Back to articles

Tiesta Tea increases repurchase rate by 26%

Industry: Tea

Platform: Shopify

Favorite Feature: Ready-to-go Rewards Page

2010

Year Founded

26%

Increase in Repurchase Rate

~ $14,000

Value Generated (90 days)

When customers are close to a reward, it’s likely they’ll spend more to reach it

Rachel Heinzinger

E-commerce Marketing Manager

Company Overview

Loose-leaf tea is a tea that is not brewed in a teabag. Instead, the leaves brew directly in hot water and that allows the water to extract a wide range of vitamins, minerals, flavors, and aromas from the leaves.

That’s what the founders of TiestaTea experienced on their trip to Prague, Czech Republic where they tasted loose tea. At that time, in the USA people who wanted to try loose leaf tea, had to find a specialty store, pay way too much money and deal with very confusing and hard to understand names of various teas.

So Dan and Patrick decided to revolutionize how people consume tea. Their mission is to make tea consumption accessible, affordable and understandable. Being in business for over 10 years now, they started on the shelves of stores and are now running the largest portion of their business online.

The integration with Trustspot was such a big advantage to Lootly, since incentivizing reviews was very important for our business

Challenge

At the beginning, the online portion of Tiesta Tea’s business was really small and they were on a mission to grow it. At the time, they were running their own points and rewards program manually, which was not at all sustainable nor effective.

After switching to Shopify as an e-commerce platform they made a lot of changes that would attract new customers but also wanted to continue running loyalty and rewards programs as it has proven to make customers come back. In addition, they wanted to increase the number of reviews they get from people as this type of UGC helps a lot to increase the conversion rate on their e-store.

Initially, Tiesta Tea turned to Smile.io for implementing a loyalty and rewards program and they were using Trustspot for UGC. However, there was no connection between these 2 integral elements of a successful loyalty marketing strategy and they started looking for a tool that can integrate with Trustspot and would help them incentivize reviews as part of their loyalty strategy.

Solution

The company’s initial goals were to increase repurchase rates, decrease churn, incentivize UGC and attract customers to buy more on their site than on Amazon.

Lootly helped Tiesta Tea to structure and deploy their loyalty and referrals strategy to successfully meet these goals and generate positive value.

Based on insights on their customers’ buying habits, their strategy is structured to incentivize people to sign up for an account at their store for which they instantly get points and then they’re just a small number of points away from their first reward.

On top of that, they offer strategically structured rewards in the form of discounts that customers can redeem as they accumulate points from shopping with them. The gratification in the form of rewards is an experience that customers can’t get when shopping for tea on Amazon for example.

Additionally, Tiesta Tea deployed a VIP Tiered program, a feature they find resonates a lot for their customers. They’ve structured a 3 tiers program through which customers can progress as they meet their entry requirement and earn more points for their spending as well as extra perks that they value.

Finally, their referrals program for acquiring new customers through brand ambassadors is contributing a lot to the overall success of the program. The concept resonates well with their target audience, which is mainly women ages 24-35 who are mindful of their health and fitness, new mums, and tea lovers in general. They know this target group values the incentive they’re offering for making a referral and thus the strategy is working well for them.

We were really happy that with our Lootly plan we could implement a VIP tiered program when we thought was a good time to add it to our strategy

Results

Tiesta Tea has been using Lootly to run their loyalty and referrals marketing for over 7 months now. Their success is largely due to a lot of changes they did over the course of time on their website and of course, adding Lootly is one them.

Lootly’s user-friendly widget allows customers to easily interact with their program and actually use the offered discounts and perks. In addition, the rewards page provides information to customers about the program in a super easy and understandable way.

In numbers, Tiesta Tea had a ~50% increase in new customers since deployment, which proves the effectiveness of their acquisition strategy. The repurchase rate has increased by 26% and their sales and revenue grew by staggering 225% compared to the year before deploying Lootly.

In addition, their social media presence also improved: their Instagram following increased by 25% and their Facebook following increased by 43%.

“ Although our overall success is based on a number of harmoniously implemented changes on the website, deploying our loyalty and referrals programs with Lootly has definitely been a huge part of that success”