How Public Goods Increased Membership Retention 5% and Achieved 10X ROI with Monocle

About

Public Goods is a direct-to-consumer brand building a one-stop shop for everyday essentials, from personal care and cleaning supplies to pantry staples, all designed to be healthier for people and gentler on the planet. The brand’s mission is rooted in simple, sustainable design: fewer harsh ingredients, minimalist packaging, and fair prices without unnecessary mark-ups.

The Challenge

Public Goods was eager to enhance the performance of their retention program, particularly around three key areas: churn prevention, first-purchase retention, and cross-selling. With a lean team, they had been running manual tests and basic segmentation, but they knew there was a significant opportunity to unlock more sophisticated personalization with the right technology.

The challenge was finding a solution that could deliver enterprise-level sophistication without the typical barriers.

Harley Butler, the CEO of Public Goods, was looking for a lean solution that could be implemented with minimal complexity.

"A lot of solutions out there are enterprise level or very difficult to set up or require a lot of internal resource to even manage the testing," he explained.

Three Core Retention Challenges

Butler pointed to three retention areas he was curious to test out Monocle for.

1) Preventing membership churn

With over 100,000 paying members whose memberships renew automatically each year, Public Goods needed to identify which members were at risk of canceling before renewal and determine the right outreach strategy to retain them.

The challenge was understanding who needed to be reached, when to reach them, and what messaging would resonate most, rather than applying blanket offers or making educated guesses. The team had been manually testing different offers through their customer support team each month, but lacked a systematic way to optimize across these variables.

2) Reactivating dormant members

Adding to the challenge, many members had signed up during the 2020 pandemic rush but hadn't engaged in years. The team wasn't sure if re-engagement was even possible.

"These were people that might have signed up five years ago during the pandemic. So it was a big question mark if we could actually re-engage them. Every little half of a percentage point gain that we can get in renewal rates is meaningful contribution dollars for us in the business."

3) Optimizing 2nd purchase retention and cross-selling

Beyond membership renewal and reactivation, Public Goods was looking to improve retention after a customer's first purchase. In addition, they wanted to cross-sell core category products to subscribers who had only purchased non-core items. 

They were curious to see if implementing AI could outperform the static winback flows that they had set up by looking at each subscriber individually rather than at the segment level.

The Solution

Public Goods partnered with Monocle to test AI-powered personalization across three critical retention use cases, working seamlessly with their CRM agency Darkroom and Klaviyo.

Use Case 1: Churn Prevention

For membership renewals, Monocle's AI analyzed Public Good’s membership audience to evaluate which members were most at risk of canceling based on their behavioral patterns and intent signals versus those who were showing signs that they would renew regardless. This prevented "leaking" offers to members who didn't need them while ensuring at-risk members received the right strategy to keep them engaged.

Use Case 2: Post-Purchase

Instead of static winback flows that enrolled all first-time purchasers into a flow at the same moment, the Public Goods team tested Monocle’s AI choosing the best time to enroll subscribers into the winback flow, maximizing the likelihood subscribers would engage and convert.

Use Case 3: Cross-Sell

For cross-selling core category products to subscribers who had only purchased non-core items, Public Goods let Monocle's AI control the entire journey, selecting not just timing, but also which messages to send and how frequently to communicate based on each customer's behavior.

The Results

Public Goods validated that AI-powered personalization could move the needle, and then some.

Overall Business Impact

• 5% increase in membership retention
• 7X winback email conversion
• 10X return on investment

What I first really wanted to validate was that we could move the needle. The results proved we absolutely could and we're only just getting going.

Sophisticated AI-powered personalization drove meaningful gains across membership renewal, first-purchase retention, and cross-selling, all without requiring enterprise-level resources or complexity.

Implementation Experience

For a CEO who's worked in digital for 25 years across companies from Adobe and Cisco to Target and startups, Harley's bar for vendor partnerships is high.

"I've been around long enough and worked with a lot of vendors from big to small. The key to all of this is getting it stood up in a way that doesn't drain your own strategy, and then obviously you want results, too."

The Monocle implementation exceeded those expectations.

The Monocle team has a clear vision of how all of this can work and come together, and they innately understand businesses like ours to the point where they’re suggesting the things that we would only bring up ourselves.

The direct partnership between Monocle and Public Goods' CRM agency Darkroom was particularly valuable: "That's just awesome because that means we're not sort of in between. You're getting the exact strategy implemented the way it should."

What stands out most for Butler is how Monocle makes sophisticated technology feel simple: "All of what we're describing here - I’m making it sound relatively simple. It's not. It's really complicated at times, heavy math, heavy technology, and that part is all just so seamless."

What's Next

Having proven AI-powered personalization could drive meaningful retention gains, Public Goods is expanding Monocle across additional use cases:

First-time buyer segmentation: Using AI to personalize welcome offers based on whether a site visitor is a member, recent member, legacy member, or non-member—ensuring each segment receives the most relevant experience.

B2B wholesale engagement: Public Goods generates significant revenue from wholesale customers like Airbnb hosts, small hotels, gyms, and spas who purchase case packs. With a separate Shopify instance for wholesale and high AOV self-serve customers, there's a substantial opportunity to apply Monocle's AI on the B2B side.

The Bottom Line

For retention marketers who've been promised sophisticated personalization before but found it too expensive, too complicated, or too resource-intensive, Harley's perspective is direct:

It's weirdly cliché all of a sudden to say that AI and personalization is here. But all of a sudden, because of AI and Monocle’s capabilities, it's easy to do now, as it should be.

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