Lunch and Learn: How Huel is Driving Profitable, Scalable Growth Through Customer Advocacy Marketing with Mention Me

We are now going to start to talk about one of Emarsys' customer Huel, how they are driving profitable, scalable growth through customer advocacy marketing with our partner Mention Me. Now, if this is your first introduction to Huel, you should know that in 2015 they really set out to transform how all of us think about nutrition. And that mission is to make nutritionally complete, convenient and affordable food available with minimal impact on both animals and the environment. They had an incredibly fast mindset of growth and innovation, and since launching in 2015, Huel is actually sold over 300 million meals to customers. So they are really exciting company with a history of fast growth that we should be looking forward to hearing from. And in this session, we're going to explore the customer advocacy element of it and how it's related to performance and how it works alongside their traditional cross-channel marketing mix. And we're joined by two distinguished speakers. Tash Reynolds from Huel. She's their global head of CRM. She's actually based in the UK, but I believe she's actually joining us from New York today. So we're becoming yet more global. And as part of Tash's role, she leads teams in both the UK and the US and really, truly leads on Huel's number one value of make customers happy by nurturing relationships with loyal customers around the globe. With Tash is wonderful Kat Wray, who's the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Mention Me. Those of you have been on our masterclasses before, you may have had the opportunity to hear Kat speak. Kat's based here in London, and she's been with Mention Me for over six years. And she really has focused on honing a really deep expertise into how brands can harness the power of customer advocacy to grow their businesses. So without further ado, I'd like to hand things over to Tash and Kat. Great. Thank you so much, Sara, for the introduction. And thank you everyone for joining today. So in terms of what we're going to be covering today and our session, so we're going to start by talking to the power of customer advocacy. First we're talking about what customer advocacy is. But also why is so important for businesses be leveraging it to drive growth, especially in the current climate. And then we're going to talk about how you'll have done exactly that. And first of all, highlighting the value of that customer advocate, but also how Huel have leveraged advocacy data to supercharge profitable growth that they're sustaining. And if you have any time at the end, more than happy to answer your questions. But we're hoping it's a really useful session for you guys that this session is jam packed full of data, insights, tangible examples, that you all can use as inspiration off the back of the session. So we really hope you found it useful. So before jumping straight in, we wanted to set the scene on why it's so important for brands to be leveraging customer advocacy to drive growth, especially in today's climate. So we know right now it is a really tough mark out there. And there is a million reasons why that's the case. But two reasons that come up consistently as a challenge is, first of all, acquiring high-quality customers is getting more and more challenging. And again, there's a variety of reasons for that. It is more competitive than ever. So everyone is competing over the same customers and differentiates yourself can be really challenging. But also there is also really a big overreliance on paid acquisition channels that can often be quite inconsistent and unpredictable when it comes to cost and effectiveness. On the flip side, retaining customers is even harder and getting customers to come back, spend more, and become a lifelong customer of your brand. And so those key reasons are driving a lot of painful consequences. So we're having conversations with a lot of brands out there where some of them are missing growth targets, profitability, struggling, customer lifetime value might be dropping, engagement rates are struggling, and often there's overdependence on things like discounting. And ultimately what we're seeing a lot of is that brands are paying a huge amount to acquire customers using paid channels, and they're paying a huge amount to retain customers with discounts. And so if they are driving growth, it certainly isn't profitable growth they'll be able to sustain. And so what we're doing at Mention Me is helping brands drive that profitable growth by helping brands unlock the power of their customer base and specifically within them, help them unlock the power of a specific segment of customers that most brands are overlooking right now, and who already exist in your database, and it's a huge opportunity to unlock straight away. And just to explain what we mean by this, so most of the time when we're speaking to brands in the market, the way they will measure the value of a customer and the way they'll prioritize results, attention and targeting is focusing on the customers with the highest lifetime value. Who has the highest spend looking at recency, frequency and monetary value? Now obviously that makes a huge amount of sense, of course, but it is quite a limited view of your customer. Your customers do a lot more than just buy with your brand. And a key piece of data and a key lens of data that a lot of brands are missing out on are actually who are your customer advocates? So who are the customers who are actually going to the lengths of spreading the word about your business and helping drive organic growth through referrals? If you can get your customers doing this on your behalf, that is the most valuable way for you to be driving growth and the most valuable form of marketing. But whilst is the most valuable for marketing, it's also one of the most invisible. You know, word of mouth, referral, it's very difficult to track and very difficult to action any kind of way. And a lot of the time at Mention Me, we'll be speaking to brands who, you know, they know a good amount of customers come in from off the back of recommendations, which is great, but whilst that's great, they can't actually do anything with that information, and they can't drive it from a marketing perspective. And so what we do at Mention Me is we help brands turn advocacy into something that brands can really leverage as a growth driver of their business. And just to visualize the impact of this. So this is all real life data, and a real life example with Huel. And this is one of many examples we've got with them. But the small blue dot you see on your screen is one of Huel's customers. Let's call her Steph. And for most brands right now, this would be the way you can look at Steph. So obviously be able to zoom in on information on her spending and engagement and RFM individually. But typically brands are looking at Steph in isolation. However, because Huel understands the power of advocacy and is tracking advocacy data, this is actually what we found happened after Steph. So she referred three of her friends who referred, who referred, who referred, and they ended up with this incredible network of customers that spent over a quarter of 1 million pounds with Huel. And as I said, this is one of many examples of networks we've uncovered within Huel's database. And so the key thing here is to an extent, referral and advocacy like this will be happening in all your business right now. And that's why it's so important to first of all make more of this happen. Make it really easy and seamless for your customers to be referring their friends and drive their organic growth. But secondly, track this data because if you can track this data, you can start unlocking these new valuable segments of advocates and start thinking about how you want to start treating them differently in your CRM strategy to drive more growth from within. And ultimately that's our vision at Mention Me is help brands think advocacy first that when you're thinking about driving growth in your business, the first thing you think about is how do we get our customers to go out there and spread the word on our behalf before you start investing more and more on paid channels? Paid channels aren't going anywhere. But if you think in this order, if you think advocacy first, you're going to have super economics as a brand and be able to drive truly profitable growth that you'll be able to sustain in the long run. And ultimately, how we approach that in driving profitable growth through advocacy is in two key steps. So the first step is unlocking word of mouth and referral as an acquisition channel to acquire high-quality customers. And the second step is then leveraging advocacy data from that to then maximize customer value and revenue you're driving from within your customer base. And so what we're gonna do now is talk about how Huel have done exactly that, how they've driven that profitable growth through advocacy and starting with that first step on how they've unlocked word of mouth and referral to acquire high-quality customers. So I want you to go ahead. Thanks, Kat. Sara gave a great introduction to Huel. So won't spend too much time talking about it, but Huel did launch in 2015, and we are now the world's number one complete nutrition brand. So what that means is our product range provide a convenient way for you to consume the essential vitamins and minerals that you need. And we have helped millions of our customers to easily fuel their goals and stay on top of their nutrition. So, speaking of our customers, let me introduce you to what we refer to as our Hueligans. We now have around 5 million Hueligans worldwide in over 46 countries. And it's safe to say as a brand, we are really obsessed with them. Customer obsession is at the heart of everything we do. It's part of our brand DNA, and we even have stickers on our laptops that do say "make the customers happy." From the beginning, we knew we wanted to drive a strong community within our customer base. And as you can see from the pictures on the screen and the fact that people even now have Huel tattoos, we think we're doing an okay job of that. So our branding was always really prominent. Our product range was great and really different, and our customer obsession had led to strong customer satisfaction. All combined, this meant that Huel was naturally becoming a part of customers' everyday conversations, and word of mouth recommendations were happening. As a brand, we knew there was an opportunity here, but we had no way to measure and activate that. And that's when we started working with Mention Me. So Mention Me allowed us to add a whole new layer to our relationship with our customers. We'd already driven brand loyalty through customer satisfaction and built really strong relationships with our customers. But what Mention Me did was they allowed us to take this one step further and activate brand advocacy, which helped us to really propel growth and continue to help us propel growth. Mention Me made it really easy for us to optimize and track advocacy in a much more sophisticated way, whilst also providing technology to make it really easy for our customers to refer. So great example of this is using Mention Me's name share functionality. So for those of you who aren't familiar with Mention Me, I'll just explain what the name share functionality is. So referrals happen in everyday lives, as I said. It happens in word-of-mouth conversations, in everyday lives. And Mention Me name share allows customers to keep those referrals happening offline. Instead of using digital links and codes, name share allows customers to simply tell their friends to use their name at checkout. This means, as I said, customers referral behavior can remain offline, and recommendations can continue, but our customers get rewarded for it. I think the key thing in all of this, and something I want you to take away, is that as a brand, our customer obsession meant that we'd naturally built really strong relationships with our customers, and they were in turn showcasing real brand loyalty. However, what we've realized is, although loyalty is great, taking that to the next level and really activating and driving those customers to become brand advocates is so key to growth. I think it's safe to say that everyone on this call is probably thinking about how they can drive and activate loyalty. But what's been key to us is taking the next step and building on advocacy and referr a friend, and all of this is what will really help to drive growth. So Mention Me made it really easy for us to activate and unlock brand advocacy and made it really easy for our customers to refer a friend. And off the back of that, in year one of working wtih Mention Me, we saw 10% of new customers come through referrals, which was huge. And this has grown over time. And last year we saw nearly 20% of new customers come through referrals, which was driven by 22% of our customers referring. This growth has come from lots of incremental testing and changing that we've done with Mention Me, and they've really enabled us to figure out who in our customer base has the highest propensity to refer, and tweaking our referral campaigns to ensure that we're always providing what resonates most with our Hueligans. As you can see with our projections for the coming year, we're aiming for 27% of new customers to come through referrals as a channel. We're really going to double down on referrals in order to reduce the reliance on our paid channels and really help drive our sustainable and profitable growth that Kat's been talking about. We aim for this to be our biggest share of growth with Mention Me yet, which is really exciting, and our plans involve really utilizing all the data that Mention Me have to offer. I was just saying, on mute… Beyond those amazing results that Tash has talked about in terms of that growth and new customers from being able to track and optimize referral. Is it also enables you to really rethink the way you're looking at the value of your customer and unlock whole new valuable segments of customers you can do more with? And so, as I said at the beginning, the way to visualize this is most brands right now will measure the value of a customer based on their spend, looking at lifetime value, recency, frequency, and monetary value. But that is a limited view of your customer. And so we apply a whole new lens of advocacy data on top to get a much more holistic view of the true value of your customers. As the way that we measure that is a metric called extended customer revenue, or ECR, which is the lifetime value of a customer, as we all know, plus all the revenue they've driven through referring their friends. And so just to visualize the impact of this, so let's say Huel have a customer Steph. Steph makes two purchases with Huel a year. And so because she's not a particularly high spender or her repeat purchase rate isn't particularly high, Steph is automatically segmented as lower quality. So sure nurtured in the background but not prioritized in any kind of way. And for most brands that would be their view of Steph. However, because Huel understands advocacy and tracks advocacy data, they can see that while Steph might not look that valuable based on her direct spend, she's actually referred seven friends who've referred four more. Her extended customer revenue is much, much higher than that original direct spend. And so what this data does is it enables brands like Huel to have a competitive advantage to identify that it is customers like Steph that are your VIPs. There are so many opportunities you can do with this data, which I'm just going to talk to in a minute. But the key thing here is most brands aren't doing this. They don't have this data. And so then the problem there is you're only seeing Steph for that 140 pounds a month. So she could be sitting in your inactive or your defecting segment. She's not being prioritized. And so she might get frustrated, leave, and take all her friends somewhere else. So what this data is doing is it's enabling brands like Huel to unlock whole new segments of customers that are truly valuable. They've been over looking to be doing a much more valuable job with. And the results I've seen at Huel really speak for themselves. So there are figures that you can see on screen really show how referrers and the people they're going to refer are real quality, high-quality customer groups. The one example on screen, I'm not gonna talk through them all, but the one example that I really want to highlight, is that if a Hueligan starts a relationship with us through a referral, they're 3.5 times more likely to go on and refer themselves. This really highlights that high ECR piece that Kat's just been speaking about and also shows how referrals can really snowball growth. I think long story short, I wouldn't really want you to all take away from this session, is that advocacy and referrals can really drive both high quantity of customers, but also real high quality of customers as well. So so far, what we've talked to is how Huel has unlocked word of mouth and referral to acquire quality customers. But what we're going to talk about now is how they're then leveraging the advocacy data we just touched on to maximize customer value and the revenue they're driving from within that customer base. And the first thing to touch on that's really important is that when it comes to identifying your customer advocates, they're not always the customers you think they're going to be. So when I was going through that referral chain earlier and showing Steph, her original spend, and then her ECR, there might be some people on the call thinking, "That's great, good to know who is referring, but I assume the people spending the most of the people who refer the most. And so we've got them covered in our top spending segments." That's actually not the case. So we've done analysis across over 500 clients, and there's absolutely no correlation between how much someone spends with the brand and how much they refer. And so again and again, what we're finding is it's genuinely customers like Steph that don't look valuable based on spend that often are driving the most indirect revenue through referral. And that was absolutely the case with Huel. So to give some context on Huel's segmentation strategy. So Huel work with an agency right now that help them identify different customer segments, and they base this on data such as data points on location, gender, lifestyle, things like that. So you can see on the screen some examples of the segments that Huel uses. And that really helps them target their messaging and engagement to make sure they tailor that in the right way. However, when it comes to Huel figuring out where they were going to prioritize their efforts on which segments to spend most of their time on, previously, what Huel did is they were looking at which of these segments have the highest lifetime value, and that was where they were focusing most of their attentions focus on engaging and retaining. However, since then, what we've done is we've added advocacy data into this. And what that's done is it's completely changed the way that Huel views valuable segments and which segments to be prioritizing. And just to visualize this, pretty sure this is quite a busy slide so I'm going to walk you through the graph in front of you. But on the left hand side on the y axis, you've got the lifetime value of those segments. And on the x axis in the bottom you've got the ECR of those segments. So ECR being lifetime value plus revenue driven through referral. So previously as I said Huel would prioritize in segments who were spending the most with the highest lifetime value. So as you can see on the screen, these segments G, O, and H were the ones where Huel was doubling down on and focusing most of their research and attention on. However, because we've now landed on top advocacy data, we've now unlocked five key segments that Huel were previously overlooking. So all the ones you can see circled in pink. And the really key thing to show here is all of these people, these customer segments, they're quite low on the LTV axis. So they're not spending a huge amount themselves. And so a lot of these segments of customers would have potentially been inactive or defecting. And so as I said before, they wouldn't have been prioritized. However, what we can see on the x axis is they are driving a huge amount of revenue just indirect referral. And so what this has done is unlocked hugely valuable customer segments that Huel were previously overlooking. They can now do a huge amount more with. And that's obviously really exciting for a CRM team like Huel who have lots of ideas on how to activate that. Yeah. And this was so exciting for us and continues to be. It's giving us a whole new lens to look at our customers through. It's given us a whole new segment to talk to, and our new purpose for communicating with our customers as well. So what we're going to do now is just run you through some initiatives that we've been running here at Huel, just to give you an understanding of how you can utilize this advocacy data. So the first thing I'm going to talk you through is around product launches. So as a brand, we're always expanding our product range, always launching new products and new flavors. But until now, we haven't been utilizing advocacy data as part of these product launches. What we decided to do from a recent product launch, which is our Black Edition, Ready-to-Drink, as you can see on the right hand side of your screen, was really treat our advocates as the everyday influencers that they are. We decided to target those customers that sat within the behavioral segment most likely to purchase this product, but then also overlaid that high ECR data to find the perfect cohort of customers. So what that gave us was the customer group most likely to purchase this product, but also most likely to go on and refer it as well. We created a beautiful gifting box that our influencer team actually poached for themselves as well, and sent out to influencers as well. And we sent that out to these customers completely free of charge as a way to say thanks for being a great advocate. And here's some free products of our new range for you to try. Now, we were measuring the impact this based on purchasing and referring, but the results we found were so much bigger than that. So we actually had 150% increase in new product social shares, not just on traditional channels that we see, but also on LinkedIn as well. So we unlocked a whole new channel that we could potentially use in our social strategy going forward. But it was also really interesting to see that if we'd done this with, just high-value customers that were spending a lot, we might have seen some increase in social shares. But because we did it with advocates, they really wanted to shout about our brand. We also saw a 280% increase in positive customer service contacts. And who doesn't want to be part of a team that's causing positive tickets rather than just negative ones at the time? And at the point that we pulled these results, we saw that 25% of these customers went on to refer that new product to their friends. We know this has gone up since then, but that's still of course, and customers at the time had gone on to refer. Now, what's really key in all of this is that utilizing these referrers, gave us a whole new segment and trying to engage with around our product launch. And if we'd taken this same concept and done that with high-value customers, yes, they probably would have gone on to purchase. But doing it with advocates really unlocks a whole new customer group that we're seeing our product being recommended it from their friends and family as well. So because of the success of the system, we're going to roll out as part of our ongoing product launch strategy. I'm really excited about that. We're also utilizing Mention Me's AI capabilities. Yeah. Just to get some context on there. So in our platform, not only can we measure the existing customer revenue of a customer, but can also predict that using AI machine learning. So we can predict all your customers who are likely to become advocates in the near future. And we can also measure of your existing advocates who are sharing, who would like to stop sharing in the near future as well. Yeah. So with these customers that were likely to stop advocating referring, we've taken the hypothesis that these customers have already recommended the product they purchased to all the relevant people in their life. So does giving them a new product to try, unlock new people they can refer Huel to, and therefore prevent them from lapsing as an advocate? So what we've been doing with this customer group is sending them a product that, although it might have an affinity to the product that they currently purchase, it's something they've never tried before. To not only see if they go on to purchase it, but do they go on to refer new people and therefore stop themselves from lapsing as an advocate? This, again, has given us a whole new purpose for communicating with these customers. Plus, they feel really rewarded and valued, and they're getting something free from us as a brand. This is a test that is currently in progress, so we don't have results to share. But what we've seen so far, everything looks really promising and it's potentially something we're going to roll out as part of our BAE strategy ongoing as well. Now, one of the great things about working with Mention Me and Emarsys together is there're heaps of Tactics ready to go, and set up ready to use so you can easily activate and utilize the ECR and advocacy data that we've been speaking about. This has meant, as our team over the last few months has been able to really build out journeys that are talking to these customers and really nurturing them in a different way. I think the most refreshing thing from this is really the fact that we have a whole new world of CTAs to use with these customers because we're talking to them about different things rather than just getting them to shop now. A great example of this is that we recently sponsored Soccer Aid in the UK. So if you don't know, Soccer Aid is big charity celebrity football game. And off the back of that we received concert tickets that we could share with our customers. Now, previously, we would have set up a competition with our high value customers and thanked them for purchasing. But this time, instead, we did it with our advocate and we looked at those with high ECR and went up to them to say thank you for being an advocate and then also giving them the chance to enter the competition. Now, not only was this great for us to be able to say thank you and recognize this segment, but we also saw great engagement from this campaign. And also on the day these customers were sharing on socials and really shouting about the fact that we've given them free tickets to the game. What we're also keen to do from here on out is measure the impact on how this campaign influences the behavior of this cohort, longer term as well. And in the last use case that Huel is currently implementing in terms of leveraging advocacy data is leveraging advocacy to create lookalike audiences to optimize performance of paid acquisition channels. So Huel is setting this up right now. But we've set this up with a lot of our clients already. And in terms of how it works, we'll create a segment of customers who are your top advocates, who are the ones driving the most indirect revenue through referral. We'll then push those segments into the likes of Facebook and Google as lookalike audiences to then target similar-looking customers in terms of acquisition. And when we've compared the performance of the advocacy-led audience versus all those clients next-best-performing audience, we've decreased the CPA on paid channels by up to 25%. We've increased ROAS on these paid channels about 30%, and we're also helping acquire higher-quality customers who are 15% more likely to refer onwards. So it is super exciting. And as I said at the beginning, we know brands are very over-reliant on paid channels. So to make this more cost effective is a huge game changer in terms of enabling brands to more effectively use their marketing spend. The Huel assessment is up right now in all their regions, but a particular focus region is the US, which is as a real focus target region for them right now, because they recognize this will really supercharge the effectiveness of the paid channels in acquiring new customers in that area. And so hopefully today, what you've learned is by thinking advocacy. First, there's kind of three key ways it really helps you with that profitable growth. So the first is obviously unlocking word of mouth and referral as an acquisition channel to acquire quality customers. It also helps you unlock whole new segments of customers you've been ever looking to drive, more revenue and more value from within your customer base, but also it helps improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of your other marketing channels, including paid channels. And so really, all of that driving towards that long term profitable growth that will scale. That's it for us today. If you're keen to connect with either of us, we've got our QR codes on the screen here. And yet back to you, Sara. But thank you all for your time. Thank you very much, Kat, Tash. That was really a fascinating story. Before I let you guys go. Tash, I've just got one question for you. What would your advice be to any businesses on the call that want to lean into customer advocacy? They're really not too sure where to start. I think for us, the key thing that we learned was that being able to have the data and understand who those customers are within your customer base is really, really essential to start in. And then once you know who they are. Just testing everything. I think that's where we we've really built our strategy from just testing them testing them and then and just try loads of different things. Think outside the box. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, both of you. If anybody has additional questions for other our fantastic speakers, you can reach out to them on LinkedIn. You can see the QR codes on the screen. I'm sure they would be delighted to hear from you. And a final thank you to both of you for me, for making the time to participate today. I know you added a lot of value for everyone. So what do we all get from some of this? I think for me, I took away a reminder about how important word of mouth is as such an incredible driver for business. And I think the other key takeaway was really interesting that I wouldn't have realized was the fact that the referred customers are so much more likely to refer more customers, and that you really are starting to create a cycle there as you start to get that going. And perhaps, I'll see if I see nods that that's starting an indication that you're starting to get it right and you're starting to get the program right, and it's starting to actually have a life of its own, which I think as a marketer, I find really, really exciting. So thank you both very much.