Here’s a game of spot the difference for you.

Bloom & Wild integrates testing into everything they do, and it’s not just the assets they create, but the channels they put them on.

Through testing, Bloom & Wild have discovered that Instagram Stories and Pinterest aren’t effective acquisition channels for them, and that OOH performs far better than radio.

But that’s just a sliver of the useful information we learned in our chat with Charlotte Langley, Brand & Communications Director for Bloom & Wild. She shared much more on the values that saw Bloom & Wild gain over 2.4 million customers and how they’ve really come into action over the past year.

Here are are a few of our favourite takeaways.

1. Treat every audience touchpoint as an opportunity to impress

The best example of how Bloom & Wild do this is in their approach to customer service, or as they call it, Customer Delight. The name change isn’t just cosmetic, the department is tasked with turning customer complaints into solutions that go above and beyond to make the consumer happy.

Around 50% of their customers first discover the brand through receiving the flowers as a gift, meaning they can’t slack when it comes to the product itself. This is why they pay attention to the little details like giving two free packets of plant food with every package, rather than 1, and why their retail displays feature these beautiful, plastic free flower cones that are lovely to look at and easy to carry without a bag.

2. Solve your customers’ problems 

Like many businesses Bloom & Wild was created to solve a problem. Founder, Aron Gelbard was trying to send flowers and found the experience difficult and drawn out. So he created Bloom & Wild to be the balm to that wound.

In innovating letterbox flowers, they made it that much easier to gift bouquets and over time, the company saw a huge shift in how people gifted flowers. Large numbers of Bloom & Wild customers began using the service to celebrate their friends and families on a regular basis, rather than only buying flowers for special occasions.

Ultimately, Bloom & Wild have made it their mission to make it easier for people to show that they care. To that end, they’ve built features on their site that allow users to mark important dates in their friends and family’s lives, so they’ll always be reminded to send some flowers on the special days.

Knowing that letterbox flowers often take a while to perk up after transit, every bouquet comes with a note that reads ‘shush, your flowers are sleeping’. Acknowledging the product’s flaw and pre-empting customer concerns in a warm and witty way is just another example of how you can build problem solving into all aspects of your brand.

But sometimes there’s no need to pre-empt your customer’s problems, you can just ask them directly. Bloom & Wild utilise Survey Monkey to get their customers to help them with product development, LookBack to ensure that their website’s UX is working in service to their customers and communicating their key messages, and Attest for larger scale market research.

3. Think bigger than your bottom line 

Bloom & Wild started giving their customers the option to opt out of Mother’s Day messaging if they found the celebration difficult, and immediately gained a lot of great press, loyal customers, and then a raft of copycats.

But rather than seeing the imitators as a bad thing, Bloom & Wild embraced them, and kicked off the Thoughtful Marketing movement. The movement shares ideas and resources to brands who wanted to implement their own more thoughtful segmentation.

You can spend forever worrying about how an action will impact your bottom line, but sometimes doing the right thing by your customers is just the right thing to do. And sometimes it can lead to huge earned media, and a movement with you at its centre. Not a bad way to build a brand.