One of the toughest challenges within any business, let alone a start-up in a crowded drinks space, is the ability to identify real opportunities for growth over tempting easy wins. Mr. Consistent chief brand officer, Kahrissa Bell, explains how finding the right balance and blend of your team’s expertise and customer data can lead to lasting success.
Identifying these true growth opportunities can often be a push/pull scenario with a marketing team and a production team, with both groups ultimately wanting volume related outcomes in order to drive business growth.
(Source: Mr. Consistent)
At Mr. Consistent, to solve the issue of identifying opportunity, we’ve purposefully given our customers the power to guide our product development choices. By putting our data at the forefront of decision making, we have been able to identify areas of opportunity and ensure product launches are successful from the outset, with strong repeat purchases in the months and years to come.
By optimising our platforms and drawing down on the first party data we have accumulated, delivering products that meet market demand has been a strength that has enabled us to stay ahead of the competition.
Our business analysis model is often comparable to a big-box e-commerce retailer, focusing on guiding information such as Sessions, AOV, Returning Customer Rate, Conversion Rates, Cost per Acquisition and SKU sales information.
When we couple these standard business metrics with our in-depth data, we are able to ensure we are tailoring our product offerings to what the customers are wanting. This is done by focusing on data points such as empty search results, comments on social media posts, post-purchase reviews commentary, conversion rates by product page analysis, and even first party surveys disguised as a fun piece for customers to share their thoughts.
Gathering these multi-faceted data points enables us to drill down on common themes and take this information to the wider business before new product development gets underway.
For example, prior to launching our Lychee Martini Cocktail Mixer, we had established that there was enough product demand from our existing customer base that we would be able to sell this product at a similar rate of sale to our second and third best-selling cocktail flavours.
We had significant demand from customers directly vocalising their desire for this cocktail to be added to our range, coupled with our own research from surveys, market trends and even a significant amount of people searching for Lychee Martini on our site. Once this information was available to the team, our product development team were able to reprioritise their focus to create a cocktail that would have an immediate impact on revenue.
From informed decision making to coupling this perfected Lychee Martini recipe with a world-class creative team working on a launch campaign, we saw sales eclipse our best-selling product!
Balancing the information we pull from our first party data with our product development is always going to be a challenge because we can’t rely solely on data to drive the business forward.
At Mr. Consistent, we use data as a guiding force to advance the company, while also ensuring we listen to the goals of our internal teams who have been hired for their relevant expertise. We know there is no point in creating a cocktail that revolves around socialising and good times, only to fall flat through poor execution in engaging customers.
By making a concerted effort to balance internal goals with data, we have been able to grow Mr. Consistent to one of the most prominent social-led drinks brands in Australia – giving the people what they want, when they want it!
Kahrissa Bell is the chief brand officer for Mr. Consistent and keynote speaker at the Online Retailer Conference in Sydney on 24 July. Her session will focus on ‘From Data to Daiquiris: Maximising Customer Data for Personalised Marketing and Improved Customer Experience’ with more information available here.
