Harried Moms Helped with Shopping Cart Abandonment Campaign

Company Profile
Diapers.com is the nation’s largest online retailer specializing in baby care products. They offer the widest online selection of baby necessities, the convenience of fast, free shipping, great value for their customers and the best customer service around.

The Challenge
As with many online retailers, Diapers.com experienced high abandoned shopping cart rates. MarketingSherpa estimates the average cart abandon rate for e-commerce sites is nearly 60 percent. Seeking a way to draw these customers back to the Web site to complete their purchase, Diapers.com needed an effective and cost efficient way to reach these individuals.

“We just thought there might be an opportunity to recapture some of those lost sales,” said Matt Lindenberg, assistant director of marketing for Diapers.com.

The Solution
Companies anxious to respond to customer behavior in meaningful and targeted ways can start by optimizing the integration between their email marketing and Web analytics platforms. This integration enables a two-way flow of actionable information allowing companies to more efficiently target and trigger email campaigns based on Web-site clickstream data—the details of how visitors interact with a Web site. By integrating Coremetrics LIVEmail with Silverpop, Diapers.com receives automated data that they can use to send triggered messages based on certain criteria.

Diapers.com automatically receives a list each day that contains customer names, email addresses and date of the abandoned online shopping cart. Two days after abandonment, the Silverpop/LIVEmail system triggers an email reminding the customers that they left some items in their shopping cart and encourages them to come back to the Diapers.com Web site to complete their purchase. Items are held in abandoned carts for two weeks, and no enticements such as discounts or sale promotions are part of the “come back” program.

 “We feel like we’re offering our customers a great service,” Lindenberg said.  “Because our customers are mostly moms with young children, they lead pretty hectic lives. Our reminder emails show that we noticed their cart additions and remind them to come back to Diapers.com to finalize their purchase.”

The Results
Diapers.com sent out thousands of abandoned shopping cart messages in May. The open rate for this campaign was 48 percent higher than any previous campaign and the click-through rate 78 percent higher. Additionally, the net conversion rate was 129 percent higher.

Naturally, Lindenberg is very pleased with the integration. “Once you develop a program like this, it runs automatically and in the background. It’s a useful up-front investment in time to recoup sales that are just being lost,” he said. Indeed, the Diapers.com shopping cart abandonment emails made up only 2.7 percent of the email volume for May, while contributing 10.4 percent of the total revenue from email marketing.

“Since abandoned carts were essentially all lost orders, the additional revenue generated is gravy.”

The integration of Coremetrics and Silverpop helps marketers tap the power of true one-to-one marketing. The two solutions work seamlessly to give you full visibility into the effectiveness of your email campaigns and allow you to target customers precisely and effectively. The result is a higher return-on-investment for email marketing campaigns.

Diapers.com
http://www.diapers.com

Silverpop
www.silverpop.com