Members-only flash-sale site BrandAlley has lowered its cart-abandonment rate and cost per sale by 50% with a marketing platform from Emarsys.
The U.K.-based retailer, which has 2.5 million members, hosts daily fashion, beauty and houseware sales that each last up to a week. It works with 200 designer brands, including French Connection and Diesel, and promotes its new sales to members via email as well as via social media and its website. French Connection is No. 322 in the Internet Retailer Europe 500, Diesel is No. 444 in the Internet Retailer Top 500.
BrandAlley began using Emarsys to send more targeted, personalized emails and site recommendations in January 2016. Using Emarsys, for example, BrandAlley identified its biggest spenders and most frequent purchasers as VIPs. It then segmented these VIP consumers by the brands they had purchased or viewed often and served them the discount offers on those brands before they were made available to the rest of BrandAlley’s customer base.
In a recent campaign coinciding with the launch of a sale for U.K.-based high-end fashion brand Jaeger, No. 458 in the Europe 500, BrandAlley sent a VIP email campaign to more than 26,000 customers. The campaign achieved a 36.5% click-through rate—compared with the average 14% for all campaigns on average—and of those who clicked through one of the emails, 10% made a purchase, BrandAlley says.
BrandAlley is using the Emarsys Web Extend product to collect data. Web Extend tracks visitor interactions on a website, processes it and then serves it to other Emarsys marketing tools, such as the Emarsys Predict recommendation engine. The engine delivers automated personalized recommendations to a retailer’s customers across email, mobile and web, which saves BrandAlley time. More targeted, effective and automated marketing is helping drive down the cost per sale, the retailer says.
“The time saved in setting up these campaigns gives our marketing team the freedom to be creative in other areas of our marketing activity,” says Rob Feldmann, CEO of BrandAlley.
Global Shop Direct, a large Australian direct-response television retailer, also has had positive results with Emarsys. Since moving to the Emarsys platform in June 2016, Global Shop Direct says it has generated 20% growth in revenue from automated product recommendations on its website, and a 300% increase in revenue from its newsletters by adding automated product recommendations to them.
“Historically, our focus has been on delivering strong (customer) acquisition strategies, rather than focusing on retention,” says Jamie Dow, managing director of Global Shop Direct. “However, the needs of our customers have changed, as have their preferred channels of communication. With this in mind, we knew our engagement strategy had to evolve. Emarsys has enabled us to increase our customers’ lifetime value by focusing on retention through improved engagement.”
Global Shop Direct says it set up Emarsys quickly. For example, within one month of signing on with Emarsys, Global Shop Direct deployed the Emarsys system and also had sent its first abandoned-cart email campaign.
Global Shop Direct is using Emarsys’ Web Channel product, which targets and treats site visitors differently based on the retailer’s customer-relationship-management data and real-time data that is generated and collected as each shopper interacts with the site.
The company also is using Send Time Optimization, which predicts when a recipient is most likely to check her email and sends messages at those specified times. It uses machine learning to analyze the behaviors of a retailer’s contacts and identify the times when they are most responsive to email. For new contacts with no behavior history, the first emails are sent at a time based on the aggregate historical data on open times for all of a retailer’s email subscribers. But the algorithm analyzes new responses for every contact daily and updates its model.
Global Shop Direct says using Send Time Optimization has resulted in a 9.7% increase in open rates.
According to Emarsys data, after sending 10 Send-Time-Optimized campaigns, a merchant can expect a 2-12% increase in opens, clicks and purchases.
Favorite