Ritual creates optimal user journeys based on customer behavior with Twilio Engage

The big win

With an increased focus on LTV, specifically increasing retention, order frequency, and average order value, Ritual struggled to understand the full customer journey and effectively use the data they were collecting to create business value.

Ritual increased investment in Twilio Segment with Twilio Engage to create optimal user journeys. Ritual sends Twilio Segment customer data to downstream tools, like their email platform Iterable, to deliver personalized experiences based on the products users have purchased and their life stage.

Ritual is a health-meets-technology company reimagining the products we use every day, starting with multivitamins. The brand was founded on the belief that better health begins with better ingredients, and has pioneered a new standard of high-quality, clean products that are backed by science and Made TraceableTM with the first visible supply chain of its kind. 

As the brand was experiencing increased growth, the marketing and digital teams needed to better understand the customer journey to orchestrate lifetime value, specifically increasing retention, order frequency, and average order value. Ritual turned to Twilio Engage and AWS to create real-time audiences to power more personalized customer journeys.

Going beyond capturing website event data 

When Ritual first launched in 2015, it focused its limited resources on building great products and delivering superior customer service. While Ritual believed in the power of data and invested in data infrastructure, teams struggled to effectively use the data they were collecting to create business value. In addition, the team did not have a complete view of the customer journey in order to increase lifetime value (LTV). The team lacked sophisticated experimentation and personalization strategies, which limited their ability to provide optimal experiences for their customers. 

Before, Ritual only used Twilio Segment as a data source to capture website event data and push that into the data warehouse then to view in Looker. From there, Ritual would do manual audience segmentation in two primary ways: 

• Using the legacy ESP: The digital teams would create audiences based on email engagement or individual website events (i.e. purchased essential for women and opened their first onboarding email). Then the specific audience would be added to list or automated workflow enrollment.

• Manual List Export: This provided more granularity but the digital teams would have to run SQL query or pull reports in Looker that combined the different actions they were looking for. It was messy and always last minute. 

Each customer email resulted in some level of churn, which is expected in a subscription business, but there was still consistent positive feedback from customers. Ritual knew it needed to invest in a better way to engage with customers at the right times with the right message to continue to improve LTV.

Creating rich custom audiences with Twilio Engage

Laura Brodie, Director of Customer Lifecycle and Growth at Ritual, and her team created a strategy to deliver the optimal user journey to customers using robust Twilio Engage audiences.

Ritual’s first step was to improve how they tested customer experience assumptions. Laura from Ritual explains, “We couldn’t just dive in with experimentation. The first step was using our data in a real execution and making sure everything was flowing correctly. Once the foundation was set, we started with simpler tests and got our measurement approach in place. From there, we were able to begin more rapid experimentation using customer data.”

After establishing an experimentation muscle, Ritual focused on using customer data to segment their audience and personalize the customer experience. “We use our data to create deep segments and bring our customers down a personalized journey that sticks with them for the full tenure they are subscribed to Ritual,” Laura describes. Ritual sends Twilio Segment customer data to downstream tools like Iterable, their email service provider, to create an optimal journey based on the products users have purchased and their life stage.

Using Twilio Segment and Iterable together, Ritual is able to support its prenatal subscribers with personalized emails. First, subscribers receive introductory content about the Essential Prenatal multivitamin, then they receive helpful editorial content to support their pregnancy. As their due date approaches, they receive an introduction to the Ritual Postnatal multivitamin.

Optimizing User Journeys to increase LTV over time

With flexible data infrastructure and a sophisticated optimization program, Ritual is able to activate its data to continuously optimize the user journey and improve customer LTV. Ritual has been able to achieve:

• Increased email A/B testing velocity, testing based on richer consumer data (i.e. propensity model v. page view)

• Agile audience development to support big moments like product launches

• Increased LTV over time

Ritual recently introduced a new bundling feature, and is using Twilio Segment to drive new subscriptions. “Users can add up to 6 products in their subscription box that’s shipped to them every month. Our bundling feature provides a great opportunity to introduce our customers to additional products that are going to be a really good fit for their household. We use personalization and we’re starting to do some really exciting tests where we try to predict what other products our customers would be interested in.” Ritual is now better able to identify their user’s needs and create loyal customers through optimized experiences.

To learn more about how Ritual creates optimal user journeys and improves engagement, watch Laura Brodie's CDP Week video panel.