Agile marketing requires agile data measurement

“You have to be agile today,” said Matthew Murray, COO & CMO of direct-to-consumer women’s wellness brand Love Wellness. Certainly this didn’t shock any attendees of MarTech’s virtual conference this March. As we’ve covered extensively at MarTech Today, agile marketing is a route many business are taking, and it works best when keeping the customer as the focus.

For Murray, nimble data measurement and analytics strategies are also essential to keeping the agile marketers ready for anything.

Keeping agile during rapid growth

Love Wellness has seen 100x growth since Murray joined the team in 2018. At that time, the company, founded in 2016 by ex-reality star Lauren “Lo” Bosworth, was just beginning its journey. First, they were a D2C ecommerce play that sold out of their digital storefront. Then, they added Amazon as a channel. In 2019 they branched out to retail, getting stocked at Ulta Beauty locations. The newest leap was to Target at the end of last year.

According to Murray, his agile marketing team has grown with the company, around ten employees now. He maintains connections with other parts of the organization by serving as both CMO and COO.

“There’s a lot of collaboration, where I’m bringing in sales, working with finance and really focusing on making the company really efficient,” he stated.

He added, “We’ve become an omnichannel brand. And I think that’s a huge part of evolution. If [rapid growth] happens to you, as a brand, you really have to be smart so that you don’t cannibalize your existing customer base, and really are growing your customer base.”

Read agile coach Stacey Ackerman’s series on agile marketing.

Agile marketers balance exceptional customer experience with efficiency

“Today’s marketer has these two critical imperatives,” said Emily Hoffman, Product Marketing Manager at Salesforce Datorama, which provides data measurement for Love Wellness. “On one hand, they’re extremely customer-centric, focused on tuning into what the wants and needs of the customers are, on how they can really engage with them at every single touchpoint and make sure every message is also relevant to them.”

She added, “And then on the other hand, marketers today are being tasked with much more transparency and responsibility when it comes to the marketing budget.”

Murray has adopted this call for efficiency, and gives it priority even over ROI, although that’s also a big focus in his dual roles.

“Efficiency is becoming more and more important because there’s so many ways you can be spending a budget, whether it’s on marketing, or product innovation to actual cost of product,” he said. “There’s a lot of ways to be more efficient.”

Using data for efficiency and growth

Because of the level of growth, even over the last year, Love Wellness is just starting to take a longer view, while also getting real-time updates. According to Murray, he uses data visualizations and pdfs to zero in with specific departments, all while clinging to a single source of truth.

This is important, because Murray counts up to 235 data sources relating to sales and marketing. If he’s focusing on customer experience, he’s breaking down new customers and retention, and further breaking that down by channel.

“What we’re doing is harmonizing that data to be around specific KPIs that we find important,” he stated. For example, one source might say that PPC is $.50, while another says it’s closer to a dollar. 

But beyond that, Murray and his team need to pull everything together into their single source and measure what they think are the most important metrics, at the end of the day. For efficiency’s sake, he’s looking not just at best-selling items on a particular channel, but also factoring in production and marketing costs to find out what items are the most profitable, which might not be different from the top seller.

Watch Matthew Murray’s full session here (free registration required).

Responding to new opportunities

According to Murray, the more real-time the data is, the better his team can respond. This has driven the company’s emphasis on subscriptions. At the beginning of 2020, subscriptions were only 10% of sales. Currently, they’re 70%.

At the heart of Murray’s growth strategy is building a close connection with Love Wellness customers. A wellness quiz is still one of the most dependable tools they use at the top of the funnel.

“We know the quiz is a really qualified lead,” he explained. Anybody who’s really interacting with the quiz and trying to learn more about our brand and products is a tremendous opportunity for us.”

There is also an online community of customers known as The Love Club. Murray states that the company is in plans for a more robust public-facing campaign around The Love Club, rolling out later this year.

With so much data and potential opportunities buried in it, Murray embraces his agile marketing team.

“The best part about humans is that we’re not predictable, so data can be helpful to make wiser decisions but you really need that human layer to look at the data,” he said.  “And the more real-time data you’re looking at, the more accurate you can be in some of your assumptions and you want to lean in on what the data is telling you.”

The data and leadership can be centralized in a single source of truth watched closely by the CMO (and COO), but growth is supported by an adaptable team of data-driven marketers.

“Some of [the data insights] are definitely KPI driven, but KPI’s are only possible through the tactics and objectives that you set, and so it’s a little bit of the chicken or the egg,” said Murray.