10x more customers converted with Dotdigital's abandoned cart and personalization strategies

Affordable Mobiles is an online mobile phone reseller, specializing in pay monthly network contracts. Affordable Mobiles goal is simple: to provide customers with the best mobile phone deals possible, while delivering unforgettable customer service.

Challenge

Affordable Mobiles faced a challenge when they outgrew their previous CRM system. The company was eager to find a new platform that would help them retain customers through highly personalized experiences and an increased use of marketing automation.

Affordable Mobiles found the ideal partner in Dotdigital, which also offered a favorable parent and child account structure. This arrangement enables Affordable Mobiles’ marketing team to effectively manage customer data for their main brand and two additional consumer brands separately. By doing so, they are successfully mitigating the risk of human error, such as sending customers emails from brands they haven’t opted into.

Due to the intricacies of selling mobile phone contracts, customers are asked to go through a multi-step check-out process with many personal questions and a credit check. As a result, Affordable Mobiles noticed that customers frequently abandoned their shopping carts throughout the checkout process.

Since attracting new customers as an ecommerce store can be costly, Affordable Mobiles wanted to minimize losses at the final stage. The company set out to find a solution to monitor customer behavior, delivering personalized messages at the right time to re-engage them and enhance conversion rates.

Solution

Abandoned carts are a challenge for every ecommerce store. Affordable Mobiles tackled this problem effectively with the help of Dotdigital. The team shared their complex requirements with Shantelle Collins, an implementation consultant at Dotdigital, who created a personalized abandoned cart program that took the customer’s order history and behaviour, into account. Each abandoned cart campaign was powered by Dotdigital’s web behaviour tracking, dynamic content, and advanced personalization through liquid markup and considered the customer’s communication preferences and conversion path.

The Dotdigital solutions team utilized precise data on the products customers planned to purchase. Through seamless collaboration with A1 Comms Developers, they created messages that served as both gentle reminders for forgotten items and appealing incentives, such as limited-time voucher codes, data boosts, stock updates, and discounts. This hyper-personalized and engaging approach was employed when applicable to the specific products abandoned by customers. Consequently, it proved highly effective in captivating indecisive customers and encouraging them to complete their transactions.

Also, Affordable Mobiles utilized a cart abandon SMS marketing strategy. The company sends a unique basket link of products a customer browsed, providing an additional layer of engagement. Affordable Mobiles also created a custom data field against the customer record for the unique basket link. This allowed Shantelle to personalize final SMS reminders to encourage customers to return to their abandoned carts and make a purchase. However, these reminders are only sent if SMS is the customer’s preferred method of communication.

As a final touch, Affordable Mobiles used Dotdigital’s eRFM modeling, to gain a deeper understanding of its customers’ engagement levels throughout every stage of the customer journey. For customers who didn’t quite make it to the checkout, Affordable Mobiles sends timely and relevant product recommendations via email to customers who have shown interest in specific products. This continuous communication helps keep the target audience engaged and informed about the latest and most enticing mobile devices on the market. The audience is then dynamically added to segments for further automated retargeting.

Results

Affordable Mobiles have experienced a remarkable 43% abandoned cart recovery rate. This impressive figure is accompanied by an increase in open rates, rising from 28% (with their old provider) to 49% with Dotdigital. Affordable Mobiles also had a substantial boost in click-through rates, from 10% to 21% for all customers.

Overall, with help from Shantelle Collins, A1 Comms, the parent company of Affordable Mobiles, has experienced remarkable success by acquiring 10 times more customers than its previous supplier.

Looking ahead

Affordable Mobiles have an eye on the future as it plans to embrace SMS marketing. The company plans to use the knowledge gained from these campaigns and apply them to its other brands. This move will further enhance its current strategy by adding abandoned cart messages and using order insight data in SMS messages to make them even more personalized.

Additionally, the company is keen on refining its welcome programs and adopting unified contact data to consolidate all customer information into one single view. By analyzing customers using eRFM and offering personalized product recommendations, Affordable Mobiles will leverage Dotdigital’s extensive open API and integration network to streamline its growth initiatives.

The team is also committed to continuing its collaboration with Shantelle to enhance its retention programs by incorporating hyper-personalized product recommendations, dynamic content, and dynamic surveys.