Ritual increased customer retention by 2% in 2 days.
May 25, 2023
Test and roll is one of the most valuable frameworks I’ve encountered in my career. We were able to get quick insights and condense a 30 day experiment into 2 days!
Chelsea McClure, Director Customer Growth and Lifecycle @ Ritual
About Ritual
Ritual is a health and wellness brand aiming to bring a new level of transparency to the health and wellness industry. A Certified B Corporation, they have pioneered a new standard of high-quality multivitamins and supplements that are backed by science and Made TraceableTM with the first visible supply chain of its kind. Together with leading scientists, researchers and advisors, Ritual has developed products based on thousands of independent research studies, and now has one of the leading prenatal multivitamins in the U.S. Other interesting facts: Their vegan protein is the first protein to be Informed Protein Certified and is used by elite athletes on the Angel City Football Club. Their flagship multi (Essential for Women 18+) has USP Verification, a certification held by less than 1% of supplement companies, is backed by a peer reviewed and published human clinical study, and a patent on the technology. Ritual is available on Amazon.com, with the Climate Friendly Pledge Badge, and nationwide at Whole Foods Market and Target. Learn more at Ritual.com.
The Challenge
As a business operating on a subscription model, it is standard practice for Ritual to send an email notification to its customers before their monthly order is shipped. This is to allow customers to review and modify their subscription as necessary, and also to provide advanced notice of any charges that will be incurred. Ritual wanted to improve on this email series in order to effectively address customer needs and concerns without triggering churn while optimizing for revenue. Additionally, they wanted to mitigate the risks of launching a damaging test variant to a large population of users at such a critical time in their journey. The key here was to learn quickly, as industry standard 4-week test flights would not allow Ritual to test enough variants and could potentially lead to damaging results if the audience was exposed to the wrong treatment for too long.
The Solution
Ritual’s acquisition team was already utilizing Haus’s GeoLift product to understand incrementality of their advertising spend. After internal discussion, Ritual also reached out to the Haus team to supercharge their CRM & retention experimentation. Haus set up a test and roll framework for Ritual to move quickly between tests to find big wins for this email series. Together, Haus and the Ritual team constructed a testing roadmap to understand which email variant is most effective at increasing customer retention and satisfaction.
The Result
2 days into their test & roll experiments, Ritual’s first test variant showed a clear lift in subscriber retention. Ritual rolled out the new strategy within a week to the full customer base and saw a 2% lift in customer retention.
They continued the test and roll strategy and successfully tested 5 variants in 45 days. With traditional A/B Testing, this series of tests would have taken upwards of 4 months to complete. Haus’s platform allowed Ritual to find winning variants faster and launch them into the general populations quickly to maximize profitability, as well as reduce any potential damage or blast radius from losing variants. These 5 variants resulted in a 4.53% lift in billing and Ritual was successfully able to move the needle on an email that was previously slow moving in terms of optimization. As a result, retention improved significantly.