Birchbox Upgrades Mobile App to Increase Upsell, Engagement

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In an effort to increase upsell to its most loyal customers, Birchbox has revamped its mobile app after looking at the metrics and finding some of its most engaged customers were using it.

The company worked with Sailthru to change its mobile and push notification strategies and use the feedback from the app to optimize its other channels.

Eva Lam, Product Manager for Birchbox, said the company launched its Holiday Shop in the app so customers could browse and buy all of Birchbox’s featured gifts.

“We also have a more streamlined shopping experience on the app,” said Lam. “There’s improved trial-and-purchase which lets subscribers easily add full-sized products to their shopping cart from a list of the past samples they’ve received in their monthly boxes. Subscribers can also filter samples that they have reviewed or added to their wish list.”

Lam said Birchbox wanted to continue to drive value for its most loyal customers with new and smarter engagement strategies to support product discovery, conversion and connection to subscription accounts. She added this was the rationale that led to the app upgrade.

“We wanted to deliver an experience that creates a direct connection between sampling products through the subscription and purchasing in our shop,” said Lam.

Lam said prior to working with Sailthru, the company didn’t have as robust of a push strategy, using it primarily for non-personalized, one-way communications.

“We revised our mobile app as a shopping tool for subscribers who wanted to be able to shop anywhere, anytime, without waiting for a mobile site to load,” said Lam.  “As such, we launched a comprehensive push messaging strategy to support our app.”

The goals of this push messaging strategy included increased visit frequency per user, growing revenue for Birchbox’s online shop, upselling engaged high-value customers and improving mobile messaging with more personalization and segmentation.

Some immediate results included a 211% increase in products purchased on days with push notifications, a 50% increase in push notification open rates, a push notification opt-in rate that was 30% higher than the industry average and a 3x lift in engagement of app users vs. website users.

“Mobile is the fastest-growing part of our business,” said Lam. “It drives 70% of our traffic and more than 50% of our revenue. In fact, this holiday season we’ve seen a 10% increase in traffic and a 20% increase in revenue from mobile compared to last year.”

Lam said Birchbox plans to incorporate more personalization in its app and across channels in an effort to entice more customers to use the mobile app.

Birchbox plans to create personalized entry points to the app, ensuring customers immediately see content that’s most relevant to them, and increase the level of personalization, including product recommendations.

The company also plans to add more triggered push notifications to the mobile app based on specific user behaviors or interests, including abandoned cart, 30-day inactivity and loyalty point thresholds. There will also be app-exclusive sales and promotions and rich push notifications.

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