Tea Forte increases customer lifetime value by 25%

Tea Forte is the global luxury tea brand known for quality handcrafted teas, design-driven accessories, and exquisite packaging. Enjoyed in more than 35 countries, Tea Forte is a well-recognized brand at leading hotels, restaurants, prestige resorts, luxury retailers, and teaforte.com.

Before Optimizely, Tea Forte had multiple systems for managing data and executing campaigns across channels. The team used a legacy email service provider (ESP), which could only run basic batch-and-blast emails and hadn't innovated its product in five years. Additionally, the Tea Forte team struggled to create and personalize triggered emails from unintegrated point solutions.

The systems couldn't talk to each other or exchange customer data and hurt performance, which felt like over-investing for the Tea Forte leadership team.

Brewing a data-driven marketing strategy

At Optimizely, our market-leading Digital Experience Platform (DXP) offers brands like Tea Forte a composable architecture that harmonizes data across systems and provides the customer context necessary to deliver outsized outcomes. Making a single real-time view of the customer possible, regardless of the tools you've selected to execute your marketing, is Optimizely's activated CDP called Optimizely Data Platform (ODP).

After partnering with Optimizely, Tea Forte had a deeper understanding of its customers by centralizing all customer, order, and product data in one place with Data Platform. As a result, tea Forte now had better access to their data than ever before. With Data Platform, the team could filter customer data by behaviors, products, and purchases. Instead of bouncing between tools and guessing, Data Platform unlocked predictive segmentation and data-science-backed targeting on customers to boost the relevance of campaign messaging—something that was impossible to do before.

Data Platform also empowered Tea Forte to incorporate behavioral campaigns into their email strategy, unlocking higher revenue per send. Using insights from Data Platform, the team now sends welcome, cart abandonment, and post-purchase behavioral series emails with individualized personalization. In addition, a reliable strategy for Tea Forte has been to use Data Platform to segment for non-openers in earlier campaigns and send a follow-up.

With automated and dynamic segments in Data Platform, Tea Forte can be sure their emails are targeted. Whenever Tea Forté reminds users of "final day" and "sale ends soon" messages paired with the items from their cart that have yet to be bought they can be sure it's sent to the right person. 

The team also uses data from Data Platform to drive repeat purchases. The team will segment for 'most often bought' and 'repeat bought' items then use them in post-purchase campaigns. As a result, the Tea Forte team effectively nudges customers to buy again by running targeted omnichannel campaigns with email and coordinating Facebook ads via Data Platform's segment sync with Facebook.

Understanding customers with data

With the help of Optimizely, Tea Forte has seen a 20X return on spending in under a year. Furthermore, their average customer lifetime value (ACLTV) has increased 25 percent with the addition of behavioral-driven campaigns.

"It's where we go to understand our customers," said Nebelung.

In the past, the Tea Forte team would have used over twenty SQL database queries to complete these campaigns. With Optimizely, analyzing marketing campaign performance is now a simple, easy-to-read customer dashboard. As a result, Tea Forte now has insights and metrics, serving both reporting and campaign needs. The team can also complete more complex analyses and make more right decisions with their marketing. For example, within a few minutes, the team can build a segment to understand the lifetime value of customers who originated from Google AdWords.

Capturing more touchpoints with Data Platform

Tea Forte plans to integrate data from their first retail store, which recently opened on renowned Newbury Street in Boston, Massachusetts. By pulling in data from the point-of-sale systems, guest interactions, and check-ins into Data Platform, Tea Forte will start to understand how the digital experience informs the in-person visit. They can also use data from the store to target customers more accurately and further personalize the customer experience.