Based in southern California, Melin is a premium headwear brand committed to creating the best quality ball caps on the market.
Having worked with a number of review providers since it was founded in 2015, the Melin team had already established a strong reputation. It was also running an effective SMS strategy through the Attentive platform, engaging with the growing number of customers citing text as their preferred communication channel.
But the two things were running in silos - review collection in one bubble, SMS marketing in another.
With no desire to switch from Attentive, what Melin needed was a complimentary review solution - something that not only worked with the brand’s existing tech, but added value to it.
“We were mainly using SMS for transactional messaging and early access to new products but we saw its potential for review collection. We just needed to find the right tools.”
Our integration with Attentive sold it for Melin. It offered the team the ability to leverage the power of SMS marketing for better review collection - and vice versa.
Using the two platforms together, Melin has been able to convert more review requests, as well as to use zero-party data gathered from reviews to create hyper personalized SMS journeys.
With more reviews coming in, it has more first hand insight to feed into product and service development. And with innovative features - like our Video First tool - it’s able to share more of the Melin brand culture through user generated content.
“We’d worked with other review solutions in the past, but ultimately chose to partner with REVIEWS.io because of how well it integrated with our existing tech stack - Attentive in particular - as well as a host of other benefits other solutions don’t provide, like specific tools for UGC.”
If you need convincing of the power of SMS, Attentive has a list of pretty impressive stats. Here’s a few key ones:
That’s why we think it’s essential for our solution to compliment best-of-breed SMS platforms like Attentive. And when it comes to strategy, Melin gives us an excellent example of how to maximize this particular integration:
Collecting more customer reviews: Melin was right to see the potential of SMS for review collection. Our own data tells us that review requests sent via text have an 18.2% conversion rate compared to 4.3% for those sent by email. But email still has a very important part to play. Start collecting reviews today, sign up for our free trial to test out our platform.
Using our Attentive integration Melin sets automated sending conditions for both. Once confirmation of a fulfilled order is received by us, we ask Attentive to verify SMS consent. If the customer is on Melin’s SMS subscriber list a review request is sent by text. If not, it fires back to us and we send an email request.
“SMS is a much more personal and visible way to communicate with our customers - so being able to send review requests via SMS has seen much more engagement.”
Creating personalized SMS journeys: Melin offers each SMS subscriber a bespoke experience using Attentive’s Journeys tool and data points from REVIEWS.io. These data points trigger actions in Journeys, so for example, a 5* review can trigger a request for video content, while a negative review can trigger a relevant support SMS.
Because it’s all automated, texts land at the opportune time, and with consumers reacting to SMS so quickly it keeps engagement very much in the moment. It’s personal, conversational and super easy to achieve.
“We’re leveraging the integration to send personalized review requests via SMS. We’ve really enjoyed the automated triggers from REVIEWS.io and the ease of building that Journey within the Attentive platform.”
Using review data for segmentation: one of Melin’s objectives for SMS marketing is to build stronger customer relationships through personalization. What the REVIEWS.io and Attentive integration does is bring more zero-party data into the mix.
Melin can now segment its audience based on things like review ratings, comments and attributes. Not only does this enhance personalization, it also allows Melin to capitalize on opportunity. For example, nurturing brand advocacy and lowering acquisition costs by inviting engaged 5* reviewers to refer a friend.
For Melin and its customer base, a hat is not an accessory - it’s an expression of personal identity. This shared mindset makes culture and community an integral part of the Melin brand. Its community is already very strong, but the team intends to maximize potential here by telling customer stories through UGC.
Sending review requests via SMS makes it easy for customers to submit photos and videos because they can capture them quickly in their messaging app. Melin also plans to increase UGC collection using Video First - our unique feature dedicated to video reviews.
Take a look at its website and social channels and you’ll see how the brand is already using UGC to share its culture. The next step is to make that culture easy to buy into by turning UGC into shoppable galleries.
Thanks to the integration, Melin is collecting more review data, creating personalized experiences and building a community of loyal brand advocates.
“This partnership has allowed us to collect much more data about our customers, our products, and our company practices. This opens the door for further process and product optimization as well as the ability to tell the User Generated Content story.”
Take your SMS game to the next level with REVIEWS.io and Attentive. If you need help setting up the integration check out our Attentive support article, or give our customer success team a shout.
The REVIEWS.io team met with folks at Attentive & Melin and discussed this plus more. Check it out here.
