The Company

Tea Forte is the global luxury tea brand known for quality handcrafted teas, design-driven accessories, and exquisite packaging. Enjoyed in more than 35 countries, Tea Forte is offered at leading hotels, restaurants, prestige resorts, luxury retailers, and on teaforte.com.

The Challenge

Before Zaius, Tea Forte had multiple systems for managing data and executing campaigns across channels. The team used a legacy email service provider (ESP), which could only execute basic batch-and-blast emails and hadn’t innovated its product in five years. Additionally, Tea Forte was using a point solution for triggered emails. The systems weren’t able to talk to each other or exchange customer data. The technology was underperforming and the Tea Forte leadership team was tired of over-investing.

The Solution

After partnering with Zaius, Tea Forte gained a deeper understanding of its customers by centralizing all customer, order, and product data in one place. By filtering customer data by behaviors, products, and purchases, they were able to better segment and target customers to boost the relevance of campaign messaging—something that was impossible to do before.

“Zaius gives us the ability to find the right people to message to,” said Jurgen Nebelung, VP of Ecommerce and Digital. “It’s rare to find a platform that allows you to take a customer-centric view rather than a campaign-centric one. We don’t have to deal with complex workflow diagrams or flowcharts for multi-touchpoint campaigns. With Zaius, we can understand the conversion and revenue impact of each touchpoint and put the customer, rather than the channel, first.”

Zaius helped Tea Forte incorporate behavioral campaigns into their email strategy, which drove higher revenue per send. The team now sends welcome, cart abandonment, and post-purchase behavioral series that are personalized to each buyer. They’re also able to segment campaigns to non-openers and send “final day” emails to those with items in their cart who have yet to check out.

To drive repeat purchases, the team uses data from Zaius to identify the most frequently purchased and repeat purchased items and leverages them in post-purchase campaigns. Running email campaigns and coordinated Facebook ads via Zaius’ segment sync, Tea Forte’s team is able to nudge customers to purchase again. 

The Results

With the help of Zaius, Tea Forte has seen a 20X return on spend in under a year. And average customer lifetime value has increased 25 percent with the addition of behaviorally driven campaigns.

“Zaius is not just our ESP,” said Nebelung. “It’s where we go to understand our customers.”

What used to be 20+ SQL queries in their database is now a simple, easy-to-read customer dashboard that provides insights and metrics, serving as both a reporting and campaign ideation tool. Analyses that were once impossible for the brand, like understanding the lifetime value of customers who originated from Google AdWords, is now possible.

Moving forward, Tea Forte plans to integrate data from their first retail store, which recently opened on renowned Newbury Street in Boston. Pulling this data into Zaius and using it to more accurately target customers will further personalize and unify the customer experience.