How Benchmade completed a full-funnel audience building machine with Dataships

Establishing an End-To-End Opt-in Engine

Since re-platforming to Shopify in 2023, Benchmade has seen tremendous DTC growth, boasting well over 500k site visits per month. Eager to capitalize on this influx of interest, its team began prioritizing retention to drive consistent repurchase revenue through email and SMS.

One major source of quality subscribers was the brand's email opt-in tickbox at checkout. While Shopify offered a native opt-in checkbox, even with auto-check on, customer consent rates hovered around 60%. That meant Benchmade's marketing team would ultimately spend more on higher-cost retargeting channels to drive repeat purchases, which would drive CPAs higher and ROAS lower.

Two strategies the team was using to combat this were offer popups and Opensend (an identity resolution tool). While those strategies helped support top-of-funnel acquisition, they didn't solve for the fact that almost half of their purchasers were not getting subscribed to their long-term retention audience. To truly fuel growth, they needed a way to get contactable customers from every part of their funnel.

Benchmade's Senior Manager of Digital Growth, Adam Hutton, inherited the tech stack when he took over their digital growth in August 2024. As a senior operator, his first order of business upon joining was auditing the stack to make sure every tool was driving the results it claimed. To do that, he asked Dataships to run an A/B test to prove they were driving incremental value.

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"Our checkout opt-in rates were hovering around 60% even with auto-check on. This meant list growth for our number one retention channel took far too much time — Dataships helped us change that."

Dynamic Consent Collection Turns Customers Into Engaged Subscribers

Adam worked with the Dataships team to establish a testing foundation to compare Shopify's native opt-in checkbox against Dataships' dynamic consent widget. The test split both opt-in experiences 50/50 over a three-week period. After concluding the test and analyzing the results, Dataships' place in their tech stack was justified by tangible ROI.

Despite the brief testing period, Dataships had already driven over 1,000 incremental email opt-ins from Benchmade customers. Each new Dataships subscriber maintained the highest standard of compliance, ensuring no gray areas or fine risks would create challenges for Benchmade's high sending volume.

However, incremental opt-ins were only the tip of the iceberg. After digging deeper into the results, Adam and the Dataships team found that the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) of customers subscribed to marketing was also $51 higher than those not subscribed to marketing.

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After ingesting Benchmade's historical Shopify data and factoring in the purchasing behaviors of subscribers, the Dataships team found that the 2,448 incremental subscribers were projected to bring in $124K in incremental LTV from those contacts. That's forecasted to result in close to $530k in realized revenue over 12 months. Having dealt with many solutions that struggle to prove bottom-line impact, seeing Dataships crunch the numbers in real-time gave Adam the confidence in the partnership with Dataships.

"With Dataships, the ROI was clear from the beginning. Knowing the incremental value of each subscribed customer was an absolute gamechanger in putting tangible value behind our retention efforts."

Benchmade Turns One-Time Conversions Into Continuous Profits

Partnering with Dataships was a key step in rounding out Benchmade's opt-in flow with dynamic consent collection at checkout. While native popups and Opensend can open communication with some top-of-funnel visitors, Dataships ultimately seals the deal by opting in purchasers, driving a steady stream of compliant and high-intent subscribers.

And just look at the results:

• 2,448 incremental marketing subscribers added monthly
• $124k incremental LTV unlocked monthly
• 97% email opt-in rate

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Moving forward, Adam is eager to dive deeper into Dataships' A/B testing capabilities while incorporating SMS opt-in alongside email to expand his touchpoints with Benchmade's loyal customer base.

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"Dataships came in and boosted our opt-in rates to nearly 100%. That massive, immediate lift is exactly what we were looking for."