Unified customer journey a sweet success for Doughnut Time

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Doughnut Time makes some of the brightest, intricately-decorated doughnuts you’ll ever see. The London-based brand employs a team of dedicated doughnut designers who are constantly inventing unique toppings and flavours. As a result, the hand-glazed treats are not only delicious, they’re also a feast for the eyes. The store has 17 branches and delivers to consumers and corporate clients nationwide. It recently launched a click-and-collect service that allows customers to place an order online and choose where to collect it from.

Learn how the brand combined email, SMS and reviews to create a hole-istic customer experience across multiple channels

Challenge

As a click-and-mortar business, Doughnut Time needs to be able to combine data from its online and offline retail operations into a single customer database to optimise CRM. The goal is to make sure customers have a consistent experience, however they choose to shop. The brand believes the customer journey should be seamless, starting from the moment people sign up, all the way through to when they receive a post-purchase request for feedback. 

To personalise these touch points and ensure the message resonates, the brand needs to gather data to learn more about its sweet-toothed subscribers. Dietary requirements, past purchases and other preferences all need to be taken into account. And, since gifting is a big part of the business, it’s helpful to know which occasions people are buying for – this insight helps with messaging and also product development.

Solution

Klaviyo’s intelligent automation platform integrates with Doughnut Time’s Shopify store and Square POS system to sync both in-store and ecommerce data in Klaviyo. With data consolidated in a single tech stack, Doughnut Time can build highly-personalised customer journeys that take into account the needs of different audiences. 

On the website, Klaviyo’s sign-up forms collect consumers’ email and SMS data, as well as their reason for purchase. Corporate customers enter the subscriber list via a separate form that triggers a notification to the sales team when an enquiry is submitted. 

Doughnut Time recently adopted Klaviyo reviews, so now it handles email, SMS and reviews on the same platform. This means the brand can create multi-channel flows that engage with subscribers via their preferred channel, and collect reviews from buyers at the right time in their journey.

Strategy

Social channels drive a high volume of subscriber sign-ups but Doughnut Time has found that social referrals require immediate brand reinforcement and conversion due to consumers’ short attention span. An eye-catching welcome series is triggered as soon as someone subscribes. It achieves a 26.8% conversion rate – assisted by a time-limited offer that creates a sense of urgency. In-store sign-ups trigger a different flow since customers are segmented by acquisition channel to customise their welcome journey. 

Doughnut Time sends both email and SMS messages to subscribers, depending on their preferences. To encourage people to share their mobile number, the brand offers extra treats – a tactic that has generated 25k SMS subscribers in a year. By combining emails and text messages in flows, the brand is careful not to make its marketing intrusive. SMS works particularly well in the welcome flow, where it achieves an 18.5% conversion rate, and in the abandoned cart flow, where it converts at 4.2%. 

To support its thriving click-and-collect business, Doughnut Time sends buyers an order confirmation email that helps to ensure collections run smoothly. The email is personalised with details relating to the customer and their order, including the store and collection date, and a photo of the store for reference. It has a 94% open rate and 45% click rate, and even generates some orders.

We set out to enhance our customer experience by offering a new in-store click-and-collect service. This concept is fairly commonplace within the food industry and has been on our agenda for a while. Klaviyo not only allowed us to open up the availability of click-and-collect for our customers, but it helped create a new revenue stream for the business. A win-win for both customer and business. With differing delivery times for our Southern and London stores, we used split triggers within the flow to good effect, customising the email depending on the location.

As an Insta-friendly brand, social proof is invaluable to Doughnut Time so gathering customer feedback is very important. Using Klaviyo reviews, the brand automatically sends customers a request via email and SMS once they’ve received their order. All the reviews are collected in Klaviyo, which makes it easy to push ratings and comments into blocks of content. Reviews can trigger further automations, too – Doughnut Time has a follow-up flow for whenever less-than-perfect feedback is received. 

Having everything in one platform works so much better. We used to have one app for reviews then Klaviyo for email and SMS. It was a pain to figure out which way the data was flowing and the messages looked disjointed. With Klaviyo, it’s easier to manage the process and we’re collecting more quality reviews as a result.

Throughout the customer lifecycle the brand makes personalised recommendations to encourage shoppers to buy again. The mouthwatering suggestions incorporate preferences such as dietary needs, while also allowing subscribers to opt out of potentially sensitive content around Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day. 

By taking this approach, the brand achieves exceptionally high engagement through its owned channels. Click rates average 10.7% for flows, and 11.4% for SMS messages (both above average for the industry) and the high conversion rates see 47% of online revenue being attributed to email and SMS.