Case study: Getting 10% more orders with catch-up email campaigns

This is a story of one more Dashly customer who decided to share their experience of using platform. Valerie, marketer in Mofy.life, told us how email marketing they’ve set up using Dashly has helped them boost their sales significantly and finalize their customers’ path from the beginning of their sessions to making an order.

About Mofy.life

Mofy.life is an easy-to-use platform that you can create your own photo books with. The whole process usually takes up to five minutes. All you have to do is to upload your photos to Mofy.life photo book editor, and to choose to arrange your photos on the photo book pages. Your order will be delivered to you several days after.

Setting up automation on Mofy.life, we’ve stumbled upon a pretty much ever-present issue, the missing links in the website’s funnel stages. Other than that, the photo book editor is quite ergonomic and the website makes for a quick and easy order completion process.

Before we begin

During this customer success program, what we had to do is to find out why users leave the website on each step of editing their order, handle possible complaints and improve purchase Conversion Rate.

Prior to building our email campaigns, we’ve divided the website’s audience (using Dashly, naturally) into those who’ve made a purchase and those who’ve left the photo book editor without finishing their order. 

To probe the ground for our automation, we’ve sent emails to customers from both of these segments and asked them to give a feedback about Mofy.life. We also had a few meaningful interviews with Mofy.life’s customer success managers and monitored user sessions through a webvisor. That helped us find which steps of the funnel are strong enough and which need some reinforcement. We chose email marketing as our cornerstone tool in solving our client’s sales issues.

Picking the trail

Let’s review our customer retention quest starting from the beginning of the customer journey. 

First, visitors enter the photo book editor and turn into leads. The thing with these visitors is that only half (52%) of them finishes their order. The other half (48%) simply leaves the website. Most times that happens either because they weren’t going to make their order right off the bat. They were just curious about how the editor works, maybe they were planning to make the order later. 

The second popular reason is that people just can’t decide which of their photos they’d like to put into their photo book, so they just don’t end up making their order on their first visit.

We’ve decided to use email marketing. We sent visitors an email with a link to the order they’ve started making. Following this link, they’d found their order that they’re free to edit in any way they want. This email also contains some manager tips and video guides on working with the editor.

This email resulted in having the Open Rate of 48% and the Click Rate of 23%. 25% of the receivers completed their order.

People who haven’t completed their order following this email received another sequence of emails. It warned them that the order they’ve created is going to vanish soon. The emails of this sequence also have a link to the order page. The first email is sent 1 day after such users enter the editor:

The results of this email is 40% of users who’ve read it, 8% of those who’ve clicked on links in it and 10% of those who’d finished their order after reading it.

This one is the second email of the sequence:

The second email resulted in Open Rate of 30%, Click Rate of 7%. The Conversion Rate to purchase was 9%. That one is the third email of the sequence:

The results of this email are 31% Open Rate, Click Rate of 7%. The Conversion Rate to purchase was 6%.

Let’s say a customer didn’t come back during these three days. They’ve lost their order completely and for us, it appears that we’ve lost our potential customer forever. Still, 7 days since they initially visited the website we can send them one more email that we’ll use to answer their possible questions and share some more photo book ideas.

The results are as follows: 30% of the receivers opened the email, 3% of them followed the links in this email and 2% of the receivers have completed their order.

Moving on to working step 2 of the funnel. Each step of the customer path to completing the order has cost us 8-10% percent of customers. This ultimately means that only 40% of the users who started making their order have actually completed it.

Working with abandoned carts

We’ve launched an auto email campaign for each stage of the order making process. Leaving on any step of the funnel (be it the page where they enter their contact/billing data or the page where they must complete their purchase) would result in customers receiving an auto email. These emails:

– inform customers about an unfinished order, 

– show them the value of the product,

– notify them about the work they’ve already done in the editor (which they might lose)

– let them complete the order using a direct link in the email (Mofy.life have managed to achieve that with an API integration between the website’s admin panel and Dashly).

This version of this email that was being sent 24 hours after a customer has left the website was opened by 41% of the receivers. Another version of the email, which was being sent 3 days later, was opened by 33% of the receivers. The Click Rate of these emails was 14% and 6% respectively.

The more time goes from the moment a visitor has left the website the less results these emails will provide. However, you should still keep trying to grab the attention of such visitors. There’s always a chance some of these users will come back to making their order, even after their initial order has been erased.

Helping customers finish their order

Don’t forget about those who have chosen the photos they want to see in their photo book, entered all of the data required, choose payment method but have never made the payment nevertheless. Leads like that are incredibly hot, so we’ve send them emails 24 hours after they’ve left the website. We’ve also set another campaign to be sent 7 days later. In these emails, customers can proceed straight to the payment or overview the order before finishing it.

This email campaign proved an Open Rate of 62,5% and a Click Rate of 33%. For the 7-day email, the Open Rate was at 46% and the Click Rate — at 5%.

The conversion is pretty impressive, isn’t it? Without these emails, we would have lost these customers forever, which proves that they were definitely interested in the product. 

But there’s still one more step in our customer retention journey. Next, the Mofy.life sales manager looks at the list of customers who have never opened our emails and gives them all a call. This helps us get some additional orders from the customers who’ve just never managed to see our catch-up emails.

In conclusion

Google Analytics says that the sequences we’ve described above helped us gain about 10% of the overall orders. Sure, there’s still something to work on and more email campaigns to launch, but we’re certainly satisfied with the campaigns we’ve already set up with Dashly. Be sure not to miss our next Mofy.life case description where we’ll talk about repeat purchases, discounts and more stuff!

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