How Veronica Beard built omnichannel experiences and decreased Customer Acquisition Costs by 20% with Twilio Segment

To meet customers’ needs — wherever they come from — Veronica Beard routes online and offline interactions across the customer journey through Twilio Segment’s extensible platform to design customer-first engagement. With Twilio Segment’s customer data platform (CDP), Veronica Beard has achieved:

• 20% reduction in CAC from Facebook Ads

• 11% increase in ROAS from Facebook Ads

• Elevated its Paid Social channel from being one of the most Markdown-heavy channels to one of the most Full Price-heavy channels, all while scaling budget

• Personalization based on all customer activity, from offline to online interactions, across its tech stack

Connecting every touchpoint in one place, from returns status to customer reviews

To grow its direct-to-consumer presence and have more direct conversations with its customers, the team has implemented a suite of customer experience solutions along the entire customer journey.

Having joined the company after seeing a job posting on Twilio Segment’s Customer Community Slack group, Maxime (Max) Lagresle, eCommerce Analytics Manager at Veronica Beard, leads the project in instrumenting customer data collection across the stack through Twilio Segment to enable intelligent customer engagement.

As Max explains, “We have so many data points and interactions that we can use. With Twilio Segment, now all of our customer interactions with different marketing initiatives are being taken into account, and we’ve connected our suite of ecommerce applications to design more relevant, personalized engagement.”

Partnering with Twilio Segment’s Professional Services team, Veronica Beard accelerated its implementation to witness faster time-to-value. Given Veronica Beard’s extensive set of technology applications, the Twilio Segment team provided strategic guidance to implement standardized event collection across a suite of custom integrations. 

Whether it’s product reviews or returns information, Veronica Beard unifies its customer data with a combination of Twilio Segment’s out-of-the-box Destinations and custom integrations built using Twilio Segment’s Functions product. Now that it has one source for all of its customer data — offline and online — in Twilio Segment, the team can intelligently design the customer experience with all factors in mind.

For example, the team connects an online form software to Twilio Segment to enrich customer profiles with respondents’ preferences and likelihood to purchase. With Twilio Segment, the team collects questions and answers as an event, and can 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.”

Improving quality while increasing spend in Facebook Ads

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 in Twilio Engage (formerly known as Personas), the audience management product, to transform its Facebook Ads strategy into one of its highest-quality acquisition channels.

For example, the team collects product review information from its review platform, and creates a Twilio Engage audience of users that have only left one-star reviews, then delivers this group of users to its advertising channels as a real-time suppression list. The team also delivers a “Low Value Customer” exclusion audience of customers that have at least two orders, but have returned 100% of their orders, based on order and return data from its data warehouse.

By using Persona’s real-time audience capabilities for suppression in its advertising destinations, the company saves these unhappy, low-value customers from unwanted ads, conserves marketing spend, and, in the case of social media platforms, prevents having negative comments on their posts.

Example suppression audiences for Veronica Beard

Using outputs from recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) models in Google Bigquery, the team creates SQL Traits in Twilio Engage based on decile of customer value and recency. They also unify online and in-store transaction data for every customer profile in Twilio Engage to identify their “omni-channel” customers, or customers that have purchased both in-store and online.

Example high-value Audience in Twilio Engage

“Based on our research, we know that omni-channel customers are our most valuable customers,” Max explains. “Because of this, we build Twilio Engage Audiences of our omni-channel customers and top customers in lifetime revenue, to use as the basis for Lookalike Audiences in Facebook Ads.”

Removing the need for the pixel, Veronica Beard’s future proof acquisition strategy has enabled it to get ahead of anti-tracking privacy initiatives while maintaining — and even improving — its paid channel performance. Compared to Facebook Audience Network, the team witnessed an 11% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) and 20% decrease in customer acquisition cost (CAC) in Q1 2021 when leveraging its high-value Twilio Engage audiences to power Facebook Lookalike Audiences.

“In 2020, Facebook generated customers with the lowest gross margin across all of our advertising channels,” according to Max. “With Twilio Segment, we leveraged our first-party customer data to improve our Facebook 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.” 

What’s next? With every new solution brought on, a host of new opportunities becomes available for the team to design intelligent omnichannel experiences, powered by Twilio Segment.

Now that the team collects all interactions across the stack in one place, Veronica Beard is exploring new cross-channel strategies to deliver timely, relevant communications with Journeys, Twilio Segment’s orchestration feature.

“The goal is to understand how we can incrementally activate different channels for a better customer experience,” Max explains. “Instead of spending money to deliver ads to everyone in an audience, I’m going to send an email first, and only retarget on advertising if they haven’t opened or purchased from the email.”

Example Journey for Veronica Beard

In another example, Max hopes to deliver a more timely product review email to customers by routing events from their shipping logistics provider to their reviews platform through Twilio Segment.

“Instead of sending a product review email after 21 days from the order, we want to send an email one day after the product has been delivered,” Max explains. “We’re always looking for new ways to deliver a better experience. At the scale we’re operating at, Twilio Segment is the only solution that empowers us to move fast and personalize the omnichannel experience.”