One of the most difficult exercises for a business is to figure out how to scale while staying true to its roots.
For Tiff’s Treats—a made-to-order cookie delivery service based in Austin, Texas—the answer to expansion was simple: When it comes to growing a business, focus on your loyal customer base and create incredible customer experiences.
We recently met with Rachael Romeo, Email Marketing Manager at Tiff’s Treats, and Rachel Cowlishaw, Associate Director of Client Strategy at Movable Ink, to find out Tiff’s Treats’ recipe to sweet success.
Keep reading to learn more about Rachael’s role at Tiff’s Treats, and watch our on-demand webinar for even more insights.
An Interview With Rachael Romeo From Tiff’s Treats
Tell us a little bit about Tiff’s Treats!
Tiff’s Treats is famous for bringing hot, fresh-out-the-oven cookies and brownies to hungry treat lovers. We’ve always tried to keep our menu small, our dough fresh and make sure we never run out of our customers’ favorite flavors.
While we’ve grown to 59 stores and over 1,000 employees, and now serve the greater Texas area, Atlanta, Nashville, and Charlotte, our core mission is still the same: bake amazing cookies and deliver them warm and fresh.
Tiff’s Treats went from a college-campus kitchen to 59 stores! That’s amazing. To what do you attribute this growth?
A big driving factor for our growth was technology—specifically, the development of our app. Now, we are able to provide customers with a faster, more user-friendly ordering experience.
You can actually track the delivery of your cookies right up to your door. It’s fun to watch the progression of your cookie delivery!
Our app users have actually become some of our most active customers, which really speaks to the efficacy of the decision to turn to technology to grow. At this time, over 25% of our orders come through our app.
How do you leverage the data you capture in the Tiff’s Treats app?
Not only does our app enable convenience, but it also facilitates our retention of an incredible amount of customer behavioral data: Customers log in with our app and order cookies.
From these interactions, we collect information on their name, location, and order preferences. In the event that they provide feedback on their delivery and app experience, we have another bulk of feedback and data to analyze.
With this data, we can provide the best support to each and every customer, enhancing individual experiences. It’s a pathway to personalization that we’d built into our business model and helps us to retain that local and high-touch bakery feel.
What were your primary marketing challenges prior to making the switch?
Before we put any systems in place to fully organize and operationalize our data, our team had to manually segment our customer groups based on our limited database: by location and purchase.
There were a few issues with trying to build customer segments using this method:
- Manual segmentation gets exponentially more difficult as a company scales. Profiling ten customers is quite different from profiling 10,000 customers!
- Customer data (location, preferences, etc.) can change on a dime. Manual segmentation is not an agile process, so we would constantly be rebuilding these segments and shuffling customer characteristics.
- Customer data was only accessible by IT. We would always have to bother our IT team for data requests and up-to-date customer information. At some point, these requests got annoying (for both parties)!
As we scaled, it was impossible to continue marketing with manual segmentation. We quickly recognized that the limitation was in our tech stack. No matter how much data we collected, we couldn’t effectively operationalize it with our previous ESP.
Once you identified the limits of your MarTech stack, what was your next step?
We knew that we needed to find a solution that would help us acquire, organize and operationalize our customer data, so we did some research. Soon, we came to the conclusion that, by adding Iterable and Movable Ink to our tech stack, we could solve all of our data acquisition and enablement issues.
Before partnering with Iterable and Movable Ink, our catered messaging capabilities were limited to “Happy Birthday” messages and geo-targeted emails. Now, we can automate our database’s search for keywords and phrases.
For example, if we know that somebody said “Happy Birthday” in their gift message, we can target them with an email to add birthday-themed packaging. That’s an add-on that we wouldn’t have recommended without the technology to target and typify.
With our new platform, we have a complete customer journey.
How have Iterable and Movable Ink helped Tiff’s Treats on your journey to personalize?
It’s easier to list out these new capabilities! So here we go:
1. Since implementing push notifications with Iterable last year, we still wanted to drive more customers to download our app. So we added in an email to our welcome workflow that described the app download process. It went from “Welcome to Tiff’s Treats” to “Welcome, let’s make your ordering easier with this app.”
And these emails are sent with precision. For instance, when the email is opened up on the iPhone, the Apple Store button is displayed. With an Android, the Google Play store. And if a device isn’t known, both buttons are sent. It makes our lives and our customers’ lives so much easier.
2. We used to leverage purchase data to personalize the hero image in our email. But with limited functionality, the hero image would be a picture of the last cookie purchased. At the surface, this sounds fine. An average application of personalization and imagery. But with gift-buying and other idiosyncrasies in order, the image wasn’t always customer-optimized.
Now, we can use Movable Ink to poll our customers about their favorite flavors. We feed this information back into Iterable and feature that flavor in the next message.
3. We can now gamify our offers and coupons over email, driving excitement and greater engagement. For instance, we’ve recently used a “scratch-off” email to reveal new flavors and offers. The game allows us to tease the possibility of a deep discount, and it’s driven a lot of activity.
Since partnering with Iterable and Movable Ink, we’ve seen:
- A 142% overall increase in clicks on campaigns that use Movable Ink vs. ones that don’t
- A 164% increase in redemptions in our July cyber-week alone
- A 184% increase in redemptions on coupons overall
Do you have any advice for other marketers?
Of course! For every marketer, it’s important to remember that:
- Data is great, but it’s worthless if it is not accessible or actionable.
- Having the right MarTech stack is imperative for growth.
- Invest in personalization to build relationships with your customers.
- Personalization is the difference between customer retention and customer churn!
To learn more about Rachael Romeo and Tiff’s Treat’s marketing and personalization strategies, watch our webinar on-demand.
Ready to start organizing, automating, and operationalizing your customer data? Learn how partnering with Iterable and Movable Ink can help enable world-class engagement.