D2C Digitally Native “Mission-Focused” Apparel Brand Optimizes Email Acquisition, Converts Without Couponing & Engages Customers With AddShoppers

Launched in 2015, our client leveraged social media to grow a brand around their social mission. After rapid growth during their first couple years, they looked to take their eCommerce business to the next level.

Impacts

Goals

When starting with AddShoppers, the client’s goals included:

1. Improve email acquisition: They had a big focus on growing their email list so they could own their audience rather than having to rely on social media, which they could not control.
2. Improve conversion rates: As with just about any eCommerce brand, conversion rates are always a focus for the client.
3. Encourage referrals: As a brand born on social media, the client naturally grew tremendously via organic social sharing & referrals. However, they wanted to amplify their word-of-mouth and generate more sharing.
4. Engage customers: They wanted to leverage all of the social proof, user-generated content, and brand content produced by their creative team to help drive purchases.

Strategy

In order to help the client meet their goals, AddShoppers executed the following approaches:

1. A/B tests for email acquisition. We tested two different placements for their main acquisition offer (10% off plus 250 reward program points) to see which would capture the most email addresses: (A) persistent top bar vs (B) Portal campaign.
2. A/B tests for cart abandonment. We implemented our cart abandon trigger and tested two different offers against each other to see which would drive the highest revenue and conversion rates — and if we could improve conversions without discounting: (A) Free Shipping Reminder Message vs (B) 10% Off
3. Social campaigns to encourage referrals. We implemented multiple social campaigns in order to maximize organic sharing & referrals happening on their website, including basic sharing as well as Refer-a-Friend.
4. Launched campaigns featuring rich content in their Portal. We took the valuable content that the client had gained and published it through their Portal, including things like Best Sellers, Quizzes, Videos, Instagram posts, and more. A/B testing wasn’t left out here — we even tested Top Rated Products vs Customer Reviews to find out which was more engaging.

Campaign Gallery

Here are templates showing each campaign we ran. (We’re not able to share real screenshots from this case study, but these templates match the types of campaigns actually run.)

Email Acquisition Campaign — Variant A — Top Bar

Email Acquisition Campaign — Variant B

Cart Abandonment Campaign

Portal Engagement Test

Best Sellers Portal Campaign

Video Portal Campaign

Refer-a-Friend Portal Campaign

A/B Test Results

Here are the lessons we learned from the A/B tests.

Email Acquisition
Variant A: Top Bar
Variant B: Portal

Winner: As expected, the Top Bar variant was the winner with a 2.8x higher email capture rate. Key learning: it’s hard to beat a persistent campaign shown on every page!

Cart Abandonment
Variant A: Free Shipping Reminder
Variant B: 10% off

Winner: Surprisingly, the Free Shipping Reminder variant was our clear winner! It drove a 2.3x higher revenue per user, 2.2x higher engagement, and 23% higher order values. This was a big win because they were able to increase revenue without using a discount.

One caveat: The client did have a highly prevalent 10% off discount elsewhere on their site, so that might explain why engagement wasn’t as high with that variation. If there was no discount offer available anywhere else, we’d expect different results from this test.

Portal Engagement
Variant A: Top Rated Products
Variant B: Customer Reviews

Winner: Users that interacted with the Top Rated Products variant had 1.6x more engagement, 11% higher average order values and 32% higher conversion rates.