A Strategic & Creative Overhaul That Led to a 609% Revenue Increase in 3 Months

Company: Nekohama

Industry: CPG - Food and Beverage

Dispatch Services Retained: Email & SMS Strategy Consulting, Design, Copywriting, Retention Marketing Consulting

Platforms Used: Klaviyo, Shopify, Priv, Okendo

Length of Partnership: 10+ Months

Background

Nekohama sells premium, ceremonial grade Matcha, known for its higher quality than most if not all on the market. Sourced from Kyoto, Japan, Nekohama offers a subscription service to customers. As a young brand with a premium product, Nekohama faced several challenges in optimizing their email marketing strategy and customer journey.

Key Problems:

Inconsistent Campaign Cadence: Despite having a very engaged list, Nekohama was not sending campaigns regularly.

Lack of Automated Flows: There were no automated flows to nurture new subscribers into customers or to educate and delight new customers post-purchase.

Non-Reflective Creative: The email marketing creative did not reflect the premium product and branding.

Ineffective Communication of Subscription Benefits: The value and benefits of the subscription program were not being communicated effectively.

Unoptimized Popup Forms: Nekohama had a good amount of organic site traffic but lacked optimized popup forms to capture site visitor contact information.

What Dispatch Did:

Started sending campaigns to engaged core segments once per week

Built out comprehensive automated flows from scratch that meet customers where they’re at on their journey to drive brand engagement and incremental revenue.

Implemented new creative that was aligned with Nekohama’s premium brand and designed to drive maximum click-through and conversion.

Developed targeted and dynamic messaging within campaigns and flows to highlight the value and benefits of the subscription program.

Designed and implemented optimized popup forms to capture site visitor contact information and nurture them toward their first purchase.

Results (First 3 months of partnership):

Attributed Email Revenue:

+609%

Campaign Revenue:

+999%

Flow Revenue:

+189%

BACKGROUND

The Challenges

An initial comprehensive audit at the start of our partnership with Nekohama revealed several areas needing immediate attention:

Our audit revealed several challenges:

Unoptimized Popup Forms

Nekohama had a good amount of organic site traffic but lacked optimized popup forms to capture site visitor email & SMS information. This led to missed opportunities to nurture visitors into customers.

Lack of Automated Flows

There were no automated flows to nurture new subscribers into customers or to educate and delight new customers post-purchase. This lack of automation led to gaps in the customer journey and lower conversion rates.

Inconsistent Campaign Cadence

Despite having a very engaged list, Nekohama was not sending campaigns regularly. This resulted in missed opportunities for consistent customer engagement and revenue generation.

Ineffective Communication of Subscription Benefits

The value and benefits of the subscription program were not being communicated effectively to existing customers. As a result, the subscription uptake was lower than expected.

KEY OBJECTIVES IDENTIFIED

Develop a campaign calendar strategy and cadence that would allow Nekohama to generate consistent revenue from their list and continuously move prospects lower down the funnel with educational content.
Optimize the Customer Journey by creating all new automated flows from scratch.
Improve creative to align with the premium brand.
Clearly communicate subscription benefits to upsell existing customers in both automated flows and campaigns, using proper segmentation and dynamic content.
Reach a conversion rate on signup forms upwards of 10%

THE SOLUTIONS

Strategic Approach

Audit & Analysis

Audited existing campaign and flow strategies, mapping out the existing customer journey.

Automated Flows Strategy Development:

Once we deeply understood the brand’s customer journey, we identified gaps in messaging along customer journey that could be filled to achieve our objectives.

Content Strategy Development

A campaign calendar was built off of our framework for creating evergreen engaging content that combines thoughtful merchandising with product education. Nekohama has a lot benefits to communicate, which made it easy to find new angles to frame Nekohama as the solve for a variety of problems that their customer demo may have, including; inability to focus, anxiety from coffee, overall health benefits of matcha, longer lasting energy without a crash from coffee, etc.

Placed an emphasis on showcasing recipe content often as the data revealed that this is what subscribers engaged with most, also leading to higher conversion rates.

Popup Form Strategy Development:

We worked with the brand to identify an offer for new site visitors that would be attractive in exchange for joining our email & SMS list, and more importantly, met the brand’s margin requirements. We also took the step of building out a tiered offer structure to incentivize SMS subscriber double opt-ins in order to fast-track list growth.

Typically we see better performance with popup forms that do not have images, but we developed a specific testing strategy tailored to Nekohama focused on testing images of the brand’s influencer founders in different contexts to see if the brand messaging interlaced with the founders’ familiar and trustworthy faces would drive higher performance.

Implementation

All Core Flows Rebuilt:

Optimized core automated email flows, such as the Welcome Series, Abandoned Checkout, Post Purchase, Sunset flows These flows were tailored to meet customers at different stages of their journey, enhancing engagement and driving incremental conversions. One of the core early learnings from analyzing Nekohama’s data was that new subscribers responded in a stronger

way to education around matcha’s benefits compared to coffee VS education around Nekohama’s benefits compared to other matcha brands. This informed several other aspects of our strategy as it revealed the consumers we were speaking needed to first be sold on matcha, and then sold on Nekohama being the right matcha choice for them.

Abandonment flows were branched between prospects and existing customers in order to address the different objections that each segment would have when abandoning a cart or browsing session.

Post purchase flows were branched between first time purchasers and repeat purchasers, with a strong emphasis for first-timers placed on on product education and the benefits that come from creating a daily habit out of drinking Nekohama.

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Design was elevated to help communicate the brand’s premium quality.

Segmentation

Provided an improved segmentation strategy focused on sending to engaged subscribers to help maintain a high level of deliverability.

Created core segments for Prospects, One-Time Purchasers, and subscription customers to understand engagement and conversion data from each, as well as be able to remove subscription revenue in order to get a clear picture of true incremental revenue driven.

Dynamic content blocks to feature personalized offers:

Dynamic banners in each email feature the brand’s welcome offer to convert prospects, and their subscribe and save offer to convert repeat one-time-purchase customers into subscription customers.