5.11’s Post-Purchase Surveys Lead to New Customer Insights and Revenue Growth

5.11 is a world-leading maker of purpose-built technical apparel, footwear and gear. With a diverse range of core personas—from first responders to recreational enthusiasts—5.11’s personalization and segmentation strategies need to be powered by real customer insights. Using Lexer’s tools and guidance to launch a post-purchase survey campaign, the team at 5.11 learned more about what makes their customers tick while driving additional sales and lifetime value growth.

5.11 is a California-based retailer offering superior technical apparel and gear for law enforcement, first responders, tactical operators and recreational enthusiasts.

After combining and enriching their data within the Lexer Customer Data Platform, 5.11 began developing personas to inform their approach to customer engagement. To collect more information about their existing customers and encourage repeat sales, they delivered a post-purchase survey to anyone who made a purchase, including an incentive to respond.

So far, the campaign has driven a 2.5 percent survey response rate collecting key insights for over 42,788 customers and over 4,000 coupon redemptions yielding $560k in sales.

“The post-purchase survey and coupon has been a high-performance campaign for us,” says James Foster, Marketing Automation Manager at 5.11. “This survey had a three-times higher open rate and four-times higher unique click rate than our standard promotional emails.”

This case study will explore:

• How 5.11 developed the strategic survey to learn more about their customers
• What kind of customer insights they learned from the responses
• How they plan to respond to these insights to improve customer engagement moving forward

Objectives and methodology

Customer surveys are a versatile tactic for developing direct and meaningful relationships with customers. For 5.11, this campaign was an opportunity to learn more about who their current customers are to inform segmentation and personalization in the future.

“Implementing a regular feedback program like post-purchase surveys provides us the data we need to better manage our customers’ expectations,” says Debra Radcliff, Global Chief Marketing Officer at 5.11. “It’s important to understand how people perceive our brand so that we can pivot if we need to make necessary changes. At 5.11, customer feedback is critical to our success. We have some of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the industry and our reputation rides on the quality of products and customer experiences we can consistently deliver.”

5.11 had a number of goals for their post-purchase survey campaign, including:

• Gain a deeper understanding of current customers
• Increase personalization and customer segmentation with survey insights
• Inform persona development with survey insights
• Track customer satisfaction following the last purchase

To meet these goals, they used Lexer’s Secure Form Builder to develop a survey that asked both quantitative and qualitative questions about customers’ motivations, the ease with which they found and purchased their items, their opinions on price and value, their overall satisfaction, and more. It also included an NPS survey question, “on a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend 5.11 to a friend or colleague?”

Using the Lexer CDP, 5.11 set up an automatic trigger to send the survey 10 days following purchase. When customers filled out the survey, their responses would be available immediately in the Lexer CDP, enriching existing customer profiles.

Conversions and customer insights

5.11’s post-purchase survey campaign resulted in:

• A 2.5 percent response rate.
• A 9.4 percent email conversion rate, about 111 percent higher than 5.11’s standard email conversions.
• Over 4,000 total coupon redemptions.

Although surveys may not typically be associated with revenue growth, 5.11’s coupon incentive turned the campaign into a high-performing sales driver as well as a successful tool for data collection.

By pulling these survey responses directly into the Lexer CDP and analyzing them against their entire customer database, 5.11 was able to gain insights about:

• Customer lifetime value
• Gender
• Channel preference
• Occupation
• Shopping experience
• Repurchasing factors
• Perception of 5.11 products
• Product satisfaction
• Overall satisfaction
• Likelihood of purchasing again

These insights help 5.11 shape and strengthen their persona profiles for improved segmentation and personalization. By taking a test-and-learn approach to persona development, they’ll continue to work with Lexer to collect feedback and refine their personas based on continued engagement with surveys, sales, and other engagement strategies.

In particular, 5.11 is interested in exploring a subscription service for new styles and worn-out products to streamline the buying process for repeat customers; using NPS promoter segments to inform high-value lookalike audiences for future targeting; suppressing NPS detractor segments from paid campaigns to avoid wasting ad spend on irrelevant audiences; and turning promoters into brand advocates by encouraging them to leave product reviews online.

“Lexer’s tools and team helped us discover important insights about our customers while driving email conversions 111% higher than our standard campaigns,” says James. “We’re looking forward to continuing our work with Lexer to provide personalized experiences to our customers.”

With one of the simplest integrations in the industry, Lexer’s CDP effortlessly combines, cleanses, standardizes, and enriches your data into an actionable single view of the customer. Our tools and team will boost your customer IQ with AI-powered predictive analytics, third-party data enrichment, and targeted customer surveys.

Interested in gaining rich customer insights and delivering personalized experiences? Use the calendar below to book a demo of the Lexer platform.