Adolfo Villagomez
Analyst · Sidoti & Company. Please go ahead
Anthony, this is Adolfo. So there are a lot of learnings coming out of Valentine's Day. We're literally transforming the business from a merchandising perspective, a digital perspective and marketing. So let me -- and by the way, also our post-purchase experience has significantly improved. Before I go to the learnings, I also want to be mindful that between Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, there is not a lot of room to make a lot of changes. I mean you need to buy flowers ahead of time. So you can make some changes, but not all of them. So Mother's Day, it's going to do better across those metrics, but don't expect the full performance impact just yet. But as we think about the changes we're making, let me start with digital. It used to be that the merchants would place a buy and they decided, "Hey, you're buying roses," or "You are buying lilies." And they would be at the top of the product page, which most customers make a decision on those products. 65% of the sales come above the fold on any website. So if you don't have the right product, your conversion declines. As I mentioned, we are now using AI-driven sorting and ranking. So number one, conversion is improving. But most importantly, we are also finding out what customers really want and what they are willing to pay, not only from a type of spend, but also from delivery method and delivery fees they are willing to pay. So we learned a lot from that perspective. From a marketing perspective, I want to remind everybody that, I mean, the reason Flowers did worse than Food is our marketing spend there last year was heavily unproductive. As an example, we were buying transactions for $40 and making $20 margin on each transaction, then you would say, well, that's great because we are acquiring a customer. Well, yes, that's true if you retain the customer. But if you don't retain them, then you are just wasting dollars. So we're working on both is lowering our customer acquisition cost and improving our retention. The second one requires the Martech stack. We're making improvements, but we are not 100% there yet. But on the first one, the team started experimenting going top of the funnel and mid-funnel. In the past, the company just wouldn't like that because there was so much focus on the -- they were so focused on the transaction and the measurement capabilities we have would lead you to believe that buying clicks was the most effective marketing method. What we are finding out as we have more, I would say, better measurement capabilities, is that's not true. If you do it right, top of the funnel and mid-funnel investments also drive customer acquisition. By the way, it allows you to acquire younger customers, which also longer term, it's better. So the team was experimenting with podcasts, TikTok, Instagram, all of them with huge success and which will be expanded in the future. From an assortment perspective, one of the things we started testing was just first, our mix between florist delivered and direct from our warehouses. In the past, the team, because they had already made the purchase and we own the inventory, using this manual sorting and ranking would favor the direct delivery, which combined with the assortment we were offering there, led to lower conversion. And by the way, then at the end of the event, because we had a lot of inventory, they would do heavy discounting. We are managing through that. There were huge learnings during Valentine's Day. Again, some of those are being applied on Mother's Day. And we continue to learn in Mother's Day. I'm actually super excited about the learnings and the implications for assortment. But it's a process. The other thing we -- I think on our operations, this is the type of stuff you don't see in the short term on the balance sheet. But our customer satisfaction post-purchase increased. Our calls to the call center declined on a per order basis. And now that we're also using AI on the call center, we're able to be significantly more productive with a better customer experience. So all in all, again, it was one event, one of the multiple businesses we have. But a lot of learnings that some of them are being applied during Mother's Day. But certainly, they will be fully applied during the upcoming holidays. So very optimistic about the improvements to the overall experience in the future.