Legion Athletics

Background

Legion Athletics is an all-natural sports supplement eCommerce brand.  Using natural ingredients, their products include protein powders, bars, protein cookies, vitamins, as well as supplements. Their mission is to provide high quality, safe supplements that are scientifically proven to boost strength, muscle growth, and fat loss.

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Challenge

Legion offers supplement memberships where customers can subscribe to receive their products on a monthly basis. In addition to a 10% discount on each order, members get free shipping, VIP customer support and they can have peace of mind that they’ll never run out.

As with any brand, their goal is to keep people in their subscription for as long as possible. Lengthier subscriptions means more revenue for the company and higher customer lifetime value.

Legion decided that the largest area of customer retention opportunity for their brand was experiment with ways to prevent churn and keep members in their supplement subscriptions longer.  

According to the Harvard Business review, if a company is able to increase its retention rate by 5%, it’s possible to increase profits by up to 95%.  This is based on research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score).

In fact, there are massive gains to be made for brands that can reduce their monthly churn.  The following chart shows the annual impact to a brand’s overall membership based on its monthly churn rate.

As you can see in the chart below, having a 2% monthly churn rate means a brand is losing 21% of its customers every year!

Approach

Armed with data from the chart above depicting how detrimental customer churn is to a brand, Legion decided to craft a strategy that would minimize the number of members that canceled their subscriptions each month.

Using data from past memberships, they were able to calculate the average length of time a typical customer was in one of their supplement subscriptions before deciding to cancel the subscription.

Legion then crafted a handwritten note outreach strategy at exactly this point.  Their goal was to make the customer feel like a special VIP.  They wanted to surprise and delight the member at this point so that the customer would decide to continue in the subscription beyond this normal churn point.

To do this, they set up a personalized handwritten note through IgnitePOST that would be sent when the member reached a point that was one month prior to the average churn date:

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As the note above shows, members would receive a personalized, handwritten note from Carson, the Director of Customer Experience one month prior to the average churn point.  Carson thanks the member for being one of their best, most supportive customers and then gives the customer an offer code to use on their next purchase.

The front of the card also includes a QR code, which takes the member right to Legion’s online store.

To make things super easy, Legion was able to leverage Klaviyo, their marketing automation tool, where they had all of their marketing flows already set up.

Using IgnitePOST’s Klaviyo integration, they were able to to design the look and feel of their handwritten note and then simply drop this handwritten mail touchpoint in right alongside of their existing marketing flows.

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Further, Legion decided to leverage IgnitePOST’s Exclusive Klaviyo Offer. IgnitePOST is a preferred Klaviyo partner and offers a $1,000 credit to any qualifying Klaviyo customer that wants to send handwritten notes from their Klaviyo flows.

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Results

After sending hundreds of handwritten notes at exactly the right time, the results of this effort become apparent.

Legion was seeing a conversion rate of 6.4% from the handwritten cards that were being triggered. Since these cards were being triggered at the normal churn point, they considered all of the recipients who reached this point to be members who were about to churn.

If we consider the chart showing the impact of monthly churn rate on an annual basis, recovering 6% of members who were about to churn means that Legion’s membership base was 52.4% larger at the end of the year!

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Further, since this was all set up through Klaviyo, it required absolutely no work on an ongoing basis from the Legion team. The automation simply ran and recovered 6.4% of customers who were about to churn each month.

How impactful would it be for your brand if your membership base was 52.4% larger at the end of the year?

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Conclusion

When brands come to us, they’re often focused on user acquisition as their primary goal. However, as we’ve shown from the case study here, improving customer retention and preventing customer churn is far more impactful.

With the cost of acquisition rising by 60% over the past 5 years, it has become critical for brands to have a solid customer retention and churn prevention strategy. We’ve noticed this is the biggest differentiator between brands that grow successfully and brands that don’t make it.

If you're interested in having IgnitePOST execute a similar strategy for your business, reach out to us today! We’d be happy to work with you to craft, execute, and measure a similar strategy for your business!

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