Dollar Shave Club was built on very strong marketing.  They started in 2011 with a viral video about razors and sold for one billion dollars to Unilever just five years later.  They are digital natives, builders of a lifestyle brand, and smart content marketers…

…with one exception that should sound familiar to us nonprofits.

About 28% of the shaving market in the U.S. is female.  DSC has made it clear they are pursuing women to join.  When you Google ‘“dollar shave club” women’, as I did for this post, the first ad is for Dollar Shave Club® for Women.

However, the post-acquisition customer journey for women is not as smooth as a good shave.  From Becky Montchal and Andrew David in Chief Content Officer magazine:

“we appreciate that your subscription service has helped us reduce our razor costs and given us the confidence to bear our hair-free faces, backs, and legs.

“Once you win over a female buyer, however, the relationship turns sour. With email subject lines such as “Here’s How to Manscape Your Butt” and “This Is Why Your Pee Sometimes Comes out at an Angle,” Becky has reached her limit. She’s unsubscribed.

“It’s clear you and your team understand how to create great content … but how about customizing some of that creatively snarky content for women? Why not ask the gender of the buyer at sign-up? Then you can quickly and easily segment your email communication.”

My guess is, with retention communications like these, Dollar Shave Club probably has lower retention rates among women than among men, perhaps to the point they wonder if their marketing dollars are worth it trying to address this audience.  They are doing what we talked about Wednesday, working to fit their audience to their marketing instead of vice versa.  (And they are assuming the male as the norm, another no-no from Wednesday.)

The reason this may sound familiar is  because this is how much of the sector  approaches testing.  Let’s say you have a premium-acquired and premium-focused donor file.  You bring them in with labels and through the year they get calendars, decals, notepads, member cards, luggage tags, dog tags, and some other type of tags.

You want to break your premium dependence, so you test non-premium communications in donor development and acquisition.  Each is a failure.  Why?

1. Your previous acquisition has built a donor file of people who are in it for the premiums
2. Your donor communications have thoroughly driven away most of the non-premium-focused donors who made it through the gauntlet of #1
3. The lists and audiences you use are optimized for a premium-focus.
4. Even if you had a non-premium acquisition piece that worked despite #3, those donors will be burned to a crisp by your donor communications.

What would need to happen is an entirely different communication stream for the non-premium audience from stem to stern.  Just as with Dollar Shave Club, if you acquire with one message and retain with another, you will not be doing that much retaining.  It may even dissuade you from reaching an audience you should be reaching.

Now, substitute in your own donor identity measure for “premiums.”  If you focus your donor communications mostly on a religious audience, you likely have a small non-religious audience hanging on for dear life;  and the opportunity to acquire more if the message is right in both acquisition and donor (or vice versa if your religious donors are in the minority).  If all your communications focus on dog people, you can’t just acquire cat people and retain them with dogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdogdog.  As we talked about with Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s creative and effective acquisition piece to get pet owners to Save the Bay by focusing on those pets drinking the water, you then have to treat these donors differently to retain them.

This can get laborious, as creating new (or even versioned) communications involves costs in both time and treasure.  However, once you know your key donor identities, you can start with subtraction.  As with manscaping (to transparently bring it back around to the clickbait-ish title of this post), sometimes removing things improves the overall look.  Simply removing the communications that would matter least (or be most objectionable) can do a great deal to improve your new donor’s journey and their likelihood of staying with you for the long term.

Only when you start knowing an identity and customizing toward it will you have donor journeys that retain.

Nick