Premium supplements brand Life Extension had been treating its customers as thought everyone was the same. It had no personalization, a one-size-fits-all approach. 

Farrah Interdonato, Senior Manager, Customer Lifecycle Marketing, Life Extension, told an audience at the Data & Programmatic Summit, that, furthermore, many customers were making a purchase and then leaving. "We had a huge opportunity to drive more conversion. "Our goal was to change the way we go to market," she said. 

It began by personalizing the journey, knowing where the customer was in the lifecycle. "We wanted to tailor our communications, our offerings, and educate them about our brand. It was a change from the unknown to the known. 

"The first step was to look at our own data. Who is the onboarding customer, the retaining customer, the inactive. We had a lot of meetings to get to one point of view. You really need to do due diligence to define the stages."

Interdonato worked with the marketing analytics team to understand, for example, in the heart health category, what is the next likely product the customer should buy. Another model was developed to recommend the next likely category they should be purchasing in, maybe brain health. "We can expose them to other products they may not have known about. We increased sales of our featured product by almost 200% by using one-to-one recommendation based on what we see other customers like them doing."

Life Extension used data to develop persona groups. From a third party, it got 75 attributes, but needed to make sure it could activate on them. The brand looked at which had the highest match rates, and that would be age and gender. Interdonato said the company created assets to support the personas, starting with three: under 44, 45 to 64, 65 plus.

Using messaging, imagery and articles, it developed one-to-one variable tiles that is used in creating email, direct mail, website, and personalized landing pages.

She said they had to lay out the order of messaging for onboarding, and are now pivoting to a way of talking to the customer, to build up the brands, and educate them. The content talks about offerings, why Life Extension is unique, consideration, and to reinforce onboarding. "We revisited everything we did from a content standpoint."