Back to articles

Mountain Crest Gardens Increases Order Value By 20%

Industry: Home and Garden

Platform: BigCommerce

Favorite Feature: Points & Rewards

1995

Year Founded

~20%

Increased Avg Order Value

~10%

Increased Conversion Rate

We had customers who were continuously checking-out as guests even though they had accounts with us. Smile.io at the time couldn’t support guest checkouts, so we were getting a lot of complaining customers because they weren’t getting their points and an increase in customer support overhead because of having to manually deal with it.

Matts Jopson

Vice President

Company Overview

Mountain Crest Gardens is a family owned and operated succulent nursery established in 1995, located in the scenic Scott Valley of Northern California near Mt. Shasta.

They're the ultimate succulent store and they sell succulents and succulent-related products to businesses and consumers across the USA. Today, they grow 1000+ varieties of succulents and work hard to provide the best delivery experience to their customers so you can rest assured that you’ll receive your order fresh.

Our newsletter strategy has proven quite well for us, but customers weren’t really vested into it; there wasn’t a sense of loyalty from them to our brand. Nothing was stopping them from going to the competition.

Challenge

MCG had a traditional approach to customer retention by having customers sign up for their weekly newsletter and automatically receive a coupon they could use on their next purchase. However, this didn’t feel like actual loyalty; there’s no way to keep track of all these coupons, and customers aren’t vested enough to come back and buy from them. Also, not all their customers participate in the program and thus not all of them get the coupon.

MCG reached out to Smile.io and initially deployed their loyalty program with them. However, Smile.io at the time couldn’t resolve one of the big issues they experienced: automatically assigning points to guest checkouts. That was a problem for MCG as the majority of their customers weren’t as tech savvy and they repeatedly checked- out as guests even though they had an account at the store. This also incurred more overhead for the Customer Support team who needed to manually intervene in situations when customers simply weren’t getting their promised points.

So they decided to look for a solution that will allow them to deploy their program seamlessly, would automatically reward points to guest checkouts and will offer more features to support their growing loyalty and referrals marketing objectives at a reasonable price.

Solution

The initial goal of MCG was to establish themselves as the go-to place for succulents and succulent-related products instead of Amazon or Google to search for options. To do that, they needed to deploy a loyalty program that supports incentivizing a variety of actions, works seamlessly with their target audience, offers various display options for their custom-build theme and is cost-effective to meet and support their fast-growing business.

Lootly helped MCG set up their programs and display the program widget in a way that resonates with their customers and works well with their theme from a technical standpoint.

Lootly supports the option to reward guest checkouts, so we configured that for them as well, so their customers, regardless of whether they’re signed in or not, will always get rewarded for their purchase.

Since MCG utilizes TrustSpot for gathering & displaying UGC, it was critically important to allow Lootly to fully integrate with TrustSpot. This integration allows customers to receive points for writing a review - assets that hold a ton of value in their line of business.

We had customers who were continuously checking out as guests even though they had accounts with us. Smile.io at the time couldn’t support guest checkouts, so we were getting a lot of complaining customers because they weren’t getting their points and an increase in customer support overhead because of having to manually deal with it.

Results

MCG runs their loyalty and referrals programs with Lootly for over 1 year now.

Since they’ve set up the program and deployed it on their website, they’ve seen higher customer engagement and satisfaction.

They’ve also noticed a significant increase in their social media engagement and following thanks to the incentives they’re offering to customers for performing these actions. This has worked really well for them as it’s only a cost to the company when customers redeem the points.

In 2020, when MCG first deployed their loyalty program, their overall revenue grew in double digits marking the largest single year growth in company history.

In addition, they analyzed their most popular reward issued “ $10 off for orders over $50” and realized that the average cart value is above $80, which is evidence that their strategically set rewards increase order value by approximately 20%.

With around 3,000 rewards issued and a $15,000 investment, Lootly generated ~$100,000 in new value generation since MCG deployed their Lootly loyalty program.

The Lootly team has been with MCG every step of the way, assisting in this journey with onboarding the MCG team, guiding them through setting up their strategy in the system and displaying the program elements in a technically-friendly way.