Dogs love their humans, and Finn is an online direct-to-consumer brand that makes it easier for dog owners to show their dogs some love right back. Offering high-quality, vet-approved healthy soft chews for dogs, Finn is revolutionizing the pet wellness industry through premium supplements.

Prior to the brand’s official launch in September 2020, Finn began working with DojoMojo to build out a pre-launch audience through the platform’s proven partnership marketing strategy. Over the course of several months, Finn successfully acquired 130K email and SMS subscribers whom the brand was then able to tease their products to through regular updates, announcements, and email flows. This created pre-launch hype around Finn’s products, which in turn contributed to an immensely successful soft launch in August 2020 and an even stronger wide launch two weeks later.

The Challenge: Maintaining Post-Launch Sales Momentum

Finn’s pre-launch and launch marketing campaigns and promotions helped drive a high volume of early activity through its online store. Still, it was important to work on a longer-term marketing strategy to keep that early momentum going after the initial hype had calmed down. The brand wanted to make sure there was no lag in its engagement with customers, as this could mean losing important touchpoints.

To optimize post-launch remarketing efforts, Finn wanted to use data-driven insights that would allow them to send targeted, direct messages to high-intent audiences in order to generate a higher return. Specifically, the brand was interested in leveraging SMS as a way to nurture existing customers and leads. The problem, though, was that Finn’s customer data was scattered across various channels. It quickly proved difficult and time-consuming for the marketing team to manually analyze and crossmatch consumer data across Finn’s ESP and SMS platforms, which was necessary to narrow down potential customers prior to sending each SMS campaign.

Without a streamlined system in place, Finn’s earliest efforts to employ SMS marketing through several promotional text blasts proved nonoptimal, with a lower overall engagement rate and ROI than anticipated.

The Solution: Increasing SMS ROI Through SmartTarget

Finn beta tested DojoMojo’s SmartTarget feature for SMS Marketing in an effort to optimize the process of qualifying SMS subscribers prior to sending text blasts. The feature streamlines the process by using machine learning to identify high-intent subscribers with the highest probability of converting and then targeting that automated segment when you schedule a campaign. This ultimately ensures that every dollar spent on SMS sends is only going towards messages that have a high likelihood of a strong ROI.

Finn decided to see how SmartTarget would improve overall conversions by trying out the feature as a part of a Prime Day marketing strategy, where Finn set up an onsite sale to correspond with Amazon’s Prime Day. The goal was to enhance Prime Day promotions through targeted text blasts to the brand’s most highly-engaged SMS subscribers, which would be determined by leveraging campaign performance data.

For the Prime Day SmartTarget test, Finn set up a limited-time sitewide sale exclusively for its SMS subscribers. The brand then sent out a split promotional text campaign to its audience; half of the subscribers were those determined as high-intent contacts by the SmartTarget algorithm, and the other half included all remaining contacts. To track campaign performance, Finn used DojoMojo’s link shortening and performance tracking functions, as well as a unique coupon code that customers could apply at checkout.

The Results: Using SmartTarget to Enhance Prime Day Promotions

Through the use of SmartTarget’s AI-enhanced segmentation, Finn was able to see a 2.5x increase in SMS click-through rates. While text blasts prior to using SmartTarget typically got an average CTR of around 4.9%, the segment built through SmartTarget for Finn’s Prime Day promotional blast saw an impressive 9.76% CTR. In this particular case, the second segment — that containing users not identified as high-intent contacts by SmartTarget’s algorithm — saw a CTR of just 3.86%.

“DojoMojo has given us a testing bed to experiment with SMS marketing practices and see what really works without heavily dipping into our budget. SmartTarget has been immeasurable in helping us refine our segmentation strategies. Our initial SmartTarget text messaging campaign only cost us $200, but the insights we learned about our subscribers helped us improve our overall performance in later sends. We now consistently achieve 9% CTRs across the board.”

– Randall Stainton, Director of Marketing at Finn

Discover how you can take SMS marketing to new heights using SmartTarget segmentation with DojoMojo!