Balance Me’s replenishment emails boost repeat purchases by 83%

Sisters Clare and Rebecca Hopkins launched the Balance Me brand in 2005 because they wanted to create a range of products that helps women feel good about their skin. The result? An award-winning skincare range that blends natural bio-active ingredients and essential oils into formulas that are kind to skin and the planet. Proud to be a B-Corp, the business donates 20% of its profits to good causes, such as the Hygiene Bank.

Learn how the skincare brand used email nurture to increase customer lifetime value

Challenge

In the competitive skincare industry, brands need to work hard to build a connection with consumers and turn them into loyal customers. To increase customer lifetime value, Balance Me’s marketing team was eager to create a more seamless and personalised customer journey, but the brand’s legacy technology was holding them back. Without customer data and the ability to automate emails, they couldn’t create the kind of one-to-one interactions that promote brand loyalty and retention. Frustrated, they decided that a complete overhaul of the brand’s tech stack was in order. 

There are limitations with what you can do and how you can communicate with your audience without the detailed customer data Klaviyo provides. Moving to the platform opened up a world of segmentation and personalisation that meant we could communicate with our customers in a much more authentic way.

Solution

Balance Me partnered with the ecommerce experts at GPMD and replatformed to BigCommerce. Transforming their CRM programme was next on the to-do list. Klaviyo was chosen as the brand’s automation partner because its seamless integration with BigCommerce allows customer profile, ecommerce and store data to sync with Klaviyo in real time.

It didn’t disappoint. For the first time, the marketing team had customers’ browsing and purchase data at their fingertips and the power to build automations triggered by shoppers’ preferences and behaviour. 

Building out the tech stack didn’t stop there. The brand also partnered with Klevu for AI search, Smile.io for loyalty, and Recharge to handle subscriptions. The tools all integrate with Klaviyo so that the data generated through every customer interaction can be used to shape a highly personalised and consistent customer experience.

Klaviyo is a product we’ve liked right from the beginning because we see our customers achieving great results. We only recommend solutions that provide value and Klaviyo is one of these technologies. It integrates well with BigCommerce and the intuitive interface makes it easy for merchants to set up their first campaigns and start driving value from the platform. This has allowed the team at Balance Me to get up and running quickly.

Strategy

Armed with deep insights on its subscribers, Balance Me has developed a series of email nurture campaigns to convert consumers who are new to the brand, and remind existing customers why they love it. 

To foster repeat purchases, replenishment emails remind customers to stock up before they run out. Using data in Klaviyo to determine the likely repurchase interval, the reminders help Balance Me increase customer lifetime value without being intrusive or having to rely on promotions. The approach has resulted in an 83% increase in repeat purchases. 

When an item is out of stock, the brand gives customers the option to receive an email notification when it becomes available again. Getting in touch with the subscribers on their terms and based on their needs always works well and buyers jump at the chance to stock up on their favourite moisturiser or serum. The back-in-stock email achieves a 69% open rate and converts at 4.9%. 

More brands are starting to realise that having an engaging post-purchase experience can improve customer satisfaction and invoke a sense of loyalty. Here, Balance Me is ahead of the curve. It already sends buyers a product-specific email with tips on how to improve their skincare routine, with links to complementary items from the same range plus an incentive for multibuys. The cross-sell message is pitch perfect and the email drives a 1.9% conversion rate, which is 6x the average for the sector. 

Other email nurtures are performing well for the brand, too. The abandoned cart flow converts 7.7% of shoppers, which is more than 2x the average. It achieves this by using different tactics in each email: those who don’t respond to the first one are won over with free shipping or a free gift with purchase. 

Balance Me’s clever use of personalisation and its focus on maximising repurchase opportunities has resulted in 56% of the brand’s revenue now being attributed to email. 

Email is our most consistent revenue driving channel for the D2C side of the business now. We know there are still untapped opportunities within Klaviyo for us and we’re excited to explore them and make our emails work even harder for us.