Protein is the name of the game for The Meat Club, a Singapore-based e-commerce business that delivers meats from Australia and New Zealand directly to customers’ doors. Seven years ago, The Meat Club started off as a humble friends-and-family style endeavor frequenting farmers markets, before rapidly expanding into a lively e-commerce operation. 

For The Meat Club, customer service has always been about more than just support. It’s their number one priority, a cornerstone of their business, and their strongest sales pitch.

“We try to be as close to our customers as possible and make sure that when we communicate with them, it’s on a more personal level,” says Brad Ross, CEO of The Meat Club. “We’ll often pick up the phone and call customers directly or talk to them on a one-on-one basis.”

This level of attention and genuine human connection has set The Meat Club apart, bolstering its reputation and garnering customer loyalty. But as their business and clientele grew, this small but mighty team of four was on the lookout for new ways to personally engage with its customer base and maintain excellent customer service — without spreading themselves too thin.

With support from Bird, The Meat Club consolidated its communications and operations, scaling personalized customer interactions across channels and breaking engagement records.

The problem: Limited resources block the way to delivering unparalleled customer service

The Meat Club faced a dilemma familiar to burgeoning e-commerce businesses: how to maintain the warmth of personal connections during rapid growth.

Their business was built on a foundation of delivering bespoke customer experiences directly to their clients’ dining tables. But as the digital waves pushed their operations to even greater heights, they found themselves navigating a sea of fragmented communication channels and operational inefficiencies that threatened to dilute the very essence of their brand.

A small team of just four talented folks juggled communications across four different platforms in an effort to keep the personal touch alive. They chatted 1:1 with customers on the phone on one platform, delivered top-notch customer service on another, and promoted new products and deals somewhere else.

The team desperately needed a way to consolidate and streamline all these interactions in one place. 

On top of this, The Meat Club lost a not insignificant portion of its on-hold customer subscriptions in its move from WordPress to Shopify. The team tried to recapture them but experienced low response rates — customers weren’t responding to their emails.

They needed to take a more dynamic, direct approach via Shopify-compatible technology to breathe life back into these paused relationships. 

Lacking the resources to invest in extensive training or upskilling, The Meat Club prioritized ease of use and all-in-one consolidation. They needed a plug-and-play tool that the whole team could pick up quickly. A tool that could unify all of their channels into just one platform. 

“We’re a small business,” says Ross. “It is essential for all team members to leverage technology where they can, and make sure that we’re not spread too thinly across multiple channels.”

The solution: One-on-one customer engagement at scale, with ease

The Meat Club chose to partner with Bird for two main reasons: Its wide variety of supported channels and its ease of use. Bird could merge marketing, automation, and support into one and didn’t require an engineering degree to use. 

This was more than an operational upgrade; it was a strategic move to infuse every portion of protein, every delivery, every WhatsApp message with the personalized care that had been The Meat Club's signature from day one.

Here’s how The Meat Club used Bird to deliver their one-on-one customer interactions on a bigger playing field:

1. Leveraging pre-made Shopify templates

With Bird, everything was ready to go from the start. By leveraging pre-made Shopify connector templates, becoming operational was easy and quick, with everything up and running within a couple of days.

2. Reactivating customers through WhatsApp

The Meat Club set out on a mission to identify and re-engage customers with paused subscriptions directly through WhatsApp — a platform already embedded in the daily lives of their many Southeast Asian customers. 

The strategy was simple yet profound. Customers received personalized messages that made it effortless to reactivate their subscriptions with straightforward reply buttons like “Yes, reactivate” or “No, cancel.” 

This approach reduced the friction typically associated with subscription management, with all the convenience and immediacy that today’s consumers demand.

But this strategy was about more than reactivating dormant subscriptions. It laid the foundation for The Meat Club team to use WhatsApp as a vibrant communication channel. The perfect compromise between hyper-personalized 1:1 calls and traditional email marketing — they could now deliver their signature one-on-one interactions with promises of ongoing dialogue. 

Through WhatsApp, customers were reintroduced to The Meat Club’s “friends and family” vibe and experienced a renewed sense of connection and brand recognition.

3. Driving pre-orders through WhatsApp

For The Meat Club, Christmas is more than just a peak sales period; it's a time to deliver joy and connect with customers through their festive tables. Their holiday sales strategy relies heavily on pre-orders, especially for seasonal specialties like hams & turkeys, which are highly sought after but not available on their site throughout the year.

Before using Bird, customers would navigate to The Meat Club’s site and use the pre-order function, which wasn’t highly effective. This often resulted in a less-than-optimal signup rate for pre-orders, leaving both customers and businesses wanting more from the experience.

After implementing Bird, The Meat Club launched a WhatsApp campaign encouraging customers to register their interest directly. By linking a Google Form within the WhatsApp message, they created a streamlined, conversational process for managing holiday pre-orders with centralized visibility.

The Results: The Meat Club boosts customer sales through automated, omnichannel campaigns

By using Bird’s Shopify connectors to connect their e-commerce store with their communication channels, The Meat Club was able to deliver a new level of personalized, targeted customer engagement. 

With customer data automatically synced between the Meat Club’s online store and Bird, the team could now automate communication based on triggers. The direct approach that has always been part of The Meat Club’s mission simply took a new form: Hyper-targeted, omnichannel campaigns instead of phone calls. 

One of the channels that’s proven successful so far is WhatsApp. One WhatsApp campaign saw a remarkable 20% reactivation rate - this compares to a previous avg. reactivation rate of 3-4% for email campaigns. Moreover, the response rate to this WhatsApp campaign was around 80%, a drastic improvement over their typical response rates to email campaigns.

The Christmas pre-order WhatsApp campaigns experienced similarly remarkable results, with a notable 30% increase in pre-order signups compared to the previous year. 

And that’s just one channel. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, SMS, Email — Shopify connectors make it almost too easy to meet your customers where they are. The success of these omnichannel campaigns went beyond mere numbers. They represented a shift in how The Meat Club connects with its community, translating those meaningful one-on-one phone conversations to modern communication channels.

Redefining e-commerce CX with Bird

Looking ahead, The Meat Club sees a future where Bird shifts e-commerce customer experience towards chat commerce. Customers will replace the traditional desktop shopping experience with placing orders through more seamless, conversational interactions. 

“For subscription-based businesses like ours, the ease of repeat ordering and managing upsells quickly and effortlessly is crucial,” says Ross. “Instead of requiring customers to log into their account dashboards to make changes, Bird allows us to streamline these processes. By doing so, transactions become quicker and easier for the customer.”

As The Meat Club looks into delivering more frictionless customer experiences, especially purchasing and account management, the team is looking forward to continuing its partnership with Bird. 

“We’re just beginning to explore the full potential of what Bird can offer in this evolving landscape,” says Ross. 

About The Meat Club

The Meat Club connects you with the taste of Australia and New Zealand.

We supply proteins at their true value, bringing to Singapore what you need, when you need it. How? We source direct from trusted suppliers, utilize world-class packing facilities to seal in the quality, then freight directly to your doorstep. No unnecessary steps or waste, just a responsible, conscious way to source your meat.

About Bird

Bird is an AI-first CRM for marketing, services, and payments. 

Our mission is to create a world where communicating with a business is as easy as talking with a friend. We power communication between businesses and their customers — across any channel, always with the right context, and on every corner of the planet. If you’ve ever ordered takeaway, returned a package, contacted customer service, or requested a login code, it’s almost guaranteed your interactions have been powered by Bird’s technology.

Our platform, our applications, and our APIs help businesses streamline conversations through their customers’ preferred channels — like WhatsApp, Email, SMS, Voice, WeChat, Messenger, Instagram - and build powerful and engaging experiences. Bird's out-of-the-box functionality and omnichannel expertise tips the scales for knowledge workers and helps them be productive right away, with tools to build great marketing campaigns, customer service experiences, or automated business processes.