CASE STUDY
How we increased the revenue of a POD brand by 19% after two months
Brand Story & 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. They 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.
Before Budai Media
- Only basic email sequences set up such as an abandoned cart flow
- Wheelio popup with high conversion rate attracting low engagement subscribers
- No revenue from email and SMS marketing
- Ineffective Black Friday campaigns strategy
After Budai Media
- 9 different email sequences set up
- Branded and segmented Optinmonster popups attracting highly engaged subscribers
- Messenger marketing revenue doubled, email and SMS marketing implemented professionally
- Black Friday strategy warming up the list first, ten selling to the engaged segment
- Omnichannel approach in practice, email, Messenger, SMS became tightly connected with the strategy
How we helped
Our first step with new clients is almost always to set up email automation because it usually has the biggest impact on the business.
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.
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.
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.
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 different ways to get quality SMS subscribers: floating a button on the website with a VIP incentive offer, using website popups beside email popups, separate landing pages, and directing traffic to it.
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.
Once they subscribed to SMS, they received our Welcome SMS flow and the same happened with Messenger.
By when we finished the setup of different automation on the three platforms, we already had to get started to prepare for Black Friday.
We sent out content, customer reviews, a survey. Then, we sent the first email campaigns to the engaged people who opened our previous 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 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.
See the results above in the screenshot, we added an extra 19% revenue after two months of working together, doubled the Messenger revenue, and started implementing SMS as well.
We almost doubled the revenue per subscriber rate just in a few weeks.