With a basic cart abandonment email tool in place that yielded low conversions and a low number of sends, the fast-growing jewelry brand knew they needed a solution to meet their business requirements.
The company turned to Fresh Relevance to empower them to accelerate their growth and improve the customer experience. We spoke with Zach Simbrow, CEO of VDH to find out more about their experience.
"We've seen 10x ROI with Fresh Relevance and it’s helped us lower our cost of acquisition. It allows us to act and function like a bigger business without having to take on the extra infrastructure," says Zach. "The support team was a big selling point for us. Being able to have an account manager who comes forward with ideas and works with us in the tool is really beneficial. There's a sense of partnership, which I haven't experienced with other tech solutions. It feels like Fresh Relevance is invested in our business and we've seen that bear out in our performance," continues Zach.
Profile
Van Der Hout Jewelry is a Toronto-based jewelry brand, offering a wide selection of high-quality solid gold and genuine gemstone jewelry.
Solutions Used
10X
ROI
10%
Increase in sales with product recommendations
3%
Conversion rate for cart abandonment emails
Cart abandonment emails
The first item on the VDH team's to-do list was implementing a cart abandonment email program. The team started with a single cart abandonment email, which was set up by early November, just in time for Black Friday.
"The cart abandonment email we set up with Fresh Relevance generated more for us in the first 45 days than the previous 18 months' worth of abandoned carts with our previous solution," says Zach. "The biggest win for us was that we were able to send the cart abandonment email to a lot more people with Fresh Relevance, meaning our baseline increased massively," continues Zach.
The company soon moved to a 3-stage abandonment program, whereby an email is triggered 10 minutes, 24 hours, and 72 hours after the shopper has abandoned their cart. This increased the effectiveness of their abandonment program further. “Over the last 12 months we’ve seen an average 3% conversion rate for our cart abandonment program and a 33% ID rate,” says Zach.
Product recommendations
Before they implemented Fresh Relevance, the team used Shopify to power their on-site product recommendations but didn't see a lift in basket size. A year of Fresh Relevance-powered product recommendations and the company is seeing great success with this tactic. "In a year we've seen almost 10% of our sales attributed to Fresh Relevance product recommendations - which amounts to over CA$150K in revenue - and a 3% conversion rate," says Zach. "It's a really valuable tool and we know that it’s helped us sell more products. As a small business, CA$150K revenue is significant," explains Zach.
Social proof
The company uses Fresh Relevance's social proof functionality to highlight bestselling and trending products on their website. "The tool is based on an algorithm but we also have the ability to go in and manually select which products we want to be displayed. We like having that control as it helps us shift extra inventory and promote products that we believe in," says Zach.
"We've seen 10x ROI with Fresh Relevance - it allows us to act and function like a bigger business without having to take on the extra infrastructure"
Zach Simbrow, CEO, Van Der Hout Jewelry
Data capture
Having previously set up a data capture form within their ESP, the company switched to Fresh Relevance for this tactic. "Since switching to Fresh Relevance for our data capture form, we've seen a 12% increase in monthly newsletter sign ups and have been able to improve the customer experience by controlling when the popover appears. It has also led to an increased use in our newsletter discount codes," explains Zach.
Future plans
"Our next focus is increasing basket size and we'll be using Fresh Relevance to help with that," says Zach.