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Boden Cuts Cart Abandonment 81% With Triggered Email Campaigns

Boden, a British apparel retailer, noticed that 70% of shoppers who put merchandise in their bodenusa.com shopping carts abandoned those carts without making a purchase. To make matters worse, the company’s existing triggered email program was not identifying enough of these abandoning shoppers to enable proper follow-up.

With the help of targeted email platform 4Cite, Boden:

  • Reduced cart abandonment by 81%;

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  • More than doubled its percentage of revenue from triggered emails, from 13% to 30%;

  • Identified 40% more visitors as well as their interests and shopping patterns.

Boden’s inability to identify its customers had been a massive inhibitor to online engagement because it prevented the retailer from providing a fully consistent experience, according to James Power, Email Automation Manager at Boden. Sometimes, after a customer visited the site, the retailer would send a remarketing email, such as an abandoned cart or abandoned browser email. But shoppers visiting the site for a second time would occasionally get no email at all, even if they took the same actions they did the first time.

With 4Cite, Boden improved its customer identification capabilities, enabling it to push out more relevant product recommendations within email campaigns.

“The content of our emails is obviously defined by what customers are looking at,” Power said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “In that way, it’s quite simple. The customer comes to the site, they view our products and they give us a sign of their intentions with the actions they take on the site. We’ll take hold of that wealth of data and use it down the line, whether that’s an hour, 24 hours, or six months later to remarket them and send them campaign emails.”

When Boden realized the substantial revenue it was losing due to cart abandonment, the retailer initially sought to build an in-house solution. However, the IT team noticed quickly that it had a poor match rate (the percentage of online audience that the retailer can target), so that it wasn’t worth the time and investment to tackle the problem itself.

After a trial run with another third-party platform that generated a low ROI due to its price-per-send cost structure, Boden turned to 4Cite, which already was an established partner. 4Cite had boosted Boden catalog sales by sending targeted emails to catalog recipients who hadn’t yet made a purchase. The retailer engaged the 4Cite Interaction Hub to help Boden acquire, retain and reactivate customers with real-time personalized offers.

“We got a much better match rate with 4Cite, and we actually sent 10X the number of emails in Q4 2015 than we did in Q2 2015,” said Power. “That’s just based on the fact that we can identify customers coming to our site so much better than we could before. The cost plan allowed us to maintain a high ROI on these campaigns.”

Expanded Network Gives Added Insights On Shopper Mindset

Boden also leverages traffic from other web sites that are part of 4Cite’s extensive network, which includes apparel retailers, jewelers, airlines and hotels. With the data from these sites, Boden has more context around the shoppers’ journey, enabling them to send these customers an email when they are in a shopping frame of mind.

“That’s helped us engage customers that we’ve previously considered lost causes,” Power said. “In some cases, we stopped marketing to those consumers. We now can see when a customer is active in the inbox on retail sites, and send emails that way. The idea is that you have a much bigger chance of engaging the customer if you send them an email when they’re in that mindset to shop. That’s been great for our reactivation and retention campaigns.”

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