Within a year, the company scaled from a bootstrapped operation in its founder’s apartment to a global eCommerce name driving $50 million in annual revenue. 

We sat down with Margaret Fortner, Head of Growth at Glamnetic, to dive deep on: 

• The outsized value in optimizing post-purchase customer flows
• How Disco drives metric growth and ongoing qualitative user insights 
• Disco’s rapid migration that got Glamnetic up and running in two hours
  

"Acquisition rates, CACs, AOV, blended ROAS — Disco has been significantly positive for Glamnetic across all of these categories. And it wouldn’t be possible if they had not shown how dedicated they are to solving each of our problems.” 

Pre-Disco Days: Stagnating Acquisitions

Glamnetic launched in late 2019, right before they saw immense growth throughout 2020 (as well as a global pandemic) via traditional paid acquisition channels like FB and Instagram. 

By 2021, the brand — like many others in the DTC eCommerce ecosystem — began to hit a ceiling for scalable digital customer acquisition, due to industry-wide shifts like: 

• Skyrocketing CACs — Across many major channels, digital CPMs went from $2 to at least $33 (at a rate of 17.5x) within just three years. 
• The rollout of iOS 15 — This brutally altered brands’ abilities to drive user numbers through efficient attribution, targeting, etc. 
  

At that point, the team decided to pivot its approach — now setting its sights on growing into an omnichannel model for a unified growth channel strategy across DTC, Amazon, and retail. 

However, they soon encountered what Margaret has called their greatest pain point: the question of how best to diversify their channel mix for effectively reduced acquisition costs. 

“Everyone was so accustomed to just throwing money at Facebook and then getting more money out. So we knew we had to respond with a very blended CAC approach. The main issue was deciding how best to achieve it.”

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Onboarding with Disco: The Two-Hour Migration

As for how the team actually connected and onboarded with Disco, Margaret pointed out that she’d already seen the benefits of Disco in her previous role on the growth team at Hydrant. 

Once she arrived in her role at Glamnetic, she knew she wanted to sign up for Disco again as early as possible, based on her first-hand knowledge that the platform did indeed work. 

Since the company runs on Shopify Plus, installation efforts were seamless, and, if anything, according to Margaret, more time was likely spent on logistics than the pure tech. 

Ultimately, onboarding Glamnetic — with a sweep of all-in, heads-down implementation — took roughly one or two hours of development time. 

“I’d already had a great experience with Disco in my last growth role, so I guess I’ve become a repeat customer. Both migrations turned out to be super easy. Glamnetic’s integration took maybe a couple of hours of dev time at most.” 

Quantitative Wins, Qualitative Insights

As for the functional benefits of Disco, Margaret identified three key distinct outcomes.

1. Metric Improvements

Since implementing Disco, Glamnetic has seen sustained improvements across:

• CACs & blended ROAS — In Margaret’s words, cross-selling products with fellow brands in their Disco cohort has worked well, and she anticipates further growth to come once Glamnetic switches to Disco’s impression-for-impression model. 
  

• AOV & LTV — Disco’s functionalities for pre-checkout recommendations of relevant products and post-purchase upsell have both propelled the Glamnetic team’s internal goal of more diverse cross-product sampling from buyers. 

2. Intuitive Interfaces for Optimizing Buyer Flows

As Glamnetic’s unofficial eCom manager, Margaret interfaces with the actual Disco platform roughly two or three times each week. 

She combines pure experimentation with new product mixes — simplified by Disco’s intuitive UX for clients — in order to optimize assortments and track performance. This might include: 

• Replacing widget tiles for out-of-stock products
• Reordering layouts of recommendation sections
• Testing new imagery (i.e. lifestyle vs. PDP flat images)
  

Conversely, Margaret also pointed to Disco’s ability for users to select competitor brands to filter out of any pre-checkout or post-purchase flows. 

3. Qualitative User Insights

As Margaret put it, there’s a limit to what quantitative metrics can fully capture about a customer’s behavior. Instead, she’s found Disco’s capabilities for driving qualitative and semantic analytics to be extremely useful for the Glamnetic team. 

For instance, Margaret pointed to the platform’s functionality for pulling user data — from both pre-and post-purchase — to understand buyers’ broader browsing, interaction, and purchase trends within the entire network of Disco client brands. As a result: 

• They’ve discovered other brands that share the same buyer audience, many of which have been unexpected since they belong to entirely different verticals or categories. Subsequently, they’ve conducted outreach to these brands to share audience insights.
  

• Certain data has spurred new content or entire new campaigns. A piece of user insight from Disco can become new social media assets, a new influencer partnership, etc. — in order to pursue an untapped audience that’s emerged from the data woodwork. 
  

• Alternatively, new insights have led to deepened testing efforts — whether with landing pages, copy, or product assortments — on audience sectors that Glamnetic hasn’t focused on reaching in the past. 
  

“Disco has been an incredible addition to our data toolkit. More customer insights always make me happy. They also improve Glamnetic on every front, because everything comes down to learning about your users.” 

Leveraging the Disco Platform for Scalable Growth

Ultimately, Margaret took care to highlight that these impacts were made possible due to the user support and rapid response time of the Disco team to her team’s inquiries.

It’s a vendor experience she’s less accustomed to, as she points to the fact that larger tooling partners openly displayed through their customer success efforts (or lack thereof) that the Glamnetic team was not a priority. 

Working with the Disco team has been a pleasant surprise, as Margaret put it, with every member she’s encountered demonstrating dedication to personally assisting Glamnetic. 

For instance:

• Client success and account managers are responsive to all of Glamnetic’s inquiries through their client-vendor Slack channel. This applies from day-to-day questions about best practices for product assortments to requests to troubleshoot platform bugs. 
  

• After pointing out an issue with Disco’s post-purchase upsell function and a lack of proper Facebook pixel tracking, user support quickly worked with teams from both Facebook and Shopify to implement a solution. 
  

In her words, Margaret has never brought an issue to the Disco support team and has not received a quick, thorough resolution. 

“We’ve often felt larger platforms are incentivized to not do anything to truly support their clients, even though they’re equipped to dive into these issues. The Disco team then absolutely feels like the exact opposite of that.”