How Online Retailer Adds Over $1.5 Million In Revenue In 45 Days

Online retailer is a burgeoning industry with $211.5 billion in sales in the second quarter alone of 2020, a rising of 31.8% compared to the first quarter of the year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. A decrease of 3.9% for in-store retail sales during quarter shows the power of e-commerce to sustain growth in difficult times. The second quarter of 2020 marked the beginning months of the growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

While growth for the industry predicts high profits for businesses in this sector, it also indicates a high level of competition that the growth will attract. To remain competitive, e-commerce businesses must leverage technological innovations to avoid losing customers and to ensure a high return on investment (ROI) for advertising campaigns.

One of the services unique to e-commerce is subscriptions. These goods or services rely on cultivating close relationships with potential customers to ensure sales. Therefore, relying on top-of-the-funnel conversions for these models will not suffice.

Even for e-commerce sites that don’t rely on subscription sales, advertising methods must focus on producing leads and generating ROI from marketing dollars. Creating leads can lead to higher ROI because remarketing to those potential customers increases the chances of making sales.

When it comes to getting leads, the most common method in the industry is to use website marketing to direct potential customers to fill out a web form. However, even with the most effective means of directing site visitors to this form, only a quarter will complete the form to become leads. Losing potential customers due to site visitors failing to finish these web forms does not have to happen, though.

By leveraging automated remarketing techniques from Capture, abandoned forms can still lead to conversions and eventually sales. 

Online Retailer Massive Success Case Study

The Problem: Online retailers spend billions of dollars in digital advertising to move potential customers to their sites for lead generation and sales. However, every customer who fails to make a purchase or complete a form represents lost revenue.

One major online subscription-based shoe company used web forms for lead generation. Through traditional means, the company saw 32,890 visitors complete the forms. However, they were not aware of the number of people who started to fill out forms but left the information incomplete.

By using Capture®’s ability to track abandoned forms, the company discovered that 101,238 forms only had an email address put into them before the user abandoned the page without hitting submit. The company wanted to reach out to these site visitors and encourage them through personalized emails to return and complete the form.

Essentially, this online retailer needed to find an insurance policy for their advertising campaigns to reduce lost marketing dollars. Capture®’s automated remarketing provides a way to reach out to these missed opportunities to create more leads and more conversions.

Online Retailer Proposed Solution: 

With a patented method, Capture tracks forms that remain incomplete and captures any information the user put into the fields. This collected information can help a business generate personalized remarketing emails to these unique site visitors to encourage them to return to the site and complete the form or to make a purchase. Using this method has varying rates of success, however, it almost always generates a positive conversion rate, with an average conversion rate of 10% to 15%. However, this online shoe company’s remarketing emails proved especially effective, resulting in almost doubling this average rate of conversion.

The Results: 

Over a trial of six weeks, the online shoe retailer used Capture®’s automated remarketing to collect information from visitors who did not submit completed forms. The test period lasted from October 1st through November 15th of the same year. Capture® garnered the information from the 101,238 forms that visitors failed to submit. The company could then send out personalized emails to each unique site visitor up to three different times to entice them to return to the site. Remarketing emails went out on the following schedule:

• One hour after beginning to fill out the form
• Two days following form initiation
• Three days after sending the previous email

Overall, the company sent out 264,382 messages to unique individuals who began forms on the site. The remarketing emails had the following attributes:

• Under 3% bounce rate

• Open rate just under 40%

• Click-through rate of 39%

Out of the 101,238 unique site visitors targeted by the remarketing campaign, 25,815 became conversions, resulting in a conversion rate of 25.5%, higher than the company’s initial conversion rate of 24% using traditional means. Plus, this conversion rate is among those the company would have lost as possible leads.

By embracing an automated remarketing system with Capture®’s recovery technology, the company helped to preserve their ROI on their enormous advertising budget. In fact, the company budgeted $1,000,000 in an attempt to get 1 million visitors to the site. Had the company not used remarketing, the $1 million in advertising would have only generated the original 32,890 leads. Therefore, acquiring each client cost the company $30. However, by adding another 25,815 leads to the total, the acquisition cost dropped to $17 per lead.

To calculate revenue growth from these additional leads, the company used an average order value of $65 per customer per month. Therefore, the extra 25,815 leads produced an additional $1,667,975 in net income over the 45-day trial period. Since the company’s subscription service typically has customers stay for at least a year, the business’s total revenue would rise by almost $20 million from the leads added through remarketing.

By implamenting Capture®’s automated remarketing campaigns and strategy businesses can avoid profit losses caused by diminishing ROIs on marketing dollars. Additionally, they can increase their revenue by reaching out to site visitors and converting them to leads. Remarketing serves as insurance to protect investments in advertising by maximizing the ROI from marketing campaigns.

For more information on what Capture® and automated remarketing can do for online retail businesses and any other company with a website call (613) 654-9966.