Back to articles

Natural skincare brand doubled their AOV with their loyalty program

Industry: Skincare

Platform: Bigcommerce

Favorite Feature: Audience targeting via tags

475.3 %

ROI in 30 days

2X

AOV increase

6 %

% of new customers acquired in 30 days

For us, it was important to find a software solution that will support our needs, but will also be there when we’re facing challenging situations or have evolving requirements. Lootly is the type of team that cares about their business, which means they also care about us, their clients, and that is essential for us.

Julie Longyear

Founder, Owner and CEO of Blissoma

Company Overview

Blissoma is an independently owned, independently managed, and vertically-integrated skin care brand. They specialize in targeted care for demanding skin types.

Their focus is on producing high quality skin care products with a high level of active ingredients (most of Blissoma products have over 75% of active ingredients in their content which drastically exceeds the norm of 5% - 20% used by most skin care brands).

The goal is to produce visible results for their customer that will make a difference in how they feel about their skin.

Blissoma is a Certified Cruelty-Free brand by the Leaping Bunny Program and all the products they manufacture are Vegan. They also support all social and racial justice initiatives and they believe everyone is beautiful, important, and deserving of respect.

Challenge

Julie’s journey with Lootly began in 2020 and her challenge was rather complex:

Changing ecommerce platforms

In 2020, Julie decided to move her store from 3Dcart to Bigcommerce. Bigcommerce offers a lot more options as a cart system and is able to support Blissoma’s growth. Before the move to Bigcommerce, Julie already did a basic loyalty program through the built-in solution of 3Dcart - she gave points to people for their purchases and they loved this.

With the move to Bigcommerce though, she had to explore alternative solutions to keep the loyalty program since BC doesn’t have a built-in solution for this.

Ways to engage customers with the brand in between purchases

She also realized that people love getting points; it gives them a little dopamine hit each time they learn they just earned something. But people were only being awarded for their purchases, which meant that in the time between purchases, they weren’t really engaging with the brand, they weren’t thinking as much about it and were not motivated to do so either. So she decided she needed more ways to engage her customers with the brand and give them points for it.

Options to exclude wholesale customers from the programs

Blissoma works with both retail and wholesale customers and the orders from both customer groups are processed in the same cart. This was a huge deal for the brand, and an option to control the points for purchases for wholesale customers was a must-have.

Incentivizing reviews

Reviews are vital in the skincare industry, since people want to know (and see) that a lot of other people have tried the products and they had results. So Julie wanted to find a way to gather more reviews from her customers and allow them to share their thoughts while helping other people but also, get rewarded for it.

Solution

Julie was already familiar with loyalty programs and she now needed a solution that will help her with the new challenges presented for the brand.

The new solution would have to:

offer a seamless integration with Bigcommerce
allow wholesalers to be excluded from the program
offer more interesting ways to earn points outside of making a purchase
and play well with the reviews provider she would essentially decide to implement.

She was comparing solutions and specifically was thinking between Lootly and Yotpo, which at the time, was not designed to support growing businesses. Lootly on the other hand, met all her requirements, including a seamless integration with Trustspot, a reviews provider Julie decided to proceed with.

She was now ready to run a loyalty program that will be rich in engagement actions, give people more options to earn points, get discounts and get the reviews volume that is highly valuable in the skincare industry.

The focus of her program is in the points and rewards structure as well as a referral program.

The structure of the earning actions is in line with the definition of the loyal customer for Blissoma.

Julie identified that the customer who buys 2 times from her store, will likely come to buy again since they like their products. So she makes this third purchase motivating for customers, by offering extra points if they hit the purchases goal.

She further wants to make sure people strive to reach a certain spend amount, so she incentivizes goal spend with extra points. Sometimes, she will get customers who reach that goal on the second purchase, and this is a signal to her that she has a high spender type of customer she would want to keep for the long run.

In terms of the rewards, Julie faced a challenge at first which the loyalty program helped her resolve beautifully.

Since Blissoma is a premium price brand, discounting is rather tricky to strategize. However, through the loyalty program, Juile is able to offer significant discounts which will be of value to the customers and also to the bottom line of turning them into repeat customers.

With the use of coupon expiration, customers are able to get a good deal and repurchase their products from their favorite brand in a relatively short period of time.

In terms of customer acquisition, she compliments her existing strategy where she collaborates with estheticians, influencers and bloggers, with a referral program where customers can earn even more points if they refer to the brand.

The whole process of integrating Lootly with our tech stack was easy and it communicates nicely. Strategy-wise, I really wanted to make sure I rewarded the most loyal customers, people who come to buy 3+ times and reach a certain spend. I also really wanted to offer a way to get rewarded if you leave a review of the product bought and that has been a game-changer for us

Results

Blissoma is a premium price brand, and the customers are people who value good quality, but also want to get a good deal. So Julie wanted to ensure she can provide the best deals for her loyal customers, but also avoid the appearance of discounting.

In addition, she needs to protect her price line and not sabotage the estheticians who drive a lot of business to the brand. The loyalty program allows her to achieve all this in a very subtle, elegant way.

And it works wonderfully.

In just 30 days, Blissoma generated a 475.3 % ROI, or a ~5X return on her investment through the programs, which is a continuous value generated over the time she’s been using Lootly. It signals that the customers find interacting with the program enjoyable and easy, and also recognize its value, which is the ultimate success factor.

Additionally, she noticed that when people engage with the loyalty system prior to making a repeat purchase, the AOV goes up 2X in value from the first purchase.

She also is very happy with the ongoing reviews process, which the program supports beautifully; for each review they make, customers add points to their balance. She now has thousands of reviews for her products which significantly impact the store’s conversion rate.

So overall, the program is a major growth catalyst for Blissoma’s various business initiatives; it rewards new referrals, it rewards customers’ engagement and repeat purchases and also allows the brand’s partners to thrive.