Turning One-Time Buyers into Repeat Customers

The Situation

For years, email was Origami Owl's most profitable marketing channel, with a list of more than a million people. But it had slipped into decline: more unsubscribes, fewer opens, and less revenue every year.

At the same time, digital ads were getting more expensive. Competition for ad space was rising, and new privacy rules made targeting harder. The less email brought in, the more the business leaned on ads to grow, and the more each sale cost.

Additionally, the marketing system was set up to almost exclusively focus on new customer acquisition. Very little infrastructure was in place to retain customers, and as the saying goes, it's 5-7x more expensive to win a new customer than to retain an existing one. Customer retention was a problem we couldn't afford to ignore.

Business Risks I Uncovered

Since a million member email list is such a huge asset, I started by auditing our email marketing. I discovered that email had been running on autopilot for years, leading to three key problems:

• An outdated email platform made personalization and automation nearly impossible.
• Every customer got every email, about every product line (jewelry, skincare, cosmetics and supplements), whether they cared or not.
• Emails were designed in Adobe, then sent as images. That meant there was little room to test designs, wording, etc. and discover what drove more sales.

Underneath it all was a bigger issue: too many customers bought once and never came back. The company already had a subscription program and a referral program, but they ran separately and didn't reinforce each other. Without a strong reason for customers to return, the business kept paying to win new ones.

Solutions I Implemented

First, I relaunched email. I pulled together a team across ecommerce, IT and creative to:

• Move to a modern email platform (Klaviyo) that could personalize messages and run automated sequences.
• Add a preference center, so customers chose which product lines they heard about.
• Teach our designers to build emails inside Klaviyo, with live text we could test to find what earned the sale.
• Add text messages as a second channel. Customers who responded better to texts moved to a text-only list, which took pressure off email and improved delivery.

Then, I gave customers more reasons to come back. I took over the subscription and referral programs and added a loyalty program that connected all three with stacking rewards. For example, every third subscription order earned extra loyalty points. From there I tested each one:

• Loyalty: sign-up prompts across the site, email and texts, plus tests of offers and VIP perks to find which ones actually drove repeat purchases.
• Referrals: tests of landing pages and of the rewards for both the referrer and the new customer.
• Subscriptions: adjusted which products and bundles were available, the discount, and when subscriber perks kicked in, all to keep subscribers from canceling.