Not every client has a well-established business running for many years and decades.
This client started a new store in the middle of 2019 and he wanted us to help with our omnichannel approach to increase the retention and revenue of his new store.
Let's see how we implemented SMS, Messenger, email marketing for this client successfully.
Client Overview and Challenges
This ecommerce store had its audience mostly in the US and Canada and followed the print on demand business model.
Visitors could upload a photo and in a few days, they received a sketch of a painting of the original photo that they could paint by themselves.
Most people uploaded photos of their family members or their pets and once they got the sketch, they spent a few hours with their loved ones to paint the sketch.
The motto of the store describes wonderfully its approach: "Happiness is … listening to your dog snoring while painting his photo."
This audience had its own approach to use when we marketed them. The had to use a warmhearted and sometimes humorous tone of copy with beautiful design to sell the products.
We also had many technical challenges.
First of all, we had to set up a whole email marketing system and website popups to get more email subscribers.
Secondly, we had only a few days before Black Friday and we didn't want to miss out on this opportunity to kickstart the project.
Thirdly, we wanted to implement properly SMS and Messenger marketing.
In this case study, you'll learn more about how we tackled these three challenges and increased the monthly revenue of this ecommerce store by 19% in December of 2019.
How We Set Up Email Automation
Our first step with new clients is almost always to set up email automation because it usually has the biggest impact on the business.
Just with these, the business can gain an extra 10% revenue or even more after 2-3 weeks.
This is the full list of the email flows setup in Klaviyo:
- VIP flow
As you can see, there were two abandoned cart flows and it was because the store used regular Shopify checkout and OCU (One-Click-Upsell) checkout as well.
Also, we separated the email flows for subscribers from Mobile vs Desktop, so we can get more data on the traffic quality.
We turned off the original Wheelio popup set up on the website by the client because it collects infamously bad low-quality subscribers even if it has a higher conversion rate.
Instead, we created Optinmonster popups which enable the creator to make more segmented popups and play more with the triggers.
The results spoke for themselves because the welcome flows generated great revenue numbers after a few days of activating them.
How We Set Up SMS and Messenger Marketing
Our next challenge was to set up SMS and Messenger marketing properly.
For Messenger marketing, we used Recart and our first step was to set up passive Messenger flows.
These are similar to email flows and they are sent to passive website traffic.
These flows were:
- Abandoned Cart flow
- Messenger Receipt
- Messenger Fulfillment Notification
- Loox customer review message
The big question was how to get even more Messenger subscribers and what welcome flow to attach to it.
Recart offers many ways (you can find more info about them in this case study) and we chose the 'Discount Widget' and the 'Order page subscription' similarly to the other client in the linked case study above.
We also implemented active automation with the Recart custom flows, however, we didn't achieve as great success with them as with this client.
As for SMS, we chose SMS Bump to use. This tool has unprecedented popularity between ecommerce SMS marketing users, it had more than 25,000 installations in less than 2 years!
With this tool, we could also set up SMS flows such as:
- Abandoned cart flow
- Win-back flow
- Upsell flows for new and returning customers
- Welcome flow for new subscribers
SMS is the most intrusive platform, so it requires sending fewer but stronger messages while you have to take into account the different timezones of the customers and legal requirements (Nobody should send 10,000 text messages when people sleep!)
We also experienced with different ways to get quality SMS subscribers.
One of them is to put a floating button on the website offering a VIP incentive to the visitors when they subscribe.
The three steps of the floating button to get subscribers from the left to the right.
The other option is to ask for their phone number on the website popup that we already used for getting email subscribers.
We also set up a landing page where people can go from emails or popups and even Messenger messages. This gives a ton of ways to drive traffic to this landing page, you can even run traffic to this page.
The landing page we used to get more SMS subscribers
Finally, we crossed the three platforms and during our Black Friday and Christmas campaigns we offered extra discounts to people if they'd subscribed to our SMS and Messenger list.
We used this PS. section in every Black Friday email to promote the Messenger list
Once they subscribed to SMS, the received our Welcome SMS flow and the same happened with Messenger.
What is great in automation, depending on their activity, we used a conditional split to send different messages on all three platforms to the new subscribers.
How We Implemented Email, SMS, and Messenger Campaigns for Black Friday and Christmas
By when we finished the setup of different automations on the three platforms, we already had to get started to prepare for Black Friday.
It wasn't an ideal scenario because with other clients we already start preparing for Black Friday in September but we sent a few email campaigns less than two weeks before Black Friday to warm up the list more.
We sent out content, customer reviews, a survey. Then, we sent the first email campaigns to the engaged people who opened our previous campaigns.
As you can see in the picture below, we sent two email campaigns to all email subscribers later and they converted very well. It'd have been a huge mistake to not to start email marketing before Black Friday.
The results of our Black Friday campaigns
We also sent out SMS campaigns to the already existing SMS list and created a Black Friday Messenger flow which was sent out not only by emails but it was actively promoted with Sponsored Messages.
We used the same omnichannel approach right before Christmas with similar results. If you are interested in our Christmas Messenger flow, you can freely download it and use it by yourself if you click here.
Results after two months
As you can see in the screenshots, the store already had a 6-figure per month revenue but zero percent from email marketing in October of 2019.
The plan was to scale up the revenue and we contributed by adding an extra 7% one month later and an extra 17% two months later in December.
The results with email marketing between October and December of 2019
Besides emails, we implemented Messenger and SMS marketing and combined them successfully.
We doubled the Messenger revenue from October to November while the number of new subscribers didn't grow much. This also means that we almost doubled the revenue per subscriber rate just in a few weeks.
Results with Messenger marketing in October and November of 2019
Results of a few automations with SMS Bump after 2 months
SMS also contributed to the revenue increase and if we add up the extra revenue from the three platforms, we achieved 19% extra revenue in December of 2019 just after two months of working together.
If you want to get similar results but you don't want to learn the ins and outs of email, Messenger, and SMS marketing, click this link and let's see if we are a good fit to work together: https://danielbudai.typeform.com/to/jTIN4o