Latest / The Retention Marketing Podcast with Fexingo: Email, SMS, and Loyalty for Repeat Customers / How a Supplement Brand Uses SMS to Boost Repeat Purchase Frequency
Transcript
- Luna: Okay, Lucas, I just got a text from a supplement brand I bought from three weeks ago. It literally said, 'Hey Luna, your magnesium is probably running low. Reorder in one tap.' And... I did. Lucas: That is exactly the kind of SMS play I want to talk about. A lot of brands focus on email for repeat purchases, but for time-sensitive replenishment, SMS has a massive edge. Open rates are north of 90 percent, and the median click-through rate is around 4 to 5 percent — way higher than email for that kind of trigger. Luna: Right, and what got me was the specificity. It wasn't a generic 'we miss you' blast. They knew exactly what I bought, and when. Lucas: That's the key. The brand I looked at for today's episode — a mid-size supplements company, let's call them ReVital — built their entire repeat-purchase strategy around that kind of precision. They analysed their order data and found that for their top-selling protein powder, the average customer runs out on day 17 after purchase. So they send an SMS on day 14 — a three-day buffer — with a one-click reorder link. Luna: So the timing is based on actual consumption patterns, not just a random interval. Lucas: Exactly. And they did that for each of their top twenty SKUs. For their greens powder, the run-out day was day 21. For their vitamin D drops, it was day 35. So they create a separate SMS flow per product, all triggered by the purchase date of that specific item. The result? They boosted their 60-day repeat purchase rate by 35 percent year-over-year. Luna: That is a serious lift. And I imagine the SMS copy has to be really tight. What did their messages look like? Lucas: Very short. Brand name, product name, and a one-tap link. They tested longer copy with lifestyle benefits — 'feeling tired? Reorder now' — and shorter copy. The short version outperformed by 22 percent on conversion. People on mobile don't want to read. They want to tap. Luna: And what about customers who buy multiple products at once? Do they get one SMS per product? Lucas: They do, but with a two-day gap between messages. They don't want to overwhelm. If someone bought the protein powder and the greens powder together, they get the protein SMS on day 14 and the greens SMS on day 19. They tested sending both on the same day and saw a 30 percent increase in unsubscribe rate. So pacing matters. Luna: That makes sense. I think the worst case is you get a text every day from a brand you like but don't want to hear from that often. Lucas: Right. And they also built in a suppression rule: if the customer has already reordered before the SMS is triggered, they skip it. No pointless messages. They also exclude anyone who paused their subscription in the last 30 days — those customers get a different email flow instead. Luna: So they're using SMS for the most time-sensitive, action-oriented reminders and email for the softer re-engagement. That's smart segmentation. Lucas: It is. And it's not just supplements. Any brand with a consumable product — coffee, pet food, skincare, cleaning supplies — can do this. The prerequisite is knowing your consumption cycle. If you don't have that data, start tracking time between orders per product. Once you have a median, you have your trigger day. Luna: But what about customers who buy irregularly? Like, I buy that magnesium every six weeks, but maybe someone else buys it every three months. Lucas: That's actually the next layer. ReVital moved from a fixed-day model to a dynamic model based on each customer's actual purchase history. They use a simple algorithm: average days between the last three orders for that product, minus two days. That way, if you're a six-week buyer, you get the text on day 40. If you're a three-month buyer, day 88. They tested it against the fixed model and saw an additional 8 percent lift in repeat rate. Luna: So it's personalized not just by product, but by individual behavior. That's a lot of flows to manage. Lucas: It is, but modern SMS platforms — Klaviyo, Postscript, Yotpo — make it pretty straightforward. You set up one trigger based on 'product purchased' and then use conditional logic for the timing. The hard part is getting the data clean and keeping it updated. Luna: I want to talk about the opt-in rate for these SMS flows. Because you don't want to be sending texts to people who didn't ask for them. Lucas: ReVital collects SMS consent at checkout with a checkbox: 'Get reorder reminders via text.' Their opt-in rate is about 18 percent, which is solid for a mid-market brand. But they also send a one-time welcome text after the first purchase, confirming the opt-in and previewing what the customer will receive. That reduces later complaints. Luna: And what about unsubscribes? Did they see a spike after launching these flows? Lucas: Initially, yes. The first month, unsubscribe rate was about 2.5 percent of the SMS list. But they tweaked the timing — moved from day 14 to day 16 for some products — and that dropped to 1.2 percent. They also added an option to 'snooze for two weeks' in the text reply. If you text back 'SNOOZE', they pause the flow for 14 days. That alone cut unsubscribes by 18 percent. Luna: So giving customers some control makes them less likely to bail entirely. Lucas: Exactly. And the net effect was positive. For every 100 customers who opted into SMS, 12 unsubscribed over the first six months, but the remaining 88 were reordering at a significantly higher rate. The overall revenue from the sms triggered reorders far outweighed any list attrition. Luna: Alright, so let's say I'm a brand listening and I want to implement this. What's the first step? Lucas: Pull your order data. For your top ten SKUs, calculate the median days between first purchase and second purchase. If you have a lot of one-time buyers, focus only on customers who have ordered at least twice. Once you have those medians, set up a triggered SMS campaign for each product, sending on that median minus two days. Test it with a small segment — maybe 10 percent of your list — and compare repeat rates against a control group that gets no SMS. Luna: And what's the minimum data set you'd need to start? Like, if you only have a hundred repeat customers per product? Lucas: That's enough. You're not building a statistical model; you're looking for a central tendency. Even fifty data points will give you a usable median. The key is to keep it simple and iterate. You don't need machine learning to see that most people reorder protein powder around day seventeen. Luna: You know, I love this because it's a tactical play — not a big strategic overhaul. Any brand with a consumable product can start doing this next week. Lucas: And that's why I wanted to cover it. It's one of those high-impact, low-effort retention levers that often gets overlooked because everyone's chasing acquisition. But if you can get a customer to reorder once, their lifetime value almost doubles. Luna: Speaking of which, if these kinds of marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually tried in your own business, we just want to say this show stays free and ad-free because of listeners who support it. If you'd like to be one of them, you can buy us a coffee — literally — at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: And we mean it when we say it's not expected — but it helps us keep digging into tactics like this one. So thank you to anyone who has supported us. Luna: Alright, back to the numbers. Lucas, what's the one metric that ReVital tracks to make sure these SMS flows are actually working? Lucas: They track 'repeat rate within the expected window' — the percentage of customers who place a second order within plus or minus three days of the predicted run-out date. Before the SMS flow, that was around 22 percent. After, it hit 38 percent. That's a 73 percent improvement. And they also track average order value on those reorders — it stayed flat, so the lift was purely from frequency. Luna: So no discounting needed. They're just removing the friction of remembering to reorder. Lucas: Exactly. The one-tap link is the whole magic. No coupon code, no urgency. Just convenience. And that's the kind of retention play that builds long-term loyalty, not just a short-term spike. Luna: I'm going to look at my own supplement orders tonight and figure out my consumption cycle. Lucas: I think you just volunteered to be your own first test subject.