Madison Reed
In 2014, I joined Madison Reed to help disrupt the $46 billion dollar home hair color market by bringing an affordable, low-chemical profile alternative to the 90 million women in the U.S. who color their hair regularly. Madison Reed is a direct-to-consumer hair product brand with an at-home hair coloring kit that is exponentially healthier than drug store brands, but is still priced at around $20 per treatment. All products are offered on a subscription basis, as well as for individual sale.
As Director of Product and Director of Content and Community, I focused on both the range of digital products we built to reach and convert customers into subscribers, and the content strategy we developed to communicate with existing customers and the market at large.
This basically entailed relentless optimization of the paths between our acquisition of customers and our ability to convert them to buyers and subcribers. Our acquisition channels, which were dominated by Facebook and Instagram, allowed us to capture the attention of very specific potential customers through audience targeting and remarketing. We would tailor offers to particular cohorts, purchase ad blocks on Facebook, and customize advertising creative to each offer.
The amount of data available on these paths was incredibly valuable.
One of the big products I worked on at Madison Reed was a bespoke content management system that offered unparalleled integration with our product inventory and made it possible to set custom price points for each cohort. That way, we could track the effectiveness of each point on the e-commerce path.
It enabled us to perform A/B testing with all three points in the funnel: the creative, the landing page, and the actual offer and conversion point on the actual online store. It also allowed us to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts in aggregate, and to track the through-line of customer acquisition scientifically. We could see which kinds of ads, on which platforms, married to which specific landing page and offer, was most likely to turn a casual browser into a happy subscriber and brand advocate.
Madison Reed had (and still has!) an amazingly active community of customers and net promoters, and it was a great product to work on, in terms of strategizing how to leverage that fanbase into revenue growth.
This was a typical setup for e-commerce conversion on social, with creative bought and targeted toward a specific type of consumer up top, a landing page tailored for the same audience and offer in the middle, and a special offer keyed to the creative and the audience at the bottom.
An example of carousel advertising on Facebook. Each piece of creative linked through to its own landing page and offer. Through A/B testing, we were able to quickly identify the most effective combinations for each cohort, and track the performance of each cohort over time.
A rough, high-level wireframe of a combined content and community strategy that used customer testimonials and focused editorial to reinforce the marketing messaging on the site.
A rough, high-level wireframe of product documentation and user tutorials.
A rough, high-level wireframe of an A/B/C/D testing scenario for different homepage designs for different types of users, from casual browsers to longtime subscribers.
Part of a proposed Madison Reed community, which eventually served to allow the company to scale customer success efforts by reproducing commonly-asked questions and allowing community members to share personal experiences with other customers.
This pre-empted about 30% of one-on-one customer care engagements by allowing customers to address their issues through self-service.
The Madison Reed native apps on iOS and Android allowed us to use strategic notifications to reinforce special offers to customers with products in their carts.
One of the most compelling parts of the Madison Reed storefront was a "color quiz" that allowed us to recommend the right shade of hair color for a customer based on their answers to a few key questions.
Once a customer completed the quiz, they got recommendations tailored to their hair type, hair color history, and desired results.
A main part of the community proposal for the brand was a dedicated question and answer forum.
We tracked sentiment analysis on different products by quantifying inbound comments on social platforms into four broad categories: positive, negative, inquiries, and general feedback.
(I've removed all numbers and stats.)
A homepage variation for A/B testing returning customers with abandoned shopping carts.
A homepage variation for A/B testing customers performing searches for healthier hair color products.
An email special offer for a Presidents' Day sale.
Social
© 2023, Beth Callaghan