No cookies needed: How digital brand Panda Tea boosted revenue by 185%

Panda Tea, a Paris-based beverage brand, is making tea more accessible, healthy, and delicious. With a deep understanding of the botanicals that make up their product, Panda Tea delights their customers with high-quality drinks and personalized marketing experiences.

Founded by three brothers, Panda Tea’s organic, sustainably-sourced products offer health benefits alongside great tastes. Since the company started four years ago, they’ve grown their online business to serve over 500,000 people.

A competitive market meets growing demands for compliance

Alexandre Ali, co-founder of Panda Tea, explains that ecommerce competition has never been higher: He sees thousands of new brands arriving on the market weekly.

So how has Panda Tea won over their large customer base? By using data to build deep and personalized relationships with people—but how they do that is more important than ever because of the changes and limitations in third-party data.

Third-party data is customer information a brand gets from an entity other than that customer, like someone’s browsing history from Google. And as people become more concerned with how businesses use their data, this data will likely become harder for brands like Panda Tea to use in marketing.

Everything around the cookie and advertising is unclear right now. But the relationship with the customer is still the most important thing, so how do we create compliant, personalized experiences while third-party data is at risk?

Alexandre Ali, Co-founder, Panda Tea

How Panda Tea uses data to create long-lasting connections with customers

While data privacy laws become stricter in Europe and beyond, there’s something regulations can’t take away: the data your customers want to give you, like their email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, order history, and more. All of this becomes your Customer-First Data™.

Unlike third-party data, Panda Tea can use their Customer-First Data to tailor the experiences they create for each customer and create more meaningful relationships. In fact, they chose Klaviyo because it makes using this data easier and eliminates the fear of risking compliance.

Klaviyo offers data to understand and personalize our customers’ experiences—and since all data stored in Klaviyo requires explicit user consent, we don’t have to stress about compliance, which makes using that data easier.

Alexandre Ali, Co-founder, Panda Tea

Amid data privacy changes, email revenue still thrives

When Apple released iOS 14.5, the ecommerce industry lost access to some of their third-party data. Facebook recently followed suit to comply with GDPR in Europe and Google isn’t far behind.

While brands that rely on these paid channels have seen higher fees and lower return on ad spend, Panda Tea’s investment in Customer-First Data has enabled them to grow their email marketing revenue.

In fact, the month after iOS 14.5 was announced and third-party advertising suffered, Panda Tea’s email revenue was up 185% from the previous year. And thanks to the team’s expert use of data in the Klaviyo platform, 78% of that email revenue came from automated emails based on Customer-First Data, like their 7-part abandoned cart series.

Being able to treat people differently based on their behavior on our website, what they visit, what they add to cart, is easy with Klaviyo. It’s been key to our development and success with email revenue.

Alexandre Ali, Co-founder, Panda Tea

The importance of data compliance and security will only grow in coming years. But for brands that build trust with their customers, people will be more open to sharing personal information that ultimately leads to a better customer experience.

Fortunately, Panda Tea’s customer-first approach does just that, while reducing their reliance on unstable data sources. With personalized, relevant content and an excellent product, Panda Tea proves they care—which ultimately has won them their loyal customer base of over 500,000.

Find out more about the data privacy changes and what it means to be customer-first. Check out the resources