Under The Hood: Jess & Joseph from Feastables
Talking surveys, SMS bots, surveys, community and more with the power marketing duo at Feastables
Congrats! Feastables is almost one-year old. What can we expect in 2023?
Joseph: Right now, we’re in every Walmart across America, and we’ll continue to expand our retail presence. We also want to make sure retail customers don’t lose that fun Feastables experience. Our retail is connected to D2C through incredibly unique activations like giveaways powered by SMS. We’ll be testing new giveaways and promotions that reward engagement, creativity, and skill. Our Feastables ecosystem will be a one-stop shop for people to snack, play, and win across every consumer touch point.
Can you talk more about connecting retail to D2C?
Jess: When we launched at Walmart, we did an activation where the customer could text their receipt to 69420 to be entered into a giveaway. The giveaway was for $10K to 5 random entries. The customer was able to enter once per day and as many times as they wanted. This created a unique frenzy and opportunity for our D2C customers to become excited about entering into Walmart.
What are some unique ways you tap into the MrBeast community?
Joseph: For Black Friday MrBeast tweeted “text 69420 for the chance to receive 99% off Feastables.” That instantly drove north of 25K SMS/email subscribers in five minutes.
How will you go beyond attracting the initial MrBeast customer?
Jess: That’s the million-dollar question! Our current customer today is a MrBeast fan or a parent of a MrBeast fan. We did our first collaboration in October with YouTuber Corpse Husband which attracted a completely different audience. This opened the door for potential collaborations and drops in the future.
Joseph: We’re fortunate to have access to top-tier influencers that’ll drive top of funnel awareness. Expanding our product line to products that people want to use on a more regular basis will drive new-customer interest. We’re also working to establish a drop culture that’s rooted in virality and fun - something that people will engage with, regardless if they’re a MrBeast superfan.
How does data play a role in this?
Jess: I’m looking at data every day whether it's from our product reviews, our surveys, Kustomer (CRM), or our Certainly bot fallback data. I look at analytics and data to understand buying and customer behavior. I want to understand what customers are asking us, where we’re not engaging them enough, the information they’re constantly asking for, etc.
I’m always trying to figure out “the why” and deliver the “why” by being 10 steps ahead of our customer and community.
What’s fallback data?
Jess: Fallback data is generated from our AI conversational commerce platform Certainly that’s embedded in our PDP, throughout our website, and our SMS channel. When the bot doesn’t understand a question being asked whether it’s about the product or general engagement, it goes on CX’s fallback queue for a real person to answer or into reporting that we continuously check daily to create new iterations.
Joseph: Certainly’s web bot is a proven sales channel for us and contributed to about 6.5% of our launch revenue. It’s promising to see all that we’ve accomplished considering we’re only scratching the surface of the bot.
What makes the Feastables SMS bot unique?
Jess: When our website went live, we had a CTA at the end of the website that said “Text 69420 for randomness, inquiries and support.”
Our customers took that quite literally, and our SMS channel became just as heavily engaged as our social channels. We had 15,000+ tickets in one week because of our SMS channel. I ended up employing 30+ agents internally and externally. When you outsource support agents, it's tricky to nail down the brand voice and feel which ends up becoming a problem.
We were already using Certainly on our website, and I wanted to replicate the experience via SMS.
I built out that same web experience into SMS and ended up deflecting 80 to 90% of my tickets and reducing headcount to now having a team of 5 individuals today. I also figured out that 70% of those SMS conversations were actually our “randomness” conversation pathways.
And what I mean by randomness is random jokes, random gif exchanges, random storylines. One time I had this text-based rock paper scissors game which was about the story of Feastables mascot Feasty.
What types of surveys do you use?
Jess: I use Okendo for surveys and personalize them based on the product and type of customer.
1)Basic product review survey. We don't incentivize them monetarily but we do let them know that they could be published. People want to talk to us, but they also want to be a part of our brand experience.
2)Post Checkout Surveys. You get a different survey if you’re a new or returning customer and/or depending on the type of product you purchase. For example, cookies vs a collaboration product. I want to pull different details about the type of customer who is purchasing from us and figure out how that can feed into cohort/segment building.
3)NPS Surveys. We A/B test incentives for these like 10% off. We also personalize these based on product purchased or new vs returning customer.
4)CSAT and CES surveys like “How would you rate your satisfaction”. These surveys are mostly based on a reactive approach since the customer has come to us. They are valuable for sentiment analysis and the productivity of the support team.
Combined, I have taken all of this information and created an entire dashboard that tells us the entire sentiment overall of our customers. It is an ongoing project that will gain further iterations in 2023.
We also do research surveys! We have a group of 700+ people that are interested in research development, so whenever we’re developing a new product, we interview them on zoom or send out a survey.
What's your stack?
Turn customers into Superfans with Okendo, the unified customer marketing platform for reviews, referrals, loyalty, quizzes, and surveys, making it easy to cultivate advocacy, scale word-of-mouth, and maximize lifetime value. 8,000+ Shopify brands use Okendo to mobilize their customers for faster and more efficient growth, including SKIMS, Liquid Death, and Oh Polly.
Kustomer helps brands increase satisfaction and loyalty by empowering agents to engage customers in personalized conversations. Kustomer keeps track of customer information such as purchase behavior, site behavior and conversations to give support agents the tools they need to assist customers.
Order issues. Late shipments. Boring carrier tracking pages. These drive up your support and acquisition costs-- and lead to unhappy customers. Wonderment helps you convert more sales, de-stress your CX team and retain more customers with estimated delivery dates, proactive order tracking, and branded transactional communications.
Trusted by over 7,000 Shopify and Shopify Plus stores like Brooklinen, Kopari, and Ugly Water. Postscript gives ecommerce brands the tools they need to run a world-class SMS marketing program. Within minutes you can sync data, start collecting compliant subscribers, have 2-way conversations, and enable deeply targeted campaigns.
In short, Shopify Plus is for very successful Shopify businesses. Shopify Plus can handle over 10,000 transactions per minute, can operate with unlimited staff accounts and includes personalised, dedicated help and support which makes it the perfect platform for a large business.
Last question: Feastables has such an active community! How do you manage that?
Jess: We use Emplifi for community general community management whether it's IG, Twitter, TikTok, or Facebook.
Emplifi picks up everything and analyses it by negative or positive intent, which allows our team to prioritize responses. It also has a listening feature that analyses the entire internet for mentions of whatever keywords or tags you input. When we first launched, I programmed it so that any time MrBeast or Feastables was mentioned we got a notification of a negative or positive spike. This allows us to engage with things we wouldn't typically see in our inbox.
For example, I recently found a customer who had found a bar for their kid in a local Walmart but was disappointed that they couldn’t find others. She mentioned Feastables, but never tagged us. I was able to find that thread through our listening tool and started a conversation with her about where she could find them in her local area and suggested to also pick them up on our site. This turned into a community and loyalty build, but also helped bridge the gap back to D2C.
