How Nomasei increased revenue per customer by 3x, whilst decreasing customer acquisition costs (CAC) by 5x

Results

The big win

Nomasei, a luxury fashion house, is a small team up against industry giants and needed a way to stand out in the market. To do this they needed to provide best in class customer experience. First, Nomasei  needed to understand their customers and their user journeys. However, their tool stack made the process of segmenting and engaging with customers manual and static. But without the necessary tech resources, they wanted a data platform that was easy to implement and extensible, to fit in with their current tooling.

Nomasei implemented Twilio Segment to provide all departments, including marketing and product, with the data they needed to optimize decision-making. Enabling them to become more informed about what their customers wanted and deliver dynamic, automated marketing campaigns without the manual effort of keeping disparate systems updated. Ultimately, providing a better customer experience — ensuring customers get relevant and timely recommendations that match their shopping habits.

Nomasei, founded in 2019, is an online retailer providing luxury handcrafted shoes made in Italy, designed by Paule Tenaillon, who has worked at the biggest luxury boutiques like Chloé, Jimmy Choo, Steve Madden and Chanel for over 25 years. Headquartered in Paris, they are a small, lean team focused on hypergrowth. Nomasei is focused on building a brand that is ethical and transparent in its processes – they ensure their products are accountable when it comes to environmental standards and fair working conditions.

Before Twilio Segment, Nomasei had little visibility into their customers' preferences and behavior. And, as described by M’Hamed, Head of Growth at Nomasei, “in order to grow and be the best, we decided that we needed to be the most informed brand”. They needed a way to optimize decision-making across the entire customer journey and feed information to all departments within the company. And as a bootstrapped company making the right decisions is crucial to avoiding costly mistakes!

What’s more, Nomasei’s process of building audiences did not scale –– segmenting customers was slow, tedious, and manual. They had to first extract customer data from Shopify, then apply the relevant filters, export it, and finally import the data into their CRM system. Every time a new audience was created, they had to repeat this process. By the time data was finished importing, it was already out of date, thus the constant data refreshing cycle continued.

Nomasei turned to Segment to collect key information from their website, helping them better understand their customers, and their journey on the website. This has enabled them to scrap their manual audience building process, focusing instead on the quality of the messages they send, and delegating the management of audiences to Segment, which are now automatically and dynamically built instead of remaining static. Most importantly — this has ensured that customers receive timely and relevant recommendations.

“We are a small team, up against industry giants. Accelerated decision-making allows us to make a difference. It's the customer experience that ultimately allows us to stand out in the market, and it’s through data that I believe we can make this happen. ”

– M'Hamed Larbi, Head of Growth at Nomasei

Lack of observability into customer behavior, resulting in wasted advertising spend

Without the right systems in place, visibility into customer behavior for an online retailer can be just as tricky as a bricks and mortar store. Today, in a store, companies need to employ a host of technology to observe how customers shop, so that they can optimize their space. Without which, they make decisions with a lot of blind spots! Similarly, for online retailers, without the right technology, they have limited insight into what’s happening on their site and can end up putting money into attracting visitors and crossing their proverbial fingers that it works!

Because of this, the growth team at Nomasei decided that something had to change –– they needed better observability into customer behavior. So, they implemented Segment to consolidate their tech stack and gather customer data to inform their marketing and product strategy. Nomasei uses Connections to collect key data from their site which is then fed back to their advertising platforms, CRM and other channels like ShareASale. They are now able to optimize decision-making and ensure they aren’t wasting precious budgets. In fact, they have been able to decrease their advertising budget, in Q4 (typically a time when budgets inflate), by 20%.

Data powered digital customer experiences, at scale

As a small, lean team, Segment Connections was implemented in less than a day, by one person! So, with all their tracking sorted in a matter of hours, the team was able to focus on strategizing their marketing campaigns with Twilio Engage. This was one of the things that attracted Nomesei to Segment — it’s easy to use, extensible (400+ destinations!), and core use cases can be implemented with very little engineering knowledge. In addition, they needed a platform that would allow them to scale without having any technical debt in the future. What’s more –– you can start with a small isolated use-case with Segment –– Nomasei started off with an acquisition use case for the growth team, now it has expanded to focus on retention. And next year it will be used to power business intelligence.

Nomasei utilized Segment Connections and Twilio Engage to improve user acquisition. First, using Audiences, the growth team segmented people based on whether they’re existing customers or ‘browsers’ and by their interaction with the site (e.g. ‘added product to cart’ or ‘viewed a category page’). And then using Journeys, they set up different campaigns depending on that behavior. For example, a user might go to ‘check out’ then drop out of the funnel –– and now they can re-engage with them on other platforms, like social media, with retargeting campaigns and hyper-personalized messaging. This has enabled Nomasei to move away from static marketing campaigns to data-powered, dynamic, and automated campaigns based on customer behavior — ultimately providing a better customer experience.

All of this has had a compounding effect on sales –– after implementing Twilio Engage, Nomasei’s revenue per visitor increased by 3x, as depicted in the graph below. The team saw near immediate results after they started segmenting their audiences and sending more targeted campaigns to users.

Personalized and targeted emails to increase conversion rates

Before implementing Segment, Nomasei would send one generic email to their entire customer base. Now, they send tailored and highly relevant emails to different groups segmented by customer behavior. This has resulted in improved open rates –– increasing from avg. 45%-50% to +70%. And has improved their click-through rate from 1-2% to 15%!

What’s more –– thanks to purchase and product data they’re collecting like size, model, and color –– they’re able to run campaigns that help with broader company objectives. For example, if they have surplus stock in a particular size, they can send targeted emails to customers who have bought that size before with a special offer.

The team is in the process of restructuring their email strategy to enable them to triple the number of campaigns sent per week –– they plan to segment by product and by user category, to send even more targeted campaigns. In addition, they have worked on improving the efficiency of their email production, including implementing Lean processes and building out email templates.

What’s next?

Nomasei has flexed their usage of Segment to their business needs –– at first they started with acquisition use cases, then moved to focusing on retention, and soon will focus on business intelligence. This includes deep diving into product forecasting to understand how they can predict how much to produce, to match demand.