Kristi Hadix was recruited and brought on to head the marketing department for See’s Candies, a Berkshire-Hathaway company, and just three levels beneath Warren Buffett. Kristi encountered a conservative corporate culture with legacy data, a limited budget, and an outdated website. She was tasked with modernizing their tools and processes, growing revenue, and maintaining profitability.
Kristi established the marketing initiatives and strategy, and hired two analysts to help make data-driven decisions. She led campaign delivery/analysis, and accomplished these goals, achieving record-breaking 17% revenue growth totaling $30M in one year. This success was noted by Warren Buffet, and Kristi was invited to present their achievements to the Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders.
“Kristi drove many innovative multi-channel ideas and projects for See’s and has a great passion for marketing. She has keen eye for new trends and marketing opportunities that will generate results. It was a joy working with Kristi and it would be a welcome opportunity to work with her again.”
Van Tran
Vice President :: Strategy + Digital Operations
Responsys
They had a legacy customer service database, which was not connected to the website, nor the email service provider’s system. Everything was in its own silo, and decisions were made by guessing. All emails were “batch and blast” to the entire database, there was no data hygiene, and their email list was constantly dwindling, which meant they were highly focused on customer acquisition to “refill the leaking bucket.” Kristi’s recommendations suggested that while acquisition is always important, it is more expensive to acquire new customers than it was to retain existing ones. Kristi began to educate the upper management about the value of customer retention and lifecycle marketing. During the monthly executive meetings, Kristi emphasized the importance of not only measuring revenue generated and ROI, but specifically ROAS and overall lifetime value in multiple channels.
It was a long internal educational process, but slowly the team started to make headway and was able to begin running tests. Change began with installing Google Analytics, and learning more about the website users and customers, as well as their behaviors and their referral links. GA tags were integrated into all email campaigns to better measure the success of campaigns, as opposed to only looking at high level sales data on the day a. campaign launched. The new data improved the department’s ability to analyze results and learn from organic and paid search campaigns. The team worked with the email service provider to segment the CRM database and send both more personalized, targeted communications, as well as launch lifecycle marketing programs. These included a customer preference center to survey customers and collect additional data, such as their birthday for automated birthday offers, their favorite chocolate, their favorite holidays, etc.. As more information was collected, the content and communications became more curated and relevant to the various customer segments.
The team then developed an automated email welcome program for our online B2C customers, which sent three separate messages to new subscribers, highlighting the history of the brand, as well as the value and quality of the products. With four separate sales channels at See’s Candies that needed more marketing support, Kristi led the initiative to curate a 3-part welcome program for each additional sales channel: Business Gifts (which was rebranded from Quantity Discount), Fundraising, and Retail Shops. These automated email marketing programs were received by the various customer segments with great success, and began the evolution of See’s Candies batch and blast emails to a much more sophisticated lifecycle email marketing program.
Abandoned Cart Program
Kristi personally took over the need to update the automated abandoned cart program. It was originally a plain text email authored by the IT Department. With a branded template, personalization, and including images and details of the unpurchased cart items, the new automated Abandoned Cart program provided an excellent reminder for the customer to complete the purchase. To take it further, she decided to A/B test this automated program with and without offers of various amounts, and learned how to increase the average order value from $25 to $50 Sees.com, which is now the gold standard for See’s Candies. This automated program gave us an additional revenue boost, and also kept our customers from being as likely to purchase a competitor’s product.
In addition to the automated lifecycle marketing programs, Kristi worked with analysts to identify a campaign calendar with optimal sending days and times. They analyzed open rates, click through rates, cart abandonment rates, and conversion rates. The strategy included split testing various email drop days and times, as well as competing subject lines to men and women for holiday events like Valentine’s day, which saw a sizable increase in conversions. The initiatives included developing custom landing pages, often with A/B testing for offers and creative variations, for email, search and retail campaigns.
“I have had the opportunity to work with Kristi Hadix for the past few years at See’s Candies. In this time, she has demonstrated a keen skill in building and leading the Direct Marketing team for See’s. Her innovative and fresh approach is working to take See’s well beyond their existing position within their catalog and e-commerce offerings. This leadership and vision would be a significant benefit to any organization.”
David Robinson
Customer Services Development and Execution
The return on investment was significant, and the CEO increased the marketing budget so that the efforts could continue. Every step to integrate the collection and analysis of additional data proved to be highly valuable. Eventually, with data-driven marketing decisions, under Kristi’s leadership, the department achieved it’s annual goals, and was rewarded with upgraded analytics to Omniture SiteCatalyst, which helped to integrate multi-channel marketing campaigns for the various business units and streamline efforts. In collaboration with the customer service team, Kristi led the effort to focus on ROAS, reducing overall advertising and operating expenses by 20% within six months and growing the customer CRM database by 163% in just one year.
Campaign Performance Examples
