Airsign Offers Customers a More Powerful Clean With the Help of Powerful Insights From Shopify

Brand-obsessed entrepreneurs Alex Dashefsky and Joey Guerra used Shopify's segmentation and customer data tools to grow the audience of their reimagined vacuum brand.

Sustainably-minded product designer, Joey Guerra, and brand-obsessed business operator, Alex Dashefsky, dared to reimagine an appliance that's part of everyone's home: the vacuum cleaner.

They took a blank canvas to everything from product design, marketing, and fulfillment, before launching their future-forward vacuum company Airsign in 2022. Airsign offers a complete and powerful clean to homes everywhere without sacrificing sustainability or aesthetics.  

Alex Dashefsky (left) and Joey Guerra (right) are the founders of Airsign. Airsign

Challenge 

Airsign knew there was a gap in the market for this product, but they needed to build a sustainable business model. They'd have to find the right audience and grow their list of recurring customers in order to be competitive in the home appliance category. 

Through consumer surveys, Airsign created three high-value customer personas: design-oriented customers in big cities, millennials moving to the suburbs, and an older audience who miss the high-quality appliances of the past. Once the team knew the audiences they wanted to reach, it was time to figure out how to reach them.

Early on, Airsign used paid ads to target specific groups on Facebook and Google. But with the introduction of stricter privacy laws and iOS data tracking limitations, paid ads became more expensive with less return. 

Finding ways to gather and use zero-party data that customers willingly share with brands, along with first-party data that brands collect directly from customers, would now be critical to Airsign's success in engaging audiences and finding customers.

Solution 

Airsign recognized how important it would be to centralize its data in one place. Its addresses and other customer details were in Shopify, customer demographics like interests were stored in Facebook and Google, and its post-purchase survey lived in another tool. Since the majority of its customer data existed in Shopify, including its sales, it first worked to connect all of its data before then using it. 

Airsign started using customer segmentation in Shopify to gain insights about its customers and to take action. With the diminishing returns on paid ad spend, they began using email and SMS marketing to connect with existing customers and people who had subscribed to its newsletter. 

Results

One key group Airsign targeted using segmentation was customers who purchased the product at launch but didn't have an opportunity to sign up for its AirBags or HEPA filters, since those subscriptions weren't available until three months later. The team was able to easily build a segment in Shopify for customers who purchased the product before the subscription program launched, then target that specific group with a discount to sign up for subscriptions.

"We identified the segment in Shopify, created a discount for that specific segment, communicated with them in a way that was very personalized for their needs, and we saw about 30% of those people convert." - Alex Dashefsky 

Another important insight the team gained from segmenting its audience was determining the best location for fulfillment. When Airsign launched, it picked Chicago as a central hub to ship orders to both coasts. Alex built segments for their customers on the coasts, in the south, and midwest, and over time, saw the most expensive shipping regions grow in size as more customers automatically joined those segments. That meant the company was paying more to ship to zones at a higher cost. 

Airsign uncovered that insight three months into business and quickly pivoted to a bi-coastal fulfillment model. Since then, shipping costs have dropped by 25%. 

Airsign takes pride in not having raised its prices since it launched, which is partly due to insights gained from tools like customer segmentation with Shopify. Keeping shipping costs down has helped it offer customers the best-quality product at an affordable price. 

As Airsign matures, it plans to use more personalized messaging for different groups of customers. Targeting specific segments with offers and content tailored to their interests is an important part of Airsign's strategy to keep high-value customers engaged over time.

Airsign is offering an exclusive price of $225 on their vacuum for Shopify readers via a discount code - SHOPIFY.

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