Leader Spotlight: Engaging customers authentically, with Dianna Lyngholm

Dianna Lyngholm is Director of Creative Services + CX at FUN.com. She began her career in business development at Navitor Inc., a custom print business products business, before transitioning to a product and marketing manager role. Dianna transitioned to a brand and ecommerce manager role at Carlson Craft, a wholesale printing company for wedding invitations and holiday cards, before being promoted to marketing director. She then joined FUN.com, where she has directed brand, strategy, and creative for almost eight years.

In our conversation, Dianna talks about strategies for creating an authentic relationship with customers, including maintaining the brand voice while simultaneously modifying how to communicate with different audiences. She discusses the importance of having a customer feedback loop and shares examples of times when feedback came through social listening. Dianna also emphasizes how success KPIs differ significantly based on the channel you’re measuring them from.

Digital strategies to increase customer engagement and retention

To start, could you share a successful digital strategy you’ve implemented at FUN.com to increase customer engagement?

Last year, we replied to every single comment on our social media accounts — whether it was on an ad, organic post, or another channel. We interacted with the customer, even if it was just a side-eye emoji or something funny.

We made sure that we were authentically connecting with customers. Especially now with AI being so much more prevalent, people are used to sales pitches hitting all of their social media feeds. Being there, interacting with them, and having an authentic brand-customer relationship helped drive engagement on our social channels overall. This strategy was so successful that TikTok did a case study on us regarding our October return on ad spend (ROAS), which was 10x.

Sometimes, people visit halloweencostumes.com and think it’s not real. Since the site is so seasonal, they think it’s either a gimmick, poor quality, or illegitimate in the first place. If they comment about it being fake, we respond and say something like, “No, we’re actually based in Minnesota, and we’re really nice!” They don’t expect that, and then other customers sometimes come to our defense and say how great we are.

What about the retention aspect of the brand-customer relationship? You’re engaging these customers, so how do you keep them coming back?

We’re always trying to anticipate what they’re going to look at next and when they’re going to buy. We look between purchases to try to anticipate the next best time for us to get back in front of them. Halloween is an easy example, but we look at other seasonal purchases too, such as Valentine’s Day.

We identified that a great time to re-engage previous customers is five days before they purchased the previous year. We’ll send them a message through email, SMS, or whichever channel they’re more likely to engage with, and say, “Here’s what you purchased last year. You gave it five stars.” Sometimes, we’ll throw in recommendations based on their browsing behavior. We want to meet them at the right time with that call back to our brand.

We also have a loyalty program that we built a year and a half ago where if a customer refers a friend, they get points that can turn into dollars to use on our site. It generates a referral code that their friend can use at checkout so they get points on their end too.

Measuring the success of each social channel

How did you manage the timing aspect of staying authentic with customers? For example, do you limit your responses to comments during traditional business hours, or do you have staff continuously monitoring the feed?

It was very difficult to keep up with. We hired an intern, had folks from our copywriting and social teams jump in, and I helped too. Our CEO would sometimes pitch in as well. For the most part, we kept traditional business hours. But, keep in mind that during October, our traditional business hours change. We basically work every single day. We set that expectation so customers don’t have to wait over the weekend to get a response.

We made sure that we were monitoring comments and would pop in from time to time at night — just to make sure there wasn’t anything alarming that someone commented that we needed to immediately address.

What KPIs do you prioritize when you’re looking at the effectiveness of engagement or retention strategies?

It depends on the channel. With social engagement, we look at comments and video views, but views aren’t always that important because some channels count a view as two seconds. Nobody’s retaining anything from that. We instead look at the watch duration and analyze that. From there, we can draw conclusions on what worked and what didn’t. Why are people watching one particular video for longer than others? We then try to optimize future content to match our findings. Repeat rate is a long-term KPI that we look at.

Since we’re seasonal, we decided to look at a fourteen-month window instead of the traditional twelve-month window. A twelve-month window could be good for somebody selling flowers or jewelry, but for us, our customers might be thinking about making a purchase sooner or later than they usually do. Maybe they miss that twelve-month window, but they are still a repeat customer. With the fourteen-month window, we’ve started analyzing recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) scores, as well as the customer’s movement across that score.

For example, maybe they’re a very frequent and recent customer, but they’re also a low-price point customer. How do we get that component up? When it comes to something like email or SMS, we focus on clicks. You can’t measure open rates anymore because of the different privacy changes that have occurred over the years. Clicks and conversions are key instead. If a customer clicks, that means we engaged them somewhere, and we can get them into a new audience. That’s a win.

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Moving customers across sites and platforms

Online, you’re looking at average order value and suggesting additional items that might increase their customer’s order size. Are you also looking at the segment of people who buy during Halloween to see how you could get them to purchase during other parts of the year?

Yes, for sure. Anytime somebody converts, that’s great. We send the customer an order confirmation email from our Halloween site, display an ad that showcases our FUN.com brand, and give them a coupon to incentivize them to visit the site. Also, we’ve built our loyalty program to be brand-agnostic. If someone earns points on one site, they can redeem them on our other site. That’s another element to get that cross-branding piece into the puzzle.

Do you find that the majority of your traffic comes through desktop or mobile, or is it an even split?

Mobile is definitely king. About 80–85 percent of folks are shopping on mobile, but conversion is higher on desktop. That tells us that people are probably shopping on mobile, get distracted, and then come back on their desktop to complete the process later. Of course, some people still check out on mobile, so we have different experiences on mobile and desktop, like different scrolling capabilities. We want to make it easy for customers to get back to where they want to be, so we include a side scroll on our add-to-cart pages.

Keeping a pulse on customer feedback and social trends

Could you speak about your approach to incorporating customer feedback into your product development and iteration process?

Feedback loops within cross-functional teams are key to growth or satisfaction in general. People don’t usually write reviews, even if they’re incentivized to or if they’re unhappy with the purchase experience. What they want is a resolution, particularly if they’re dissatisfied. They want the path of least resistance, which tends to be going to social media.

A good example is when we launched a 25-foot tall, inflatable, decoy Michael Myers. People went nuts for it. Influencers posted about it and it went viral — it sold out very quickly. People started getting the product and posting photos. Most of them were great, but some of them were not. There were posts of the tie-down loops breaking, seams tearing, etc. Of course, we made good on the customers’ issues, but we wondered why they didn’t tell us directly instead of posting online first.

Once I saw a few of these posts, I flagged that something was wrong. I sent them to our product development director and she started instantly working with the team. They were already creating pieces for the following October, so they made changes to the product, such as heftier and thicker tie-down loops and the including patches in case something rips. Having that feedback loop is super important.

Further, good comments are a great guide, not just the bad ones. For example, we’ve always been inclusive with our sizing — we offer sizes from infant to 8X for some styles. This year, we posted “same costume, different size” videos and people really engaged with them. They were happy to see size inclusivity, and the comments highlighted that they normally don’t see this with other retailers. We’re leaning even heavier into that.

What’s your process like for spotting trends or keeping a pulse on popular things that could influence your product offerings?

We create products based on pop culture. It usually takes six months to get something through a full cycle, so we do the best we can. For example, we already know about upcoming movies that haven’t been released to the public yet, so that’s something we work on products for.

On a day-to-day basis, we focus on the methods we leverage to sell products. For example, we published a blog post a few years back about costumes for men with beards. That has done well for us as a revenue stream, which I would have never guessed. So, we decided to take that into the video side.

Also, we had a Gen Z intern working on our social team, and she said that a current trend is costume parties that are based on a certain letter (for example, a party based on costumes that start with the letter C). We did an entire series on that, and that did super well for us.

Additionally, we make sure that our content creation team is always in contact with paid social marketing. They look at Google Trends for trending search terms, even in the off-season. For example, the Bridgerton trailer just came out and people are talking about that. Maybe they’ll throw a Bridgerton viewing party and will dress up. So, we’ll pull up some of our time-period costumes and focus on those.

Maintaining consistency across all teams

How have you managed to scale your engagement strategies while making sure that they’re still effective and maintain high quality?

We use process mapping and create tools for a larger team rather than for single individuals to iterate over and over. What you’re trying to scale is key. Let’s say I was the one doing a certain process before. I look at all the steps that I was doing along the way and map them out so everybody else can use them as a guide. Then, if we have multiple people doing the process for a while, we all talk about it. Where are the time wasters? Where are they waiting for information? It’s important to maintain a continuous process mindset and put a tool in place that allows people to do a process all on their own.

What’s your approach to promoting collaboration and alignment for cross-functional teams? How do you empower them to do things ‘bigger, better, and faster’?

I try to set a stage for communication routines. It’s easy to have a kickoff meeting and then watch communication peter out after that. My advice is to make sure that you’re setting a routine. It does not have to be a sit-down, half-hour meeting — it could just be a weekly 15-minute stand-up. Otherwise, we would be in meetings all day long. Another option is to create an open Teams or Slack channel where people can drop ideas.

Beyond that, make sure that formatting and messaging are all hitting that same audience, and that you’re modifying it for different audiences. I’ve got a custom GPT AI for my specific audience. Everybody’s using that. You want the same messaging, but don’t be afraid to break that if it makes sense for who you’re talking to. For example, a Gen Z consumer on TikTok is going to be very different from a 40-year-old mom on Facebook. You should feel empowered to customize your messaging where needed.

The essence of your brand should still be there, but the way you talk needs to change based on who you’re talking to. This way, you remain authentic and don’t sound like a robot.

Being OK with breaking the rules

You’ve also talked about pushback on the ‘brand police.’ Could you say more about that?

Technically, I am the brand police. Everybody has a few people in the organization who say, “This isn’t our brand,” or “This deviates from our guide or our voice.” In this day and age, be OK with breaking the rules on some channels.

A good example of a DIY yeet skirt video reenactment of an SNL skit. Our video did really well on TikTok, but so did our video about costumes for 40-year-old women. As you can see, these are very different audiences. The latter is more catered to the typical customer we’re looking for, but for us to continue to grow, we need to expand that audience. If we can hit another target and muddy the waters with the brand police a little, it’s definitely worth it.

Lastly, as a self-described ‘agent of change,’ could you describe a pivotal change that you initiated that helped you transform an organization’s approach to product management or customer experience?

When I started at FUN.com, I worked only with creatives and expanded into some additional marketing capacities. With creatives, and I can say this because I am one too, there’s a lot of feeling involved — especially when it comes to the work we do and how long it might take to do something.

One thing that I did was to create what we call capacity planning. So I said, “Alright designers, here are all the different types of work we do. How long, on average, does it take to do each of these things?” They’d say, “Well, it depends.” Then, I worked to bucket the things it depended on into three groups. Say the work takes on average 20 hours, but about 25 percent of the time it only takes 10 hours, and another 25 percent of the time it takes 40 or 80. We calculate this every single month for our capacity planning.

This tells us how long it takes to do all of these different tasks. Then we look at how many of those things we do every month, and rope in how many hours we need per month and per year from our graphic designers. Then, I can see that for the first six months of the year, we’re a little light. Maybe we only need a fraction of a designer’s time in each area. But, for the rest of the year, we could use two designers full-time. We then know if it makes sense to hire interns to take some of the load off, etc.

I took this framework and applied it to all of my other teams, and it was so successful that the C-suite asked us to implement it for other teams too. It helps set expectations for the people doing the planning too. On top of that, it improves the sanity of people doing the day-to-day work. It doesn’t all fall on them to figure out how to make things happen.

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