Online retailer recovers 25 percent of lost sales from abandoned carts using Silverpop Engage Transact
The Company
S&S Worldwide is a leading, value-priced online destination for arts and crafts, educational supplies, youth sports and physical education equipment. With thousands of products, the company has grown to occupy over 250,000 square feet of warehouse and fulfillment space. S&S also produces and manufactures many of the company's proprietary products and designs. Each year, the S&S Worldwide product development team designs, develops and sources new products for craft kits, therapy, physical education and early learning.
The Challenge
According to MarketingSherpa, online shopping cart abandonment rates can range between 20 percent and 60 percent. With that statistic in mind, S&S Worldwide recognized the need to better engage with customers and keep them in the buying cycle.
S&S Worldwide had been using an in-house transactional email system. Although it was capable of triggering messages to customers, it did not provide personalized emails or any data reporting capabilities, making it impossible to track basic metrics or deliverability rates. “We had an understanding of how our customers shopped for our products,” said Carolyn Nye, marketing manager, S&S Worldwide. “There was no doubt that there was an opportunity to capture lost sales. We needed a solution that would help us monetize our understanding of our customer behavior.”
The Solution
To lessen lost revenue from uncompleted purchases, the company decided to implement a shopping cart abandonment email campaign centered on engaging customers through personalized messages triggered automatically when items were left in a cart. At first, S&S Worldwide considered its legacy email solution, but soon found out that it did not provide any transactional email capabilities. After looking at several marketing technology providers, S&S Worldwide chose Silverpop.
“We selected Silverpop because it was the only provider that offered the transactional email capabilities that met our business needs around implementing a best practice shopping cart abandonment email campaign,” Nye said.
Using Silverpop's Transact solution along with a Web analytics integration from Coremetrics, S&S Worldwide implemented a series of triggered emails that alerts shoppers who abandon carts while on the company’s website. Based upon a best practices framework, the system automatically sends these shoppers a reminder to complete their purchases within an hour of shopping cart abandonment. If the customer takes no action, the company will follow up periodically with transactional emails that offer various incentives for completing the purchase. The ability to send triggered one-off messages with content relevant to the items in the abandoned cart plays a significant role in enticing customers to complete their purchases.
The Results
By using Silverpop's Transact solution, S&S Worldwide was able to capture previously lost revenue opportunities. “We are very pleased with the results of implementing a shopping cart abandonment program. In fact, we typically see a 25 percent conversion rate on personalized transactional messages focused on items left in carts,” Nye said. "One of the most impressive results of our transactional programs is that 40 percent of our revenue comes directly from transactional emails. It really shows the value of sending emails that are optimized and triggered when people are engaged on our site."
For S&S Worldwide, another benefit of Transact has been the ability to generate revenue-producing, triggered emails without IT involvement. “Our transactional emails are completely automated,” Nye said. “If we need to make a change to any of our emails, it's done without taking up valuable IT resources.”
S&S Worldwide has also had a lot of success incorporating Silverpop features such as Share-to-Social, dynamic content, and Send Time Optimization into its promotional email communications using Silverpop Engage. "Send Time Optimization has worked well for us," Nye said. "Year over year, our open rates and click rates have actually been improving because of Send Time Optimization, when across the board people have seen decreases in those statistics."
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Download the S&S Worldwide PDF on using transactional email to recover lost sales from shopping cart abandonment.
