How Mockingbird Understands Purchase Journeys & Optimizes Channels

Meet Marjorie Chelius from Mockingbird

Marjorie is the Vice President of Marketing at Mockingbird. She’s a business strategist, general manager, marketer, and startup enthusiast with a proven track record of driving profitable omnichannel growth through acquisition, retention, and distribution. 

Marjorie and her team use Rockerbox for:

• Understanding the purchase journey
• Assessing the role of every channel
• Experimenting with new tactics and measuring the results
• Driving efficiency in media spend

Purveyors of the Ultimate Joy Ride

Mockingbird doesn’t just sell strollers; they provide the means to the “ultimate joy ride.” The DTC brand’s mission is to empower parents by supporting them “every step of the way and offering well-designed products that provide real value.” 

Founded in 2019, the brand quickly gained super fans and racked up awards, thanks to its expandable, multi-function, modular strollers. The brand sells strollers directly to consumers via its eCommerce site, as well as through online and offline retailers, such as Target, Babylist, and numerous baby gear stores.

Mockingbird is an innovator through-and-through, and is helping to pioneer the field of conversational commerce. Its new feature, Flock Talk, connects prospects to parents who purchase and use a Mockingbird stroller in order to get honest feedback prior to purchasing.

A Difficult Purchase Journey to Assess

Strollers are one of the most highly considered purchases. As expensive and important items, the decision cycle takes anywhere from three to six months. Complicating matters further, half of all sales are gifts, which means buyers are not inherently trackable.

As a new brand in the crowded baby gear market, Mockingbird invested in numerous channels to build its customer base, including paid social, search, and influencers. When Marjorie Chelius joined Mockingbird in January 2021, email was an important channel to the brand’s marketing strategy, but she started to question the validity of that assumption. 

The company also invested substantial sums in Google Ads and Facebook but had no real way to assess the effectiveness of those campaigns beyond the limited platform-reported numbers that came with inherent data issues. Facebook doesn’t provide user-level data, and changes in iOS 14.5 further hindered tracking, making it difficult for DTC brands like Mockingbird to assess the performance of ad spend and strategy.

“Every brand has attribution challenges, but ours are the worst,” Marjorie explained. “For smaller purchases, last-touch attribution is an important consideration; not so for Mockingbird strollers. I needed a way to question and validate assumptions.”

Enter Rockerbox

Marjorie was thrilled to learn the team had started working with Rockerbox before she arrived. “Rockerbox brought discipline to our entire team,” she said. “We get our results and pull attribution understanding out of Rockerbox. We compare paid vs. unpaid results, and of the paid efforts, we can assess which investments deliver a tangible benefit.” 

Marjorie and her team felt Rockerbox insights are so rich and the dashboard so intuitive that the marketing team no longer uses GoogleAnalytics. Rockerbox is Mockingbird’s new source of truth, enabling them to determine the role of each channel, mitigate the challenges of Facebook, and conduct numerous experiments to drive sales performance. 

“I use Rockerbox as a source of truth for understanding the impact of my marketing experiments.” Marjorie Chelius, VP Marketing, Mockingbird

The Ultimate Payoff: Deep Insights

The summer of 2021 was a difficult one for nearly all manufacturers, Mockingbird included. Supply chain woes led to a shortage of supply, which meant Marjorie and her team had to dampen demand. Ever the strategist, Marjorie saw the enforced lull as an opportunity to “get tighter on my incrementality and channel understanding.”

She used her time wisely, probing deep into the data to see what insights it could reveal.

“I asked: What does Rockerbox data tell me about the role of email when paid marketing was on? What does Rockerbox data tell me about the role of email when paid marketing off? What I saw was that there wasn’t much difference. This allowed me to feel more confident to make decisions because paid marketing was no longer obfuscating the role of email.”

Understanding Channel Mapping

One of the key insights Marjorie learned was the role that Facebook ads play in the purchase cycle. For instance, people view Mockingbird ads on Facebook but tend not to click on them. Instead, they go to Google.com and search for the brand. “That's particularly helpful from a standpoint of: we're making big investments in a paid social, but 30% of our discovery lives in paid social. This is the reason why we feel confident to invest more in this channel,” she said. As a result, Mockingbird no longer invests in costly bottom-of-the-funnel spending on Facebook.

“We want to capture those people from Facebook with a branded Paid Search landing page, and we wouldn't be able to connect the dots and track the conversion increase from a Facebook ad to a branded search Google search without a Rockerbox. Without that mapping of the channels, I'm at the mercy of the platform.”

Results

Rockerbox provides Mockingbird’s marketing team the insights they need to make smart investments in media spending. The team now understands the role that paid search, email, paid social, PR, and organic search play in driving online sales and in-store traffic.

Most importantly, Rockerbox provides Marjorie and her team the confidence they need to run experiments (e.g. geo holdouts), measure their results, and double down on the channels that are driving the best possible performance.

This confidence is critical, as 2022 will be a year of rapid multifaceted expansion and growth for Marjorie and her team. “We’re expanding new product categories, expanding our marketing channels, expanding our team. We’re going all in, but with Rockerbox, I feel confident because we can measure things.” she said.

If you're interested in learning more about how you can also utilize the Rockerbox Attribution Platform, sign up for a demo here!