Cleaning Up: VintageTub.com Recovers Lost Revenue with Social Proof and Shopping Cart Abandonment Solution
Internet Retailer 500 company recoups cart abandoners with automated email solution
VintageTub.com, America’s largest family-owned retailer of claw foot tubs and bathroom fixtures and an Internet Retailer 500 company, has 12,500 parent SKUs on its ecommerce site. It has been a Bazaarvoice customer since 2006 and over 86% of its reviews have a four-star rating or better. The reviews provide social proof helping to sway new customers purchasing decisions. The sales cycle is lengthy as the products sold typically aren’t purchased on impulse, and the company found that customers would return to its site several times to review products of interest before adding them to the cart. Even then, it had an 80% abandonment rate.
To recoup those abandoned carts, VintageTub.com implemented Listrak’s Shopping Cart Abandonment Solution. The automated solution sends emails to shoppers who have begun but not completed the checkout process. To ensure the retailer captured as many email addresses as possible, it revamped the checkout process to collect email as the first step of the checkout process - a smart strategy that allows remarketing emails to be sent to nearly 100% of abandoners. When a shopper abandons the cart, Listrak captures the email address, analyzes the data, looking at individual purchase history, products, and associated reviews from Bazaarvoice. Listrak then dynamically generates and sends the first shopping cart abandonment email of the three-part series.
The first email is deployed 24 hours after abandonment prompting the shopper to complete the purchase. If the shopper does purchase, the email campaign is terminated. However, if no action is taken, a second email is deployed two days later. If the purchase is still not completed, the third and final email is sent another two days later. Implementing a series of cart abandonment emails has greatly increased sales and revenue as the conversion rates for the second and third messages are as high, and sometimes higher, than the first message.
VintageTub.com is also split-testing each message in the series. Version A of the series includes the Bazaarvoice product reviews for the items left in the cart, while Version B does not. The subject lines and other content of the messages are the same.
VintageTub.com achieved 122% lift in its email channel revenue in the first three months of launching the Shopping Cart Abandonment Solution. The split test is also proving that including product reviews positively impacts customers decisions to make a purchase.
The series that includes reviews generates a 15.84% average conversion rate. Broken down, email one’s conversion rate is 13.85%, email two converts at 7.58%, and email three results in an astonishing 26.09% conversion rate.
The series that does not include reviews does not perform quite as well, but still generates an average conversion rate of 11.16%. Email one achieves a 7.75% conversion rate, email two converts at 11.94%, and the third message achieves a 13.79% conversion.
Listrak is an email marketing firm providing the solutions, software, and services to optimize the value of email. Listrak works with clients to develop engaging email marketing to deliver the extra percent in effectiveness and ROI.
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