Adam Aubrey, Head of e-Commerce at KBF Enterprises, home of sports nutrition brand, Warrior, examines how it overhauled its mobile marketing strategy.

Warrior is one of the fastest-growing supplement businesses in the world and we sell one of our bestselling Warrior Crunch bars every two seconds across the globe.

But with ambitious growth targets of becoming a £100m business by 2026, we knew we needed to find a way to acquire new customers and drive sales within a short period of time.

We turned towards our mobile marketing approach to re-examine where we could enhance our strategy to reach more highly targeted customer segments, generating stronger connectivity and boost revenue – keeping personalised customer communications at the forefront.

The challenge
The challenge was creating tailored and targeted one-on-one communications to nurture customers on their shopping journey, drive loyalty and turn them into lifelong advocates of the Warrior range of sports nutrition products, in a highly-competitive sports nutrition marketplace.

We identified SMS marketing early on as the way to reach a large volume of customers at the same time, getting the Warrior brand and product offering to the right audience, exactly when we wanted to.

We partnered with conversational marketing platform, Attentive, to examine our shopper profile, including behaviour vs. demographic; see where they are up to in their shopping journey; and look at how we can nurture the lifetime value of product groups by creating cohorts and monitoring them over time.

The solution
Working closely with the Attentive team, we embarked upon an SMS campaign with personalised customer communications at the heart of the strategy. We did this in the following ways:

Growth of subscriber list:

• A two tap opt in was designed to support UK GDPR compliance
• Custom attributes were obtained during the sign ups process to deliver more tailored experiences (conversion rate on birthday messages is greater than 40 per cent and click through rate over 15 per cent)

Easy to set up automated journeys

Loyalty and referral program integrations

• Referral (via Mention Me) to encourage customers to share referral links with friends to support new customer acquisition

When a customer signed up using Attentive’s patented two-tap pop-up, the Warrior team drove personalisation by collecting zero-party data at sign up. Customer behaviour was then studied to create hyper-targeted segments that powered cross-sell, upsell, replenishment, and reengagement campaigns.

SMS was also used for referral programme messages through an integration with Mention Me, further building that all-important customer base.

Strategy
We developed a customer-centric segmentation strategy to make sure our messages resonated with Warrior customers and importantly, drove action. This included using customer cohorts based on product groups to nurture any underperforming cohorts through setting up automations through post purchase journeys.

We also employed hypertargeting, looking at our stickiness index for our product groups and looking at customers falling outside of our typical re-buy rate. We would then factor in a relevant discount based on the expected margin of the particular product gap.

We created affinity segments for product groups to up and cross-sell. And we graduated to advanced segmentation strategies, Category Viewed and Engaged vs Not Engaged. These experiments led us to understand what our best performing segments were which included our VIP customers – those who’ve purchased four or more times – and customers who hadn’t recently made a purchase. These segments are our primary targets, receiving frequent communications and oftentimes we reward them with higher, time-limited offers, while sprinkling in occasional full-list sends to ensure that customers don’t lose engagement.

Results
SMS proved to be a powerful channel for the Warrior brand, growing the subscriber base to 45,000 and generating £907,000 of incremental revenue in the first year. The programme achieved 17x ROI.

Not only that, but SMS also drove 21 per cent more revenue than our email channel – revolutionising our eCommerce strategy, and unlocking a new revenue channel. Messages sent to Attentive subscribers outperformed those sent to previous subscribers by 63 per cent.

SMS marketing allowed us to experience greater connectivity with our customers than ever before, successfully increasing customer lifetime value and taking us one step closer to achieving our ambitious business goals.