Welp, here we are, folks: the final edition of our 10-part What’s in Store marketing automation series. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about automations as much as I have. And today, I’m totally psyched to show you how Live Love Polish uses marketing automations to re-engage lapsed customers and fuel their growth.
Live Love Polish's Approach to Re‑engagement
How the multi‑million dollar nail line wins customers back.
Live Love Polish (LLP) is the creation of sibling entrepreneurs Michelle and Wayne Lin. The brother-sister co-founders launched their line of non-toxic nail polish in 2015 from Long Island City, NY and built it from the ground up. Like, way up. In fact, they’ve grown into a multi-million dollar business in just 2 years—and without any venture capital or angel funding.
Despite its success, LLP remains a bootstrapped business which relies solely on the revenue it generates to keep the company afloat. Here’s how Michelle and Wayne have managed to scale independently:
Michelle and Wayne believe that strong consumer brands emerge by offering either 1) an unbeatable logistical and price advantage, or 2) a memorable and different point of view. Michelle explains: “Most bootstrapped businesses with capital constraints cannot afford the first option, so the only way for smaller companies to succeed in today’s economy is to create a brand so radically different that it stands out from everything else in the market.”
“A strong, memorable brand is built by focusing on design, presentation, communication, psychology, product, and attention to detail,” Michelle says. “It’s impossible to build a great brand while neglecting any of these elements.”
A thrifty business mentality is something the What’s in Store team hears about a lot from our most successful customers, and LLP is no different.
“Every dollar counts! We don’t waste money on unnecessary things,” Wayne says. “We measure, monitor, and track everything we do to make sure we are operating resourcefully. It’s important for us to eliminate waste and keep our operations as lean as possible.”
Plenty of businesses create cultures that equate hard work with success. But LLP believes that working productively is what really drives success. Michelle explains that “rewarding productivity yields better results, prevents burn-out, and results in lower employee attrition and higher workplace satisfaction.”
In the spirit of their “work smarter, not harder” mantra, Michelle and Wayne have implemented a few Mailchimp marketing automations to help improve their productivity. Wayne cites the customer re-engagement automation as one of their most useful tools.
“It’s an effective way to re-engage customers who have dropped out of the purchase cycle,” he explains. “These customers are generally much easier to convert since you’ve already done the hard part in getting them to purchase the first time. It has allowed us to bring back customers that have reached the limit of their lifetime value and extend it further.”
That means those re-engaged customers end up making 2 or 3 purchases instead of just 1. They also re-engage new customers who have entered their email address but haven’t yet purchased. According to Wayne, LLP’s customer re-engagement email has converted 9% of lapsed customers.
So not only is LLP bringing customers back and driving new sales, they’re doing it in the most efficient way possible: with automation.
“With the time that we save with Mailchimp automations,” Wayne says, “we can really focus more on other aspects of the business, like growing our brand, designing new products, and marketing instead of sending out individual emails to every single customer.”