CLIENT OVERVIEW
This company was one of our first clients. The owner has been in online marketing for 13 years and manages several dropshipping and branded stores around the world.
He wanted to make a big jump with dropshipping in 2018 and scale his businesses to the next level while he was looking for a trustworthy person who could manage his email and Messenger chatbot marketing.
He knew the key role of email and Messenger and how it could provide a solid background for his business while his profit margins increased, which is crucial in dropshipping.
His largest store (the one in this case study) was a general dropshipping store with various different products – kitchenware, fashion, gadgets, car accessories, etc.
OUR MAIN CHALLENGES
…and that’s where the biggest challenge of the project was.
General dropshipping stores have the lowest engagement level and percentage of returning customers in the whole ecommerce space because they often try to sell anything to anyone.
In the meantime, email is all about high engagement and returning customers who love your products, love reading your emails, and come back to your store regularly.
However, if you try to upsell hiking boots to an old lady who purchased a massage mattress before, let’s be honest … it’s hard.
These are the fundamental reasons why it’s difficult to fit together general dropshipping and email marketing.
We faced other challenges such as exit pop up optimization.
Many marketing consultants and agencies never talk about how they set up their pop ups while it has a huge effect on the conversion of the website and the emails.
OUR SOLUTION PLAN
With the Budai Media team, we decided to use three different software tools to increase the store’s back-end revenue.
One was Klaviyo, which is an ecommerce-specialized email marketing platform.
They have extraordinary segmentational options, and you can segment your audience based on location, customer lifetime value, and many other criteria.
We started collaborating with Recart in 2018. This is an easy-to-use Messenger marketing platform with many templates and tactical opportunities.
Our third tool was OptinMonster for exit-intent pop ups to get more subscriptions, this tool provides great segmentation while your website visitors still have a top-notch user experience.
HOW WE HELPED
Let’s see what we did in the three different tools.
Klaviyo - email marketing
We set up a zillion different email sequences (or email flows) based on different behaviors because we think that behavior-based communication is the alpha and omega of effective communication today.
Let’s see a few of them:
First-time customer upsell flow
Returning customer flow
VIP customer flow
Win-back flow
Re-engagement flow
On-site retargeting flow
Abandoned cart flow
Browse abandonment flow
But these are only the beginning…
Every month, we checked the best-selling products and set up different upsell and abandonment flows based on the products.
By doing this, we could increase the engagement level and always offer a product that fitted the history of the customer.
The most important thing is to find out whether when someone buys Product A, they’ll buy Product B or Product C. To see these correlations, we tested a lot.
We also sent out 3-5 manual email campaigns per week.
Just like with automated email flows, the key here is personalization and segmentation.
We developed a lot of smart tricks with campaigns.
One of my favorite was when we retargeted the recipients of a certain email the next day with the same email but with a changed subject line.
B. Recart - Abandoned cart emails and Messenger messages
To be honest, I was skeptical when I first started working with Recart.
It seemed to be so simple…
…I thought that it was a joke.
But it wasn’t.
Though the interface of Recart was simple and it didn’t let you segment like Klaviyo, it had a different advantage, which is why we decided to use it for abandoned cart emails instead of Klaviyo.
We recognized that Klaviyo’s abandoned cart emails are actually abandoned checkout emails because the visitor has to give their email at the checkout if we want to email them.
In the meantime, Recart integrates with pop up tools and any other tools that gather the email of visitors on the website and once they hit the ‘Add to Cart’ button, they’re already in the system of Recart.
It doesn’t matter if they check out or not…
What did it mean in real life practice?
Recart collected 2-3 times more emails than Klaviyo, which resulted in a huge difference in the abandoned cart email revenue.
After recognizing this, the only email sequence we sent out not from Klaviyo was the abandoned cart sequence.
Beside this, Recart was also great to send out Messenger sequences and campaigns.
Many marketers prefer Manychat, but we experienced many bugs with it when we used it with Shopify.
We loved the Recart messages templates because there were so many.
You can welcome your visitors, send them a video promotion, images of your new collection or give more info about the shipping of their ordered products.
C. Optinmonster
With this tool, we installed exit-intent pop ups to the website triggered by time to get more subscriptions.
Then, we sent welcome emails to the new subscribers.
The key was to observe how people behave on the website.
We checked the average time spent on different product pages in Google Analytics and calibrated the different pop ups accordingly.
We created different pop ups for the most popular products and for different devices, then we tested different copies and images.
We were excited to experiment with how the exit-intent pop ups affect the website conversion.
After one month of constant testing, we could see that the pop ups didn’t affect the website conversion except when the timing was very short, so it annoyed the visitors (0-20 seconds after entering the webpage).
NUMBERS, NUMBERS, NUMBERS
We tested several things in the first months of working together and we could see the results in the summer months.
In the meantime, the size of the web store also grew and become close to a 7-figure business per month.
Here are the main numbers between May 28 and Aug 26 of 2018:
In three months, the store generated $2,480,000 as revenue which meant 83,000 orders
We generated $148,770 extra revenue to the client using Klaviyo; $85,240 from automated email sequences and $63,530 from manual campaigns.
We sent out 3,820,000 emails from Klaviyo and the average open rate was 25% with an average click rate of 1.9%.
We generated $133,450 extra revenue using Recart (we became one of the biggest users of Recart) and collected 110,000 new Messenger subscribers.
The click-through rate of the Messenger messages was 11.6%
Overall, we generated $282, 220 extra revenue to this client, which was 11.3% of his revenue in the summer of 2018.
It wouldn’t be a great percentage for a brand, but for a general dropshipping store I think it’s a great number.
We’re still great friends with the client and started working on his new stores together.
The client started working on his branded stores and I hope we can achieve amazing results with those too.
CONCLUSION
I, my team, and this client started working together in early 2018 on his international general dropshipping store to increase his sales revenue using email and Messenger marketing.
We used three different tools, Klaviyo, Recart, and Optinmonster.
We set up different automated email sequences and manual campaigns based on the behavior of the subscribers in Klaviyo while we set up the abandoned cart emails and automated Messenger flows in Recart.
At the same time, we set up different Optinmonster pop ups on the product pages using the average time spent on the web pages data of Google Analytics as the trigger of the pop ups.
We gained a huge amount of experience from our tests, such as discovering that Recart collected more emails for abandoned cart emails than Klaviyo and pop ups could negatively affect the conversion of the website when they were triggered too early.
In the summer months, 11.3% of the revenue of the store came from email and Messenger, which we found a satisfying result for a general dropshipping store.
Each component of our system had its own portion of the extra revenue, and it showed the real opportunities presented by email, Messenger, and pop ups in ecommerce.
WHAT OUR CLIENT SAID: " I read an article from Daniel from one of the ecommerce Facebook groups and we had a call and started working together quite quickly. We generated nice mid-6-figure revenue from email without additional ad costs which is amazing. If you don't do email, don't be crazy, I can't recommend him enough." - Ondrej, Ecommerce Entrepreneur
Comments