Black Buffalo Streamlines Month-End Cohort Analysis with Peel

Black Buffalo – creates smokeless tobacco alternatives that deliver the same great taste as the real thing, just without the actual tobacco leaf. They are a brand who is driven by their dedication to creating a product with an authentic look, taste, and feel. Their journey to create the perfect smokeless tobacco alternative saw them head from Chicago (where they’re based) to the South in a multi–year excursion to discover the ideal process for their product.

They worked in the fields with growers to learn from those who use time-honored techniques, which they used to inspire their own unique process.

“When we finally cracked the code, a 40-year old tobacco farmer said if we hadn’t told him, ‘he never would’ve known our leaves weren’t tobacco.’”

Black Buffalo offers a range of flavors and bundling options throughout their Pouches,  Long cut, and nicotine-free Zero product lines. Customers can choose to purchase one-time in 2-packs or 5-packs, or the old “Set & Forget Boss” (aka subscription option) to get their dip delivered every 15 or 30 days.

Needless to say, Black Buffalo has a lot of data, from different angles, different types and preferences of customers, and in different forms to analyze to keep their business thriving.

Meeting Peel:

In November 2021, Black Buffalo came to Peel to get a better view of their Cohort Analysis as well as a better grip on their customer behavior based on purchasing patterns. With a little bit of experience using the platform under their belt, the team at Black Buffalo soon figured out how Peel could expedite their reporting, saving them time and effort on a monthly basis.

They were already cohort analysis pros – they were building the exact segmented cohort reports for a range of metrics by product manually in spreadsheets. Though even for Excel pros & lovers - which these guys are – it was too time consuming.

Analysis they needed:

The team at Black Buffalo needed Peel to provide them with automated Cohort Analysis metrics on the value and retention behavior of their customers, which they were already building in-house, by hand.

• Filtering out junk & messy data - ✅
• Segmented by products in customers orders -  ✅
• Using specific formulas for how they wanted to calculate LTV -  ✅
• Ability to define groups of customers by grouping skus & products & product types together (custom segments!)  to then use as dimensions in the reporting –  ✅ ✅ ✅

All set – given Peel’s extensive library of Cohort Analysis & library of revenue formulas – this was easily available – as easy as someone ordering a latte with almond milk at a coffee shop.

They wanted to understand more about their customer behavior and purchasing patterns with questions like:

• What is the LTV of a customer who bought different types of product?
• What is the Repurchase Rate of a customer who bought different product types?
• What are products customers buying as a one-time purchase and then subsequently subscribing on their next purchase?
• What product combos are most frequently purchased together?

They've been able to answer those questions, and so much more, with just a few clicks in Peel.

“With Peel, we’ve been able to build a robust Customer Experience dashboard that allows real-time monitoring of our customer journey without manual data entry into spreadsheets, which has made it possible to make quick decisions on marketing initiatives, development needs, and even customer service strategies.”

- Vice President of Customer Experience Zach Miller

Building those custom dashboards to track those key metrics and customer behavior patterns plus accessing Cohort Analysis has been a huge asset to their internal processes.

When seeing the custom Cohort Analysis on their account, Black Buffalo’s Co-Founder and President, Mark Hanson commented:

"This would make our potential month-end cohort analysis all of 30 minutes instead of 15-20 hours."

Black Buffalo is a great example of time saved using Peel. Not only are they able to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, but they’re also able to streamline and upgrade their monthly reporting even on the specified specialized views that they are after . They’re now equipped with a much faster means of doing this critical analysis that was all available to them in Peel.