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Website
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VerticalCoffee
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EcommerceShopify
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Copper Cow Customer Story
$31,105
Coupon ROI in 2021
20.26%
in Review Rate
4,475+
in Okendo Reviews
Founded by Debbie Wei Mullin in 2016, Copper Cow Coffee doesn’t just sell ordinary coffee — it offers a unique beverage experience. Copper Cow’s Vietnamese pour-over coffees are uniquely flavored and come with specialized filters, making it a go-to brand amongst coffee connoisseurs. The company puts its money where its mouth is, too: it values sustainability and accessibility, so it pays its farmers twice the market rate and only uses real ingredients to flavor its coffee. Your morning is that much brighter when drinking something delicious you can feel good about purchasing.
Copper Cow Coffee boasts a strong DTC presence, but its products are distinctive amongst the broader industry. The brand often dealt with questions from American consumers about what makes pour-over Vietnamese coffee different from varieties they were more familiar with. Copper Cow knew one of the most effective ways to clarify its products’ value and simultaneously build a tight-knit community was to leverage customer reviews, so it sought a review provider that could collect UGC and customer feedback to boost shopper confidence, drive conversions, and influence product development.
Enabling Customers to Educate Customers
Customer reviews had been on Copper Cow Coffee’s backburner for some time, but when the COVID-19 pandemic drove shoppers toward ecommerce, the brand decided it was necessary to prioritize testimonials and UGC. However, it was unsatisfied with Shopify’s native reviews app due to its lack of customizability and integrations. Copper Cow wanted reviews to enable communication between itself and customers to become a two-way street, so it needed a more mature solution that could appeal to mindful consumers.
Plus, Copper Cow Coffee was still navigating how to bring a beverage from Vietnamese culture to the U.S. and around the world. Kate Strollo, Director of Digital Marketing at Copper Cow, says:
“One of the most significant reasons we wanted to collect UGC is because Copper Cow Coffee can be a tricky product to understand. Vietnamese pour-over style coffee and sweetened milk creamers are popular in many Asian countries, but it’s newer to the U.S. market. We wanted to let our existing customers communicate how to use the product to curious shoppers for us.”
Copper Cow also wanted UGC to play a more integral role in its overall marketing strategy. The brand noticed that consumers are largely desensitized to traditional advertising, but UGC reminds shoppers more of testimonials from their peers than words from a company that has its own interests in mind. Video became particularly critical to this strategy: drinking coffee is experiential, so written text and photography could only get the brand so far, but videos of customers demonstrating how they use their pour-overs and the different ways they prepare each cup inform shoppers that real consumers are fans of Copper Cow’s products.
“We’re really ramping up our efforts to collect UGC,” Kate elaborates. “It gives consumers a different angle on our coffees. Vietnamese coffee is more concentrated and caffeinated, so it works well for cold brews, iced coffee, and other recipes. That kind of content attests to our products’ versatility and is effective at convincing consumers to make a purchase. Many shoppers come to us and note all the things they don’t like about their current coffee brand, but we bring them back into the funnel with our library of UGC that demonstrates how all the things they do like are possible with Copper Cow.”
Copper Cow Coffee decided Okendo was the platform best suited to its needs thanks to the latter’s ability to solicit reviews and collect a variety of UGC that the brand could display at different customer touchpoints. Copper Cow also found Okendo useful for gathering feedback and identifying when customers were unhappy, allowing it to improve its customer service and steer product development.
Optimizing Review Generation and Product Development
Copper Cow Coffee did not have much of a review generation process when it was using Shopify’s native reviews app. Once it had the ability to solicit testimonials via Klaviyo email flows and offer rewards as an incentive, more UGC came pouring in than ever before. The company now sports a review rate of 20.26% — impressively high, especially for a young brand. Kate notes that informative and practical UGC is “more important than flaunting how many five-star ratings we have.”
Additionally, Copper Cow places importance on the ability to collect customer feedback with product Attributes. The brand specifically asks shoppers about quality, strength, and taste, and then displays the results onsite to reduce related customer service inquiries.
Attributes and testimonials help guide Copper Cow Coffee’s product development, too. Kate explains:
“We implement customer feedback as far as our supply chain when formulating our coffees. For example, a few customers reported that one of our churros had a drainage problem on the product page’s reviews section. Others noted that they liked our vanilla flavor but wished it was stronger, so we took their opinions to heart and made our next test run more potent. Product reviews and attribute data are excellent sources to mine customer feedback from people who won’t take the time to reach out to customer service.”
Customers also don’t always need to reach out to customer service because Copper Cow is quick to address their complaints before they even submit them formally. Whenever a customer leaves a review with three stars or fewer, it automatically generates a ticket through Okendo’s Zendesk integration that allows Copper Cow to ask what they can do to remedy the issue. The faster the brand can respond, the more likely even unhappy customers are to make a repeat purchase.
One way Copper Cow Coffee ensures customer satisfaction is with Okendo’s Klaviyo integration. The brand has Review Request Email sequences in motion that automatically send to customers one to two weeks after order fulfillment, allowing Copper Cow to reach consumers while they are most engaged with the business.
“We live and die by Okendo’s Klaviyo integration. It plugs seamlessly into everything else and allows us to leverage Attributes in different kinds of marketing, glean data insight in the backend, and build logical audience segments,” Kate says.
Because Copper Cow can reach shoppers so quickly, the brand has an email open rate as high as 30% and has captured over 4,000 reviews in less than a year since installing Okendo. Offering rewards to incentivize reviews and repeat purchases has also boosted Copper Cow’s coupon ROI to $31,105, helping the brand continue to grow as it brings authentic Vietnamese coffee to new markets.
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