Building a modern customer loyalty program: Bangn Body's story

If Priscilla Hajiantoni hadn’t struggled with her skin as a teenager, it is unlikely she would have ever set out on the journey that led her to found her own skin care range three years ago. Today, that company, Bangn Body, is helping hundreds of thousands of people around the world regain control of their skin, and propelled Hajiantoni into the Forbes 30 Under 30.

Now she is hoping to reward those customers for the loyalty they have shown through a new program built on the Yotpo ecommerce marketing platform.

Bangn Body’s products have been developed based on Hajiantoni’s belief that skincare should be simple, and are the result of years experimentation as she investigated the dynamics between different ingredients and skin types.

“When I was conceptualising the brand, there really was nothing out there in the market, especially around simplicity in formulation and simplicity in steps,” Hajiantoni told CMO.

The company initially launched by building a following on Instagram, then driving word-of-mouth and working with micro influencers, before creating an email marketing list.

“Once we launched our digital marketing strategy, I went from my mum’s living room to an 1800-square metre factory in three years,” Hajiantoni said.

However, as the company has grown, she noted the cost of acquiring new customers has grown significantly.

“When we were looking at our portfolio of customers, the loyalty was amazing, but acquiring new customers these days is so expensive,” Hajiantoni said. “So if you are going to acquire them you better have a very strong retention strategy after the fact.”

That realisation led Hajiantoni to begin examining the potential for a loyalty program. But rather than rushing something to market, she spent eight months listening to customers and considering what the ideal program would look like, and the behaviours that Bangn Body would reward.

“We wanted to ensure that we were offering value, but also ensuring that we were staying true to the business and could grow the business and provide amazing new products and services,” Hajiantoni said. “We looked at all the data, and what we realised was we had an amazing community and quite a good frequency of purchase. But we knew that we could increase that, and also increase our average order volume as well.”

The customer loyalty program features four tiers, based on levels of involvement and investment with the brand. These include a customer’s average order value in addition to their frequency of purchase. Bangn Body also rewards customers for behaviours such as engaging with social channels and submitting social and video reviews.

“Social proof is so important to us as a brand,” Hajiantoni commented. “We are only three years old, and connection with our customers is the most important thing for us. All feedback is good feedback, so we want to make sure we are able to listen to them and hear them at a deeper level.”

Hajiantoni selected Yotpo due to the strength of its analytics capabilities and the company's deep understanding of the needs of small and medium businesses.

“We’ve engaged with big organisations, but they don’t align with a small business startup mentality,” she said. “They are not as adaptive and not as fluid. With Yotpo being user friendly, we could make amendments in the back-end of the platform ourselves, so we didn’t always need support.”

Hajiantoni said it also helped that Bangn Body was using other parts of the Yotpo suite for email and SMS communications.

“People can get rewarded directly through those platforms as well, and that connects them straight to the loyalty program, so it is a very seamless approach to the customer journey,” she said.

Subscribed loyalty

The next phase in the program’s development will be the launch of a subscription service, which will also tie directly into the loyalty program.

“People will automatically get their points when they subscribe, and then every time that sales go through, they are also earning points,” Hajiantoni said. “Now that we have implemented, we have started seeing an amazing response with so many sign ups. So how do we keep these customers engaging with us and having those shoppable moments and earning and redeeming the points. That is going to be the next phase of the loyalty program.”

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