In 2014, I joined Madison Reed to help disrupt the $46 billion dollar home hair color market by bringing an affordable, low-chemical profile alternative to the 90 million women in the U.S. who color their hair regularly. Madison Reed is a direct-to-consumer hair product brand with an at-home hair coloring kit that is exponentially healthier than drug store brands, but is still priced at around $20 per treatment. All products are offered on a subscription basis, as well as for individual sale.
As Director of Product and Director of Content and Community, I focused on both the range of digital products we built to reach and convert customers into subscribers, and the content strategy we developed to communicate with existing customers and the market at large.
This basically entailed relentless optimization of the paths between our acquisition of customers and our ability to convert them to buyers and subcribers. Our acquisition channels, which were dominated by Facebook and Instagram, allowed us to capture the attention of very specific potential customers through audience targeting and remarketing. We would tailor offers to particular cohorts, purchase ad blocks on Facebook, and customize advertising creative to each offer.
The amount of data available on these paths was incredibly valuable.
One of the big products I worked on at Madison Reed was a bespoke content management system that offered unparalleled integration with our product inventory and made it possible to set custom price points for each cohort. That way, we could track the effectiveness of each point on the e-commerce path.
It enabled us to perform A/B testing with all three points in the funnel: the creative, the landing page, and the actual offer and conversion point on the actual online store. It also allowed us to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts in aggregate, and to track the through-line of customer acquisition scientifically. We could see which kinds of ads, on which platforms, married to which specific landing page and offer, was most likely to turn a casual browser into a happy subscriber and brand advocate.
Madison Reed had (and still has!) an amazingly active community of customers and net promoters, and it was a great product to work on, in terms of strategizing how to leverage that fanbase into revenue growth.
