Lessons from SIGNAL Conference: How Veronica Beard Reduced CAC by 20% by Switching to First-Party Data

At the start of the pandemic, luxury retailer Veronica Beard found themselves in need of a customer data platform that could support online and offline interactions, as well as tie together data across its many customer touch points.

Powered by Twilio Segment, they elevated paid social – turning it from a place where they sold markdowns – to the channel with the best lifetime value customers. 

At SIGNAL 2022, our annual customer and developer conference, we heard from Max Lagresle, Associate Director of Data, about how Segment enabled Veronica Beard to build an “omni-customer” approach across online and in-person channels. 

With first-party data their team was able to future-proof their customer acquisition by avoiding issues with third-party tracking cookies, and employ a strategy of incrementality – to make their ad budgets hyper-efficient and value-added.

You can watch the full session here, or continue reading to learn the top lessons shared by Veronica Beard at SIGNAL. 

Lesson 1: Building a Successful Omnichannel Strategy

To grow its direct-to-consumer presence and have more direct conversations with its customers, Veronica Beard needed a solution to engage its customers across online, and offline channels. 

Whether it’s product reviews or returns information, Veronica Beard unified its customer data with a combination of Twilio Segment’s out-of-the-box features and custom integrations. Now that it has one source for all of its customer data, the team can intelligently design the customer experience across all touchpoints.

For example, their team can connect an online form software to Twilio Segment and enrich customer profiles with respondents’ preferences and likelihood to purchase. At this point, Veronica Beard can collect questions and answers as an event, and trigger personalized emails based on select responses.

“Our goal is to understand our customers on a deeper level,” Max explains. “As a lifestyle brand, Veronica Beard aims to have a 1:1 relationship with every customer. We design ways for customers to share their feedback and preferences with us, and they know to expect a more personalized experience based on the first-party information they provide.”

Lesson 2: How to Improve Quality While Increasing Spend

For Veronica Beard, every customer data point creates an opportunity to optimize the customer experience, including in paid channels. 

From real-time suppression to lookalike acquisition strategies, Veronica Beard leverages its wealth of high-quality customer data to transform its paid advertising strategy into one of its highest-quality acquisition channels.

Their team can collect product review information, for instance, from its platform, and create a Twilio Engage audience of users that have only left one-star reviews, then deliver this group of users to its advertising channels as a real-time suppression list. 

By using real-time audience capabilities for suppression in its advertising destinations, the company saves unhappy, or “low-value” customers from unwanted ads, making marketing spend more efficient.

Lesson 3: The Power of First-Party Data 

Third-party data has long been the dominant customer data source for marketing and advertising. As data aggregators collect end-user data through cookies and browser behavior, companies pay for access to this third-party data, either directly or through advertising platforms.

Alternatively, by harnessing first-party data from interactions with their customers Veronica Beard’s cookieless acquisition strategy has enabled it to get ahead of anti-tracking privacy initiatives while maintaining — and even improving — its paid channel performance. 

Compared to baseline metrics from Facebook Audience Network, the team witnessed an 11% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) and 20% decrease in customer acquisition cost (CAC) last year when leveraging its high-value Twilio Engage audiences to power Facebook Lookalike Audiences.

“With Twilio Segment, we leveraged our first-party customer data to improve our [advertising] strategy, and now, Facebook went from being our most markdown-heavy channel to now the most full price-heavy channel, even as we significantly increased our ad spend this year.” – Max Lagresle, Associate Director of Data at Veronica Beard

Looking for more from SIGNAL? 

On November 2-3,  Twilio Segment hosted its annual customer and developer conference, featuring 30,000 attendees and 50+ customer studies and thought leadership sessions. 

If you found these insights from Veronica Beard’s session at SIGNAL helpful, you can register here to watch on-demand and learn more about how our customers’ harness and activate customer data. 

You can also review our recap of the entire conference here.