Movies Unlimited Gives Cart-Abandonment Email Campaign Rave Reviews
A direct seller of DVDs, Movies Unlimited had a 75% Website cart-abandonment rate. “People are just looking around and shopping,” says general manager Ed Weiss. “They’re just testing the waters.”
To salvage some of these lost sales—nearly 28,000 orders each month—Movies Unlimited worked with email marketing solutions provider Listrak to implement a triggered email campaign. Twenty-four hours after a visitor abandoned a shopping cart, he would receive a personalized email, complete with photos of the items left behind. If the visitor didn’t complete the purchase after that initial email, he’d receive a follow-up five days later. The primary call to action was to complete the purchase; a secondary call to action allowed the shopper to save the items in the cart for a future purchase.
When launching the campaign, Weiss and Listrak CEO Ross Kramer decided to conduct an A/B test: Some visitors would receive an offer of $5 off their order of $25 or more; others would receive no offer.
The initial emails without the offer (subject line: “Your movies are waiting for you, [first name]”) had higher read and click-through rates than those with the offer (subject line: “Save $5.00 on your order, [first name]”). Whereas the nonoffer messages had a 41.4% read rate and a 25.2% click-through rate, those with the offer had a 33.9% read rate and a 21.1% click-through rate. Neither Weiss nor Kramer is certain as to why the offer garnered a lower initial response than the nonpromotional message, though Kramer speculates “one thing may be that people are inundated with offers, whereas the other message was wrapped in mystique.”
“The nirvana of email is a subject line that’s intriguing without being spamming,” Weiss adds.
For the follow-up emails, however, the offer pulled better: a 70.5% read rate vs. 68.1% for the nonpromotional email, and a 43.7% click-through rate vs. 36.2% for the nonpromotional message.
Most important, the messages with the offer resulted in 26% more transactions and 36% more movies ordered than the nonpromotional offers, bringing in 14% more revenue.
All told, the campaign, which paid for itself within one month, has generated a 500% return on investment. It has an overall conversion rate of 13% and accounts for 10% of Movies Unlimited’s email revenue, despite making up just 0.2% of its email volume.
“If you can catch someone in a transaction mode while they’re interacting with a website,” Kramer says, “you can get some incredible advice.”
So far Movies Unlimited has been able to use the trigger campaign on only about 12% of visitors who abandon carts, as it doesn’t capture the email address of the majority of those who leave without completing their transaction. “You can’t get every email address,” says Weiss, who notes that his site doesn’t follow visitors with cookies. “I wish we could get all of them.”
Because the initial cadence of the emails was “a guess,” Kramer says, they’re continuing to test the timing of the initial message. Rather than sending the first message 24 hours after abandoning the cart, Movies Unlimited is testing sending it one hour after abandonment vs. six hours after. So far the six-hour wait time has the highest conversion rate, at 19% for the messages with the offer, though Kramer says the companies are “still in data-gathering mode.”
Implementing the trigger campaign required very little effort on the part of Movies Unlimited, Weiss says. Not a lot of recoding was necessary, and Listrak took care of what was. He dubs launching this sort of cart-abandonment program “a no-brainer. It’s very little overhead, and you get a lot back on your investment. It’s astonishing.”
SOURCE: DirectMag.com
No comments:
Post a Comment