Who is Rooted? 

Rooted is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) plant business on a mission to reconnect people to nature. As a lifestyle brand, Rooted believes in sharing the positive mental, physical, and emotional benefits associated with having plants in your space. 

After launch and up until March 2020, Rooted brought most of their revenue in from their B2B projects, supplying businesses across NYC with plants to green up their customer- and employee-facing spaces, with supplemental income coming from their Chinatown storefront and online business. 

Once the pandemic hit in March 2020, Rooted made the decision to transition completely to ecommerce, closing their NYC store and ending their B2B engagements. 

What Was the Challenge? 

After record online sales in the early months of the pandemic, revenue began to fall around June 2020. 

Rooted came to Barrel in July 2020, asking our Growth and CRM teams for a solution to increase customer acquisition, customer retention, lifetime value, and ultimately overall revenue. 

What Was the Solution?

Before making any recommendations, our team wanted to get a better picture of how email could positively impact revenue and business performance. This involved getting a better understanding of how Rooted’s email platform, Klaviyo, was set up, so we could identify key areas where we could have the largest impact. 

So we began our engagement with a CRM audit to dive deep into their email platform to learn what was working, what wasn’t, and where they could improve. Knowing that email drives high ROI for ecommerce businesses, email was the ideal platform to try to find efficiencies to increase revenue without greatly increasing spend. 

Following our audit, we shared insights and high priority recommendations we could continue to work on to start chipping away at the tasks and behaviors we hypothesized would make the most difference.

What Was Our Strategy?

We realized the biggest opportunity for Rooted would be to optimize the performance of their flows to generate more passive revenue over time. 

Our full automation strategy established key touch points along the entire customer journey, increasing the positive impact on both customer acquisition and retention. We advised on expanding some of their essential ecommerce automations, such as their Welcome and Post-Purchase flows, to better onboard new subscribers to the brand, and help new customers feel prepared to take care of their new plants. 

As far as customer acquisition goes, we also recommended creating a Browse Abandonment flow to encourage subscribers to add products to their cart. 

Finally, once Rooted’s personalized plant quiz was finished, we built follow-up flows to remind quiz abandoners to finish their quiz to get their personalized recommendations, and quiz takers to shop the plant recommendations they received.  

What Results Have We Seen? 

With the launch of three updated essential automations (the Welcome Series, the Abandoned Cart Series, and the Post-Purchase Series) and three new behaviorally-triggered flows (the Browse Abandonment Series, the Quiz Follow-Up Series, and the Quiz Abandonment Series), we’ve seen average order value, revenue from flows, lifetime value, and customer retention increase.  

Revenue from Flows

During the nine months that we partnered with Rooted to expand their automation ecosystem, we’ve seen 32% month-over-month growth in revenue from flows.  

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Customer Retention

Longer term, the Rooted team had a goal of increasing customer retention. We saw an 8% increase in two-month retention, a 7% increase in three-month retention, and a 13% increase in four-month return rate over the duration of our partnership, meaning more customers were coming back for additional purchases two, three, and four months after their initial purchase (compared to the nine months before Rooted started working with Barrel). 

Average Order Value

Since beginning our engagement in August 2020, average order value has increased on average 3.35% month-over-month for the last nine months. The average order value itself increased 27% during our nine month partnership compared to the previous period.

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In relation to customer retention, we’ve seen an increase in average order value of repeat customers. The longer a customer continues to buy from Rooted, the higher order value we can continue to expect from them.

Lifetime Value

The impact of our average order value and customer retention results can best be seen in the increase in customer lifetime value. Compared to the previous nine months, customer lifetime value increased 23.96%. 

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Image courtesy of Rooted.

Interested in scaling your emails or CRM? Contact our Business Development team to learn more.