Flash sale site Totsy.com quantifies member and customer lifetime value with RJMetrics.
Totsy is a fast-growing private sale site targeting moms and moms-to-be. Launched in 2009, it has featured flash sale discounts on thousands of designer brands. Totsy is also the first company in private sales to take on sustainable and socially responsive initiatives in all areas of its business.
Business Problem
“For our flash-sale type of site, the name of the game is getting membership.” James Argenti had recently joined Totsy as its Director of Analytics and set out to understand how much value they were getting from each of Totsy’s partners. “We always want more members. We typically want to get them for as low of a cost per acquisition (CPA) as possible, and we want to convert them into buyers. Our marketing team focuses on bringing in as many members as they can. We have numerous partnerships with whom we have CPA deals in place. And we have thirty or forty partners with whom we have CPA deals.”
However, Totsy had no standard procedure to track the performance of member acquisition programs. “Before RJMetrics, our acting CTO would have to look into the database, pull tons of data and put it in Excel in his spare time. Even something as simple as seeing how much revenue we were making each week wasn’t actually so simple. Additionally, we only had a small handful of people that had the technical knowledge to go into the database and get the data we want.” Argenti knew they needed a better toolset to quantify the performance of Totsy’s marketing partners.
Solution: RJMetrics
RJMetrics was the first hosted business intelligence product to offer direct compatibility with MongoDB – an increasingly popular agile and scalable database. The RJMetrics team quickly helped Totsy set up dashboards to understand the performance of Totsy’s marketing partners. Argenti recalls, “When we looked at the data, we found a couple of partners that were performing terribly! We had some that we were paying $20,000 and only getting 200 members a month. We cancelled or paused some partner relationships after running the analysis in RJMetrics.”
Today, Totsy gets immediate feedback on the successes or failures of their partnership deals. “The marketing team has set up dashboards to easily track how many members and how much revenue came in through each partner.” Argenti adds, “With RJMetrics, it’s much quicker to see the red flags, or dig deeper and see where performance may be weak. And since all our data is in the system, I create weekly dashboards that I send out to our C-level management too.”
Ongoing Value and Support
RJMetrics has proved useful to Totsy beyond managing marketing partners and looking at revenue. Argenti often creates new dashboards to deepen his understanding of a particular issue. “Sometimes I use RJMetrics to analyze member-to-buyer conversion. Or I might use it to analyze how many days it takes our customers between their second and third purchase. Recently we ran an analysis by bucketing our members by how much they spent on their first purchase. We found that if you came to our site and became a buyer in the $5 range, you usually came back the second time and only bought another $5. However, if you initially spent in the $10-$20 range, you came back and bought something the next time for $40 or $50. We found our sweet spot customers in that range, but also saw that we were taking a hit by acquiring the $5 customers. As a result, we're constantly re-evaluating the price points at which we offer our merchandise.”
Argenti speaks highly of the customer service at RJMetrics. “The service is easily a ten out of ten. I ask at least 8 questions a day, and I get quick responses back from the RJMetrics team. Sometimes I'll ask for new features, or ask for a walkthrough and sometimes I'll just ask for advice. When I was working with an email feature, I asked the support team a question. They responded that my methodology made sense, but also suggested an even easier way to implement it.” Argenti finds it hard to imagine life without RJMetrics today. “I probably have it on my screen at least 80% of the day.”
If you are interested in learning more about RJMetrics you can learn How it Works, read the latest post at our blog, The Metric System, or sign up for a demo below.
