Challenge: Soft Services needed data-driven insights to build personalized customer journeys
Soft Services’ products are ungendered and target skin concerns relevant to a wide range of consumers. The brand also offers product options, like refill packs and bundles, that affect repurchasing behaviors and the customer lifecycle.
With such a broad and diverse audience, Soft Services requires robust segmentation and granular customer data to serve the right messages at the right time. To extract the most value from her marketing efforts, Stephanie DiSturco, VP of Growth, knew she’d need to build personalized customer journeys — but first, she had to find the right tools.
Soft Service’s lean team already had a spreadsheet-based system that worked well for basic consumer insights. However, it couldn’t deliver the granular data Stephanie needed to reach customers on a personal level. After experimenting with a few Shopify-specific analytics tools that didn’t meet her needs — Stephanie discovered Segments and knew she’d found the answer to take Soft Services’ marketing efforts to the next level.
“When your data is the median of all customers, the insights get super blurry. Segments was the only analytics tool I got interesting information from — it’s enabled us to keep our acquisition and retention data-driven.”
Solution: Segments helps Soft Services curate powerful marketing flows that solidify customer loyalty and LTV
With Segments’ AI-powered consumer analytics tool, Stephanie can discover vital insights through cohort analysis, build in-depth customer segments using natural language, and identify MVPs or low-value shoppers with 12 lifecycle categories. Rather than relying on spreadsheet data and audience-wide trends, she can now build data-driven customer journeys, targeting messaging to unique shopper behavior patterns.
With these new capabilities, Soft Services has also discovered hidden truths about its customers and products — and used them to solidify its marketing strategy.
Revealing the true story behind winning social campaigns
One Soft Services product was selling incredibly well through Meta ads, resulting in very low CAC. Based on this surface-level indicator, Meta’s algorithms doubled down, pushing ads for this specific product harder.
While this method was great for attracting new customers, Segments revealed these sales weren’t attracting customers with as high LTV potential relative to other SKUs. “If we relied on that front-end data alone, we would have continued to invest,” says Stephanie. Instead, she quickly pivoted, investing in ads for products that would have better long-term returns, an effort that helped boost LTV from Soft Services’ customers.
Evaluating ROI of building loyalty with Surprise & Delight
Segments helped Soft Services assess the impact of one creative loyalty tactic — mailing customers a free spatula to scoop out their last bits of lotion. “Sometimes you need to do unscalable things to scale, but the manual shipping and logistics were a bit much,” recalls Stephanie. “Was it really worth it to mail out thousands of spatulas once a month?”
Segments confirmed that it was. Tagging and analyzing spatula recipients as a cohort revealed that they were extremely loyal customers. The free gift made them feel appreciated and incentivized to keep buying again. This insight was what Soft Services needed to find a scalable solution, proving the viability of this retention tactic.
Sending the right emails to the right shoppers at the right time
With Segments, Stephanie has synced Soft Services’ messaging to customers’ unique behaviors. For example, she can segment customers who’ve purchased single products, bundles, or refills and send repurchase reminders to each at the appropriate time.
“There’s only so many times you can send an email that’s not compelling before customers stop opening,” she says. “I'd rather email a segment of 200 people with a really high open and convert rate than thousands of people for the same number of clicks.”
Through every experiment, Segments’ personalized support has helped Soft Services get the most from the platform. “The client service is what really hooked us,” says Stephanie. “Through conversations with the Segments team, we’ve unlocked a new level of what the platform can do.”
“Segments effortlessly shows us the long tail of customer actions after we acquire them through ads. It’s easy to look at key metrics like repeat rate, ARPO, and LTV and use that data to guide marketing decisions.”
Results: Soft Services creates and targets over 200 high-value segments in 24 months with Tresl
By partnering with Segments, Soft Services can speak to its customers as individuals. The brand is getting to know their preferences, habits, and needs — from a 22-year-old male shopper repurchasing his go-to body bar, to a 38-year-old woman trying Soft Services moisturizer for the first time.
The result? Enterprise-level data-driven marketing strategy without burdening Soft Services’ in-house team or stretching its budget.
And the downstream effects of these benefits have been nothing short of incredible:
- 27% increase in CLTV (meta investment example)
- 66% increase in Repeat Rate (surprise & delight example)
- 267% increase in revenue per subscriber (targeted email example)
“It feels like we have full analytics and data warehousing teams — when in reality, we don’t have a single person wholly dedicated to these tasks. That’s the power of Segments.”
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