Origami Owl (2017-2022)

The Situation

Origami Owl had been heavily reliant on paid channels as a primary lever for revenue growth. Due to increased demand for a limited supply of ad space and changing privacy laws making ad targeting more opaque, paid digital acquisition costs were rising across the board. The company needed to diversify its revenue sources, and I suggested retention marketing as a new growth lever.

Biggest Risks

If Origami Owl continued relying on paid channels for revenue growth, the business would not be able to sustain itself. By allowing new customers to walk out the door after only one or two purchases, we were putting pressure on the digital team to continually focus on lowest CAC instead of finding and acquiring the right customers who would become brand loyalists with high LTV.

My Response

Origami Owl had tested a couple of retention programs (subscriptions and referral), but they operated separately from one another. When I took over stewardship of both programs, I also introduced a loyalty program that both subscription customers and brand loyalists earning coupons for referrals could plug into and compound their rewards.

Once I had all three retention programs set up and integrated (e.g. every third subscription order earned you extra loyalty points), my goal was to fine tune them.

• With our new loyalty program, I integrated sign up prompts into key touchpoints on the site and in email/SMS to grow program membership. I also experimented with different offers and VIP perks to find out which ones actually encouraged repeat purchases.
• For our referral program, I ran A/B tests on landing page content and the rewards offered to the current and newly referred customer to find the right mix that encouraged more referrals and higher basket sizes.
• To optimize our subscription program, I tinkered with the product and bundle mix available on subscription, the discount on offer and the timing of perks for subscribers to reduce churn.

My Results

During my time at Origami Owl, I helped our subscription program grow from contributing 0 -> 50% of brand revenue. In my last year, I increased our referral program’s conversion rate to 21% and lifted referral orders’ AOV by 12%. I also increased loyalty program membership by 142% YoY while lifting LTV of loyalty members 130% higher than non-members. All three of these retention programs worked together to grow company revenue and improve both our CAC payback period and CAC/LTV ratio.