The challenge
With a product so luxuriously plush and immensely popular as their line of premium bath towels and accessories, it would have been easy for Weezie to rest on its laurels (or in this case, towels).
Founded in 2018, the upscale brand isn’t at a place where they’re
hurting for business.
To fuel their next phase of growth, however,
they needed to make sure their investment in creating a
world-class brand experience was paying off.
“We have a great NPS score, our customer service team is really organized with tickets, people love the unboxing experience, everything about our team and process is really tight,” said Andrew Hughes, VP of growth at Weezie. “You’d like to think all those extra touches make all the difference for the customer, yet you’re still sometimes like, ‘Is this all really worth it?’”
Weezie’s marketing team also realized that in order to optimize spend on the right channels and marketing activities—and truly personalize the buying experience for each customer—they needed more zero-party data directly from the customers themselves. To solve both of these challenges, Weezie partnered with Fairing to conduct post-checkout “How did you hear about us?” (HDYHAU) surveys to get a holistic picture of why and how their customers were buying.
“Fairing surveys helped us to better understand the impact of all of our investment in customer experience.
Using the post purchase survey tool, we uncovered that word-of-mouth referrals were consistently one of the top sources of acquiring new customers - rivaling our paid channels.”
The solution
With Fairing’s always-on post-purchase surveys, Weezie unlocked a treasure trove of information on exactly how its customers were finding out about them.
One of the biggest recurring findings for Weezie from asking customers HDYHAU questions in their Question Stream ™?
Word-of-mouth referrals from friends and family are by far the number one source of new customers. But interestingly, this insight didn’t lead to increased investment in their referral program.
“Our audience just isn’t motivated by kickbacks and doesn’t really engage with traditional referral programs that rely on incentives. We found that they are motivated by passion for our brand, which is great.” said Hughes.
Rather, he views the strength of their word-of-mouth referrals that Fairing helped uncover as evidence that customers “are referring the product because they love our brand and our product, which is powerful knowledge to have.”
With this knowledge in hand, Weezie has been able to tailor their follow-up questions and develop additional surveys to dig into which aspects of the product or brand are being recommended most (i.e. the softness and durability of the product, the customer service, the unboxing experience) so Hughes and his team can emphasize those points in future marketing and advertising campaigns.
The results
With survey response rates regularly above 35%, Fairing’s Question Stream™ is enabling Weezie to make informed decisions how to allocate precious marketing spend:
Validating the importance of word-of-mouth
By being able to attribute ~35% percent of their business to word-of-mouth referrals through Fairing, Weezie has been able to be more judicious and precise about how they spend advertising dollars instead of spraying and praying.
If we weren’t seeing such strong engagement on word-of-mouth—and weren’t able to track that in Fairing—we’d likely have to be spending a lot more on less effective advertising.
With this concrete knowledge that all their brand efforts have paid off to create a well-referred brand, Weezie is able to use that goodwill to push and test even further with marketing tactics that will delight both new and returning customers.
Pulling the plug on underperforming direct mail prospecting activities
Where you choose not to spend is often as important as where you do choose to spend.
In 2023, Weezie had budgeted for 7-figure direct mail prospecting campaigns. They’d done them before, but this was the first time they had used Fairing data to track the results in real-time.
“We noticed it was only three or four days after running a direct mail campaign that we saw ‘direct mail’ fall off as a reason customers said they were hearing about us,” said Hughes. “Cross-referencing that self-attribution data with the match-back data we were getting from our agency really helped us dig more into it and question the ROI of direct mail.”
- Fairing direct-from-consumer data empowered the Weezie team to make a quick, confident decision in days to scale back from direct mail and reallocate that seven-figure spend to digital advertising.
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Without that data, they might have floundered in the dark for months, wasting money that could be deployed more effectively elsewhere.
“It really helped having that data, because now we know for next time, maybe we try a win-back campaign via direct mail—but we know that prospecting with direct mail maybe isn’t the most effective use of our time,” said Hughes.
- Since pulling back on direct mail as a result of Fairing insights, Weezie has seen its overall marketing efficiency rate (MER) improve substantially.
Achieving personalization at scale
One of the most impactful questions Weezie has relied on to build more intelligent profiles of its customer base is both simple and effective:
Weezie’s Question Stream®
Through asking this question in their Question Stream™, Weezie has been able to see that nearly two-thirds of their customers have three or more bathrooms in their home—valuable information that will drive the brand’s personalization efforts by enabling them to design the right bundles that will motivate multi-bathroom customers to buy in larger quantities in exchange for deeper discounts.
That information also allows Weezie to better segment those customers and personalize their Klaviyo win-back campaigns, and fill those other bathrooms with luxurious, high-quality bath linens.
Ultimately, Fairing helps us add more color to the picture of who our audience is.
We’re able to see, because our customers are telling us and confirming every day, that we aren’t a commodity product to them. We’re a part of their lifestyle.
