So just to visualize, like, how impactful this can be. So this is Steph. This let's say this is one of, Brand Ali's customers. In terms of her purchase, the hager, she buys two dresses a year, which accounts to about two hundred dollars a year. And so because she's not coming you know, a lot of times, she's not spending a huge amount. She's automatically segmented as a lower quartile LTV customer. So, you know, nurtured in the background of course, but not particularly prior sized as a VIP in terms of her experience. And for most brands, that would be their view of Steph. But because brand that you wrote with mentioned me, They can see that whilst Steph might not initially look super valuable based on that direct spend, we can actually see that Steph has referred seven friends who've referred four more. Her ex extended customer revenue is huge, much, much higher than that original two hundred dollars. And it's customers like Steph that are your VIPs, you know, they're the ones that using the data you can identify and really engage with, you wanna be able to engage with her. Thank her encourage her to keep doing what she's doing. The risk is if you don't see any of this data and you're only looking at her for that two hundred dollars, you're not prioritizing her experience necessarily. So the risk is she then goes somewhere else and takes her friends with her. So this data is really unique enabling you to identify customers like Steph. The really exciting thing here is most brands don't have access to any of this data, and they're not thinking in this way. So it's a real differentiator in terms of identify whole new segments of customers that are in your database right now. As I said, referral and advocacy will be happening in in your business right now. And enabling you to identify them and engage in the best way possible to make sure you're really nurturing to, right, to make sure you're driving that long term growth. Now there's just two points to one highlight before handing over to Michelle. The first is, you know, there might be some people on the call thinking, you know, I've actually I've already got my segment. I'm sure they're the ones that are my advocates. They're the ones that are reviewing the friends, the ones that are earning the most. And actually, it mentioned me we did some analysis across all five hundred of our clients and we found there's absolutely no correlation between how much someone spends and how much they refer. So truly, we're seeing again and again with our clients. It's customers like Steph that aren't necessarily your top spenders. They're not they don't seem particularly valuable based on direct spend, but they are the ones that your huge advocates bring in a huge amount of indirect revenue. You really need to use this data to unlock these segments that you're not looking at right now. The second piece of highlight is this data is more valuable than ever, right, now. As we all know with the economy, people are spending less. So to be able to understand more about your customer's value, beyond just their direct spend is an amazing way to really differentiate the way that you're identifying and engaging with customers to really supercharge and long term that growth. So I'm gonna hand over to Michelle now to talk a little bit about how brand Ali have been leveraging advocacy data and also optimize referral. To really supercharge of future proof their growth. Thank you very much, Cass. Hello, everybody. I'm Michelle, and for the next ten minutes or so, I will be speaking about Brown Javy's journey to advocacy. For those of you who don't know, Brand Valley is the UK's largest members only flash sale website. We're home to over a thousand premium and luxury brands that's across homeware, UC, and so much more. In order to explore our website, you need to sign up and become a member. It's quick, and it's easy, and it's free. Once you sign up then, you can access up to seventy five percent off brands from Mulberry Coach, Milton Brown, Emma mattresses, and everything in between. We launch up to forty new sales every single day, and these sales only lasts between four and seven days. So you have to be really quick because these offers sell out. So the Brand Valley journey, it's been quite the roller coaster. Right, I don't have time to take you on entirely today. But I'm gonna be sharing some highlights from that journey. The one consistent in our strategy for growth has been keeping customers at the core of everything that we do. I know it's a cliche, but it's completely true. So keeping our customers engaged and excited by brand value, it's a bit of an obsession, one which is timefully being paying off for us. So I'm going to be telling you how I've been feeding that obsession essentially with the help of mentioning Anna Marcellus for the past couple of years and how that session is really super charging your growth. So before we jump into it, just a quick look at Brand Valley's numbers, So we operate online only, and we cater to a highly engaged affluent member base in both the UK and France. Most of the information I'm sharing today is regarding Brand Valley UK, but I will speak to France occasionally. So quick look at our socials. We have over a million on our UK Facebook page, and we're growing everywhere else. Our member base is fifty eight percent female, but before twenty twenty, the gender split was close to eighty percent female. So that's changed drastically as we welcome more male shoppers because our old offering has grown and diversified so much Another acquisition this year has pushed our member base up to over nine million but also doubling our staff over not ace So that's really opened some exciting doors for us for better trading in Europe. So watch this space. Looking at our customers, forty three percent our customers are what we use to consider a VIP, meaning they spend over six hundred pounds per atom. So it's a pretty interesting metric because as I said, I'm talking about, like, year ago. We looked at this quite one dimensionally, meaning we were only focused on the individual value of the customer since working with Mention Me and with summer advocacy at the center of our retention strategy, we started to move away from only focusing on VIP end. It's just in isolation and focusing more on ECR, which is the extended customer revenue which cats spoke to. And the multiple ways that a customer can actually bring value to her brand. So we really wanna stop thinking very important person or a very important customer and think in terms of very important advocate because there's a lot more to customers than just what they spend. So nurturing advocates improves all the metrics that you see on a happy shop, a happy customers, they're a shop more, they're a tell their friends, and they're gonna come back quicker. So how do we put that very scientific formula into faxes, or we've been working with MentionE since two thousand and seventeen. And the main reason we engaged with MentionE back then was because we understood that Brand Ali was in a great position. We knew our customers loved us and we knew they were telling their friends, but we weren't exactly sure how we could, you know, harness this, really valuable advocating behavior that we saw, and that's for mentioning, Kenny. So also what you wish to mention me back then was not only the promise of a more sophisticated way of tracking and utilizing that referral marketing but the simplistic, you had very powerful name share that they offered, allowing our customers and their friends to simply use their name at checkout for an exclusive discount. It was an absolutely no brainer. But it was quick. It was easy to do, and it lends itself really nicely to the exclusive member element of Fran Dully. Customers didn't need to do anything other than to remember their own name when they were telling their friends about us. So six years on is still a crucial tool for us. Over a third of our new referral customers come from nameshare. Over the past couple of years, as we all know, marketing, consumer experience, and expect expectations online, as well as how platforms like Bench Me and Marissa's work have changed quite a lot. And brands Ali, like many other retailers have had to roll with these changes to survive. But for us, our formula for how we think about our customers has always remained the same and it's very simple. Have those satisfied customers time and time again they'll come loyalty to your brand, and they'll keep coming back. So the stronger that loyalty is keeping your return it, and they come back and become those brand advocate that we're talking about. This in turn then drives new customers, which you have the opportunity to satisfy your nurture, and you keep that cycle going. It's very simple, even though it's not always easy, and it certainly needs to be an obsession in order to really work. And it does really help when you work with characters who are as obsessed with it, as you were. So building on that formula is what has led us to sustainable growth over the years. This slide here here shows where we started in twenty seventeen that mentioned me. So in our first year, we have five hundred ninety orders. And over one point two million revenue from new customers. Last year, we enjoyed over one point six million orders from referral customers and nearly ten million a new customer revenue. So that growth was actually down to a lot of incremental changes, lots of AB testing, and constantly tweaking and changing our referral on things. Is that obsession again? Some examples of what we test over things like the copy that we used or the incentive, we'd run petitions or we'd switch out the imagery because everything is up for grabs. I've got a little point on, france down at the bottom there. So we actually rolled out and mentioned me for Brand Valley France in twenty twenty two. So we joined that November. And in our first year, we saw a hundred and six two percent growth in the revenue coming from new customers and a hundred and fifty percent growth in the number of new customers. And actually the AOV for France actually showed up seventy nine euro to ninety one euro. I'd like to mention that the French business for Brand Ali is literally a tenth the size of the UK. These numbers are very, very different to what's on screen for the UK business, but I think that just shows the power of mentioning for any sized business. Anyway, back to advocacy. So the obsession of Paris and high value brand advocates, it's a really great of sessions to have stats that you can see on screen here. Are taken very recently from our MentionE dashboard. And you can see why Ron Zali referral customers are worth obsessing over because they spend sixty three point four percent more in the first months than non referral customers. They share up to three times more than non referral customers, and they actually introduce three point eight times more new customers. We've also seen in the program that the average ECRs, again, that's extended customer revenue, which is the individual revenue plus their friend's revenue. Over four hundred and fifty one pounds in the first hundred and eighty days versus only ninety nine pounds for those who haven't been referred. If they're also one point nine times more likely to repeat crutches in those first one hundred and eighty days than non referred, it's pretty powerful stuff. These are true brand advocates that Brand Daddy has earned. So we wanna make them work for a brand in as many ways as possible. So how exactly do we do that? So we have a whole heap of pharmacy rich referral data set no room, actually, and we've just seen some examples of how wonderful these customers are. How do we make that data going up even further? So luckily, we don't have to think about that because mentioned me and immerse is already done it for us. So we've re recently started using the specially built tactics within ERC for mentioning and we've rolled out automation campaigns in our email marketing. These tactics actually use that referral data to enhance the CRM's performance and deliver the right message to the right customer at exactly the right time. So the ones that are live and that we've rolled out are the referee coupon reminder the refer coupon reminder and reminder to share again. And what these tactics promised to do is to increase customer acquisition, which is reminding those who have referred to use their cop coupon, increase customer engagement by reminding customers who've shared to keep on sharing and to drive the repeat purchase rate off, which is reminding those who have referred to come back and use their rewards. All this of course drives up conversion rate and your revenue as well as improving customer advocacy through relevant personalization and automation. So what you can see on screen there, that's a snapshot of one of the emails we created. It's very simple, but we use it effectively. We use that personalization to explain to the customer efficiently and effectively what the offer is, how and when they use it. All they have to do is click and, of course, check out. So some of the performance from that, so since we launched the tactic, our share rate has increased four point six percent. Our purchase rate has gone up twenty five percent, and the number of new customers that we have been driven by referral gone up twelve percent. So when that's when we compare the launch of these tactics to the period beforehand. Also, these emails have a super high open rate. They're twelve percent higher than our next best performing automation campaign. So we can really see the strength, in these tactics. So that's what we're doing over on emails. What else can we kind of obsess over? So the next thing we started looking at was paid social. And, you know, I'm just echoing what Kat said here. Like, what else is there to say about paid social, only that is really expensive. So if you can relate to that, I think you're gonna really like this next step. So this, obviously, rich first party referrals data that we have in mentioning can be injected into what we're doing on paid social in the form of smart audience So we were told this would be super easy to to set up. And we were told about this on a Friday morning, and by Friday afternoon, we had it set up. So we were promised that it would come with, you know, increased roas, lower CPA, and just general good vibes and, you know, good things happening for us. So we launched it and we obviously tested it to see what the performance was like. We compared it to, like, a a generic active customer look like audience that we were running. And to mention the audiences that we use drove a seventeen percent higher picture rate, our cost per reg twenty five percent north. So the campaign that we tested on, the, objective was to drive registrations. As I said earlier on, men, mentioned Rans Ali is a member's only website. So registrations are are core for us. So, yeah, so click cost per reg was twenty five percent lower. Against the generic one, and it actually dropped two hundred and eighty percent more registrations. So, you know, fair to say those promises, they all came through. So where do we go from here? I mean, there's so many places we can go from, but my talking time is pretty much up. So, Brown's Ali generates over eighty percent of their revenue from email marketing. So for us, those VIP emails and segmentations are so important. And we have keep those segments dynamic and fresh and relevant. Anything we can do to optimize them, we can. So right now, we're looking at how we can extract that data from mentioning to build a segment and push customers into a VIP status, or else use that referral data to maybe take customers out of black segment, for example. In terms of personalization, this is core for us and we wanna keep building upon that, speaking to customers in the right way and at the right time. We all understand the power of that. So for us it's just harnessing it and using it as effectively as we can. We're also looking at what we're doing on paid social. What else can we do there? We've already seen some great results. We're about to relaunch France, so we've recently one for a French business. So we've had to pause all over, activities there, and we're about to relaunch that. So I'm really excited to get that rolling. And to implement some of the tactics that we've used on the UK business with Benjamin Mercer. One thing I will keep coming back to too is smart experiments So the power of incremental changes is it's just amazing. Like, that's what I was showing in that earlier slide between our first year, twenty seventeen, and last year. That growth came from that constant testing and tweaking. And the next thing we really wanna get our calls into is NPS, the net promoter scale. So we've kinda done things a little bit backwards. This is something we've played with on and off over the years, but now we're really ready to have that as a cornerstone to our strategy for advocacy. So as you can see, we've got a lot there to keep that obsession burning. That's all that I have time for right now. I hope you enjoy that. And most importantly, I hope you got some ideas or Thank you. Thank you so much, Michelle and Kat. That was fantastic. I know that I'm I've been inspired, and I'm sure everybody here has all of a sudden We talk about advocacy a lot as marketers, but actually seeing it in action and seeing it deliver the kind of business value that you showed. I think was very, it'd be very difficult for somebody's eyes not to pop open and think, how can I do that? So thank you very much. I think it was a really inspiring session, and I think it's given people lots of creative ideas. So and I feel sure that there are questions out there. People didn't get a chance to ask. So, I am sharing contact details on this screen. I'm sure both Michelle and Kat would be delighted if you reached out to them directly and wanted to share some more details. Unfortunately, we ran out Thank you again so much. Both of you really, really appreciated it.