In our final piece for the Growth Diaries, we’re checking in on the progress of the initiatives funded by the Growth Grant that Happy Human has pushed out in the last couple of months. 

As a quick recap, our previous conversation with Vinnie, Co-founder of Happy Human, mainly revolved around the brand's challenges. She also shared with us her plan to use the grant funds to improve their current customer acquisition rates as well as lifetime value (LTV).

1. Launch of the citrus scent in May

Following the launch of their new product in May, Vinnie shared that they’ve seen a pretty good improvement in sales month on month. “If we were to compare our June sales to May, there’s a 10% increment in (our) actual sales.” 

But she sees the growth as a small win compared to the bigger win in this campaign—the increase in number and the quality of returning customers. An average of 46% of customers came back to purchase from Happy Human because they liked the new citrus scent, compared to an average of 40% before. 

“While we were developing this new scent, we actively collected feedback from our product testers and 80% of them loved the citrus essential oil. We’ve also been getting positive reviews from our customers about the new scent too”, shared Vinnie. ‍

2. Strengthening communication channels and building a proper customer lifecycle email, SMS, and notification campaigns with an agency and tech stacks—Klaviyo, PushOwl

As part of Happy Human’s plan to increase customer LTV and optimize the whole email process, Vinnie also decided to engage an email agency to optimize their Klaviyo email flows. With the email agency, they’ve created and optimized 7 email flows for existing customers:

• Win back flow
• Browse abandon flow
• Price drop flow
• Birthday flow
• Expected purchase flow
• Sunset flow
• Anniversary flow

While it’s a little too early to tell the success of these flows, Vinnie mentioned that they’d seen a significant improvement, especially for their browse abandonment flows. 

“We engaged the email agency back in May. The point was for them to fill in the gaps in our email processes, and create smoother flows with more upselling and cross-selling opportunities. I’d say we did manage to see slightly better open rates and conversions, especially on the browse abandonment flows—open rates were at 36% and conversions at 1.1%.” 

The key was to make sure that the initial outreach for browse abandonment emails was almost immediate after users browsed their site. The new flow sent out an email of their top selling products 2 hours after the user was last active on Happy Human’s website. 

Another email flow that saw an increase in open rates and conversion rates was the expected next purchase flow. Happy Human previously had a similar existing flow but was only seeing around 30% open rate and 1% conversion rate. This has been improved to a 36% open rate and a 2% conversion rate.

Vinnie also shared that while they’ve also engaged the agency to experiment with regular email campaigns, unfortunately, they weren’t working as well as expected—engagement was relatively low. “We tried out email campaigns with the agency but our own campaigns had much better results. It could be because we understood our brand voice and product a lot better than a third party. Naturally, the messaging and tone of our content just appealed to our customers a lot better. “

Alongside the new email efforts, Happy Human also tested a new tech solution, PushOwl, to reduce abandoned cart rates. How it worked was by using cookies to track people who did not sign up for their emails and reminding them with popup widgets. Vinnie mentioned, “We had campaigns for both Mother’s Day and just a regular promotion for our product launch but the numbers weren’t up to our expectations. It was a nice experiment but not helpful at all. 

The conclusion? 

The newly introduced email flows were far more effective than cookie tracking for abandoned carts. ‍

3. Building on their content and education initiatives through content and social media marketing

To pump up their new content and social media marketing initiatives, Happy Human engaged two new content creators in May to help out. 

A lot of the new content was created around the fresh new citrus scent, one-off promotions, and also greater emphasis on educating the public about sustainability. “With content, we’re constantly experimenting with new trends, new formats, new platforms to reach more people,” said Vinnie. 

This time around, they’ve focused their efforts, especially on Instagram Reels and TikTok. With Reels, they’ve seen their posts reach 15,000 organic views—they’ve never surpassed 10,000 organic views before. When sharing their pre and post-results, Vinnie mentioned that they’ve seen an increase in 2% follower growth on Instagram alone from May. 

With TikTok, they’ve also been centering their efforts on product education. The teaching and engaging proved to be a success as they’ve seen a 3% follower growth on said platform. 

“Instagram Reels and TikTok have been our go-to way to reach customers organically—they have better algorithms. We rely a lot on our content team to research and identify what people are interested in. It’s a lot better than getting an agency because the lead time is a lot shorter internally. Inhouse teams tend to have a more holistic approach which is in line with what we want.”

On top of generating content themselves, Vinnie shared that they’ve also been actively reaching out to influencers and pushing for more User-Generated Content (UGC) to amplify their existing word-of-mouth marketing activities. Rather than paying these influencers, the idea is to create more genuine content through product seeding. And if they see strong conversions from these influencers, they’re also looking into the possibility of converting them into ambassadors (or affiliates) for Happy Human. 

Plans for Happy Human 

Now that we’ve come to the end of the Growth Grant campaign, we were curious to hear what Vinnie had in plans for Happy Human’s growth afterward. 

“After experimenting with so many channels, we’re going to continue to focus on email and create more flows to capture the gaps we didn’t think about. Email marketing is a great channel because it’s our own. We’re also definitely going to double down on organic content. Going to give PushOwl and paid influencers a pass for now.” 

Here are 2 final pieces of advice that Vinnie has for small-medium ecommerce businesses to scale at a sustainable pace. 

1. Spend more time on owned channels, emails, and content. It’s not free, it’s not easy, and it takes time but it pays off. 
2. Invest in people internally because it has the continuity that engaging someone else outside doesn’t. Having someone in-house is a lot more time-saving since they already understand the brand voice, are able to speak to customers and they know the right messaging across marketing channels. 

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