How Bambu Earth Tripled Their Automatic Recurring Revenue With A Loyalty Makeover

Overview

Bambu Earth is a soap, bath, and home goods company dedicated to providing natural, handcrafted and eco-friendly products.

The Challenge

Bambu needed a flexible loyalty program to suit all customer purchase cadences

Bambu wanted to build a loyalty program with more flexibility than the standard subscription program they were using. This outdated model didn’t fit their brand well because customers wanted to refill products at different rates depending on their skincare routines. The stringent subscribe-and-save model often led to customers having excess product or lacking it when they most wanted it.

Bambu wanted to reward loyal customers while empowering them to decide when and how to purchase. And whatever the new program looked like, the skincare brand needed to drive the same level of ongoing customer commitment to maintain and eventually grow their automatic recurring revenue. Part of this needed to include rewarding customers with store credit rather than “points,” which didn’t convert well in their legacy system.

But they couldn’t build this solution in-house — creating the mechanisms for sending out consistent customer rewards and maintaining that ledger is exceptionally complex. Not to mention, every reward has to be auditable. Rather than attempt this lift themselves, Bambu decided to work with Onward.

“We wanted our revenue floor to cover our operating expenses, and we wanted to improve cash flow ahead of realizing that revenue.”

The Solution

Onward built a membership program that motivated customer buy-in

After surveying customers to understand what benefits they were looking for, Onward built a membership program for Bambu where customers paid $40 per month and received $40 of store credit in exchange. They made the membership’s value clear to customers with an in-cart widget demonstrating the dollar amount they’d save on their current purchase by joining today. Customers also receive 15% off site-wide and exclusive product promotions.

The incentives were no-brainers for customers, motivating both new and existing fans of the brand to buy in. And, since there’s no reality where they lose, Bambu also increased:

• Buy-in from subscribers who refill less often: Because the credit compounded and could be used at any point in the next year, customers who purchased less often could wait until they needed to refill their skincare collection.

• Retention of their most loyal customers: They also received 15% off every purchase, which drove more purchases from Bambu’s most frequent customers.

Onward also integrated with Bambu Earth’s subscription provider, Stay.Ai, which no other competitor on the market was able to do. This allows their customers to use store credit towards their favorite subscription products.

“Onward makes it easy to drive new membership sign-ups because customers see the value they’d gain right in the cart. Then they just click to join.”

The Results

Bambu increased order frequency 163% with Onward loyalty members

With Onward, Bambu increased their automatic recurring revenue on product subscriptions across platforms like Amazon, raising their revenue floor significantly.

What’s more, customers love the flexibility of using their credit whenever and however they want, without any complicated logistics like pausing subscriptions. The program is so accommodating that its membership ballooned by 3.5k in just 9 months!

Onward measured membership impact with a twin analysis that compared a member’s purchase behavior after joining the program to that of their non-member “twin.”

The Onward membership program tripled Bambu’s Automatic Recurring Revenue, rendering it locked-in and predictable revenue every month. As a result, that ARR covers Bambu’s monthly operating expenses and fixed costs.

“Out of our repeat customer revenue, we went from around 15% ARR before Onward to around 45%.”