FabFitFun doubles e-commerce purchases for new members & increases email sales by 8%

Results

• 2x increase in e-commerce purchases for new members
• 8% increase in sales from personalized emails
• Decreased average handling time for each support ticket by 1 minute

The Challenge

As a subscription and e-commerce platform, FabFitFun is constantly trying to reduce customer churn, drive repeat purchases, and acquire new members. With hundreds of millions in sales annually, a single change in a percentage point can dramatically impact the bottom line.

FabFitFun was using a traditional Customer Data Platform (CDP) but was severely limited by the platform’s data limitations because it only tracked basic onsite user behavior and couldn’t support more complex data models for FabFitFun that reflected each member's subscription status, order history, and more.

These data limitations prevented FabFitFun from solving three key initiatives:

• Optimizing ad spend by suppressing active members
• Increasing purchases in their e-commerce store via email personalization
• Decreasing the average handling time for all support tickets

The Solution: Transitioning to a Composable CDP

In search of a solution that could put their complex data to work, FabFitFun turned to Hightouch to implement a Composable CDP. FabFitFun uses Hightouch to power its downstream marketing and operational use cases with all the data in its data warehouse.

Using Suppression Audiences in Ad Platforms to Decrease Reactivation Costs

With no ability to differentiate between active and expired members, the marketing team was unknowingly wasting ad spend (and getting lower conversions) targeting the wrong users because they only had access to the behavioral data in their CDP.

With Hightouch, FabFitFun sends conversion data from the company’s data warehouse to the ad platforms directly, which means the company can maintain one global audience of subscribers within Snowflake to suppress existing members from being targeted.

This change has led to substantially decreased cost per reactivation since FabFitFun’s ads only go to expired customers. Furthermore, this new architecture also unlocked greater match rates for lookalike audiences because FabFitFun can now send over more first-party along with enriched conversion events.

Increasing E-commerce Purchases

Members get access to a seasonal box every quarter, but FabFitFun also offers users additional products to purchase. The marketing team wanted to personalize offers, product recommendations and offer flash sales to members. However, their lifecycle marketing platform, Braze, didn’t have the customer data needed to power these use cases.

While the previous CDP could track user behavior onsite to send to Braze, it was missing many key offsite signals and attributes about customers, such as their order history, subscription status, and machine learning models that only existed in the data warehouse.

The marketing team now uses Hightouch to sync all their customer data from Snowflake to Braze to maintain user profiles for personalization and segmentation. This includes custom data models, user-completed events, historical data, traits, attributes, etc. Having this data available in Braze has unlocked several new use cases, including:

• Notifying members when their favorite products are back in stock
• Serving best-selling and trending products to new members
• Enabling users to subscribe to individual product “reFills” from previous purchases

These new highly personalized emails have led to some pretty remarkable results, growing product “reFill” subscriptions, doubling shopping participation, and increasing revenue by 8% from this cohort.

Enabling Faster Customer Support

FabFitFun has hundreds of support agents to handle the uptick that inevitably arises every quarter when a new seasonal box ships to members. Every time a user submitted a ticket, the support team would have to search for their records using several disparate tools to identify whether an order had shipped, if a member had access to certain sales/events, or if their account was past due. This created three core problems:

1. The support team had no context to understand who was reaching out or why they were reaching out.
2. Members were forced to wait while the support team scrambled to find their account information
3. Members had to verify their accounts and submit their name/email for every ticket.

Using Hightouch to sync unified customer data the team’s support tool, this manual process has been eliminated. Now, support agents immediately have visibility into full customer data for each ticket. This has decreased the average handling time of all tickets by 60 seconds. Having this data available in one single tool has allowed FabFitFun to unlock better reporting capabilities to proactively reduce customer churn and implement strategies to win back unsubscribers.

What’s Next?

The next phase of Hightouch is rolling the platform out for more use cases across more channels to accelerate FabFitFun’s growth further and provide additional value to new and existing members.