LoyaltyLion's CEO Charlie Casey commissioned a growth audit that doubled ROI by cutting waste in marketing spend and redirecting capital to their top inbound channel, which grows 40% yearly. The audit revealed brand and organic efforts like LinkedIn and PR were driving more traffic than credited, creating a predictable growth engine.
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I'm Charlie. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Loyalty Lion. We are the world's leading loyalty platform for mid-market brands. We're trusted by over 10,000 brands, including the largest omnichannel brand on Shopify. I want to take a step back. It's like, well, why did we do this in the first place? And obviously, I've already explained to you, it was actually about growth. We wanted to drive more growth from our number one channel. So it wasn't a cost-saving exercise. I think that's important for anybody who goes down this road. Like, you need to decide what it is you want to achieve from an audit, and you need to communicate that very clearly internally. Obviously stakeholders will make up their own minds why you're doing an audit. And as I said, I've already worked in consulting. So pretty much the number one reason for an audit in the consulting world is like efficiency gains or efficiency releasing capacity, which means reducing headcount. That is not what we wanted to do here. We wanted to grow. We wanted to understand whether our inputs were driving our outputs and therefore which of those we could accelerate. and where the opportunities were. So with Jack's piece of work, he did reduce our cost of customer acquisition. It's quite easy to do that. You can just take cost out. It's quite difficult to do that and maintain growth. And that's what Jack enabled us to do. So he did reduce the cost per month. We don't want to reduce the cost. We want to reinvest that. And he kept growth the same. So actually the ROI 2x'd over the period of time. And that has been consistent in May, June, and hopefully July. So it wasn't a one-off. Well done, Jack. So that's a tremendous turnaround. And that you get twofold result of that. One, you've got the capital that got released from wastage. And Jack was basically able to point to the areas of wastage that saved us the money. He also increased the ROI that allows us to invest more. So it's actually a double win. You've got that capital that's got released that you can reinvest when you know which areas are working. And you've also got higher ROI, so you can actually justify higher overall investment. Thereby accelerating growth. So we have 3 go-to-market channels: inbound, outbound, and partnerships. In the very, very early days of Loyalty Lion, outbound was king. It's a great way to scale your business, but it only goes so far. So a few years ago now, we made the strategic decision to become inbound-led. Obviously, as a brand, that's what you're going to appreciate too, because it means that Loyalty Lion as a business is present where you want them to be present and not present when you don't want them to be present. So we became an inbound-led business that was actually Incredibly successful. And for the last 2 years, that channel has been growing 40% year on year. So really standout success. We're very pleased with that. What most companies do is they focus on what is not working to grow more. I like to focus on what is working. I very much believe, and this is at a company level and an individual level, actually, I very much believe that you can achieve more by looking at what is working and accelerating it further and faster than trying to get something that's underperforming acceptable. So I wanted to accelerate our number one growth channel further. And also, there's a risk factor there. Obviously, if you've got most of your eggs in one basket, you want to understand why it's working. Like, a lot of people just go, it's working great. I wanted to understand if our inputs were delivering the outputs that actually were occurring, because actually, sometimes over the course of running the business, you're doing a lot of busywork. It's successful, but it's not the busywork that actually drove the success. It's something else. So I wanted to see if our inputs were driving the outputs. We already had a very longstanding relationship with Rebolesco. So I already trusted Rebolesco as a brand. So therefore, when you recommend someone to me, I know that they've already gone through multiple checks. I know what your background is. I did obviously go out to market. And I had multiple recommendations. I actually interviewed 5 people, I got them all to do a case study as a test. It was, it was fairly lengthy. That was intentional to weed out the people who weren't willing to put in the effort. And, well, you recommended Jack. He was KPI focused. There was no fluff. And for someone that's driving revenue, that's what you want. He was also very comfortable in the weeds and like communicating at a C-level. A few other things he did, he delivered value before being hired. Like he identified issues on our demo booking form and he provided a fix. And he was also super fast to reply and gave me more references than I even asked for. So going above and beyond and proving that he could do the job made him stand head and shoulders above the rest. Jack did a really good job. I think what he did really well was he's got like a very simple process that he goes through. Like he doesn't jump to the end. So he basically looked at how we were working today. Was there any waste? Make sure that we can optimize for what is working and then reinvest any waste for growth. I think that the simplicity of that model is really beneficial. He was predominantly focused on paid, but also roped into that is like organic SEO and website. And whilst these channels were delivering, there was a lot of waste. And it was actually the other side of marketing, brand, that was driving a lot of our growth and really wasn't getting the credit that it deserved. So brand is like our persona externally, Mentions on LinkedIn, PR, inclusions, the customer research that we do, the white papers that we put out there, the events that we run. And it was driving a lot of our organic traffic that paid was happily taking credit for. Reassuring. There's one word. Reassuring. I will explain. Reassuring is exactly where a SaaS leader wants to end up. It helps you sleep at night. It means that you understand how your inputs connect to your outputs. It means that you have the basis for a predictable growth engine. And I'm very grateful to Revalesco for delivering that. I just want to say thank you to Jack on the record, on the camera. Yeah, for giving me a few more minutes sleep, which is something as a dad of 2 kids and the dad of a now quite mature startup values incredibly highly.
