DEMCO Increases Conversion Rate 400% With Abandoned Cart Program

Problem: DEMCO, a B-to-B cross-channel retailer of library supplies, sought to increase online conversions by targeting shoppers that abandoned their carts.

Solution: Hired an online marketing solutions provider.

Results: DEMCO was able to achieve a 400 percent higher conversion rate via a cart recovery email program. The retailer also realized higher open and conversion rates on welcome email offers as well as improved customer engagement.

With the growing popularity of e-books and the prevalence of consumers going to the web to conduct research and communicate, the role of libraries today is changing dramatically. As a result, libraries are looking for new, more efficient ways to run their organizations, serve customers, maintain and repair their facilities, and preserve their rich content resources.

Library supplies retailer DEMCO realized a few years ago it needed to find new ways to increase overall conversions on its e-commerce site. The company selected Silverpop Engage as its email service provider to help it create automated email campaigns with shopping cart abandonment and new subscriber welcome programs.

To derive value from its email programs, however, DEMCO needed a way to identify consumers that had abandoned shopping carts on its site. The company turned to Adobe's Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture, to help it determine if a shopper had left an item in a cart. With this information DEMCO could follow up and encourage them to complete their purchase.

“More than just shopping cart abandonment, Adobe Solutions give us a complete snapshot of what's going on — how customers are shopping on the site, where they're coming from, and which pages and offers they respond to most,” said Lisa Moling, e-marketing planner for DEMCO, in a company press release.

DEMCO also needed to shift its email marketing and remarketing efforts into high gear to combine promotions data. By adopting a marketing platform that integrates third-party applications like Silverpop, DEMCO receives a single, comprehensive view into its data.

“Up to 30 percent of customers were still abandoning their shopping carts, so we initiated an automated, behavior-driven and highly integrated cart abandonment program,” Moling said.

DEMCO now uses Adobe's online analytics to identify consumers who have abandoned shopping carts. Silverpop then sends a series of three cart abandonment emails from DEMCO at one-, three- and five-day intervals, encouraging the shoppers to return to their carts and finalize their purchases. In the final cart recovery message, DEMCO offers abandoners a tote bag if they complete their purchase.

By integrating the data from Adobe with automated email marketing, DEMCO has achieved impressive results.

“Once the first email goes out, we get a 22 percent conversion rate," said Moling. "We consider that a very successful result after just one email. Our series of cart abandonment emails deliver 97 times the revenue per thousand than our promotional emails. Overall we have 400 percent higher conversion rates from our cart abandonment emails enabled through the integration of the Adobe Online Marketing Suite and Silverpop.”

DEMCO's cart abandonment program runs continuously, and it's operated in tandem with other best practices such as proactive changes to its website based on insights gleaned from Adobe.

DEMCO also continues to send out promotional emails, which typically deliver a 5 percent bump in conversion. Sending welcome emails has enabled DEMCO to strengthen brand perception and speed up conversion. “The welcome email offers have garnered four times higher open and conversation rates than our traditional promotional emails,” Moling noted.

Among the biggest benefits of using Adobe is that it provides DEMCO an integrated marketing dashboard that puts the information needed from multiple sources and campaign initiatives in one place. The retailer can instantly see what’s working and what’s not with insights gained with Adobe analysis solutions. DEMCO can also quickly measure the effectiveness of proactive email campaigns.