How to get an additional 11 000 USD without any costs in an e-commerce project

Today I’ll tell you about one of the growth hack, which I have found out last year. Since that moment I’ve tested it on other projects and have got the same results. Everything that you need is to follow my recommendations and you will get a stable pipeline, which will bring you a lot of money.

I called this hack “Abounded cart via push notification”. If you set it up, you will get the same result like me:

Just now it’s more than 11 000 USD.

Frankly, we did not come to this process at once. We have been working with the client on the traditional abandoned cart implementation, through email.

At that time the project had more than 2 000 unique users per day, but there was still no abandoned cart. According to our estimates, the project received less than ten thousand USD per month.

That’s why we want to fix it.

First, we’re going to set up all triggers for abandoned cart. However, we did not see the expected great results at first. And we with our client wanted more.

We started to figure out the problem and new opportunities.

Our customer base was like a bottleneck because emails weren’t collected for this project. During the launch of the abandoned cart, we did not get any customer emails. The situation was aggravated by the fact that for abandoned cart to start function, the user received a letter prepared by us — and he had to be logged in on the website while he was adding the goods to the cart.

To understand how much we were losing — we compared an analysis of users in google analytics, where it identified 2 segments:

1. logged-in users
2. not logged-in users.

For these segments, we compared the number of abandoned carts for a period. Only 10 percent of users, among those who dropped the cart, were logged in. We have lost lots of opportunities.

At that time, we began to find another ideas.

At that time on the service, which we used to implement the abandoned cart (e-sputnik) — actively developed new communication channel — push-notifications. We had known about it, but as before we didn’t used it. We decided to implement the same algorithm in push notifications.

What are the push notifications?

The Browser push notifications are informational messages, that are sent to each new user after the subscription directly to the desktop of PC or to the mobile lock screen.

How does it work?

The user enters the website → subscribers receive notifications → receive trigger messages → after clicking on the notification, the user is redirected to the page of the website.

Advantages and characteristics of push notifications:

• You can reach the user on any device.
• The open rate of push messages is around 90%.
• Offline notifications. Users will see the message as soon as they appear on the network.
• You can set a lifetime due to which, we can cut off users who see our message too late (relevant for stocks, for example).
• It can be used in a trigger automation marketing (user based marketing).
• it’s for free.

When, where and how can you use the push notifications?

• Promotions / events / sales.
• Reminder about the end of something.
• Urgent information.
• Congratulations on holidays.
• The abandoned cart.
• Attraction to competitions and giveaways.
• New articles on the blog.
• Reminder about the start of the webinar, etc.

How have we found and how to use it in our project?

To be honest, the implementation of push notifications at that time was for me an uncharted topic. I couldn’t find any examples of implementation or successful cases throughout the network.

I started to solve this problem. We began with the most common abandoned cart pattern— when the user puts the goods into the cart, but for some reason does not complete the purchase. Our task was return this user to the website.

First of all, we installed a script to subscribe and collect users for push notifications on the website. This issue was very easy because the website has already had an “HTTPS protocol”. Frankly, if your website is still on “HTTP protocol” you can’t collect subscribers effectively.

After we developed the algorithm-script — how our abandoned cart should work. The script was very simple: the user adds the goods to the cart and if he doesn’t complete the purchase within an hour, we send a trigger message (push notification).

To make this algorithm run, we needed to understand when the person had put the goods into the cart and when the purchase would be completed. To do this, we implemented sending events from the website to the e-sputnik service, which we used for this issue.

In the algorithm, there were 2 important events:

1) adding goods to the cart

2) reaching the thank you page (purchase completed).

They should be sent from the website.

For sending events we decided to use Google Tag Manager, which was already installed on the website. Firstly, it allowed to lower the cost of the implementation of the client. Secondly, it accelerated the process, because we did everything by ourselves and could quickly test various options.

The following pictures shows how our algorism looks like in e-sputnik service:

We haven’t been waiting for a long time for the first result. We received several sales after the first week. Further results were even better and we scaled our results.

During next 12 months this solution brought to the client more than 294 625 UAH (more than 11 000 USD) to the client:

The conversion rate via this channel is 6.89% (the average for all channels is 1.81%). Cost during 12 month — 0 USD.

This brought us more than 1,1 million UAH (more than 42 000 USD) together with the abandoned cart via email!

Conclusion

This case clearly shows how non-obvious things and solutions can bring amazing results. Therefore, don’t be afraid to try new ideas because perhaps you can find your growth zone.

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Do you need to implement this solution and get the same result? Write me and I’ll help you to set it up. Find more on our website.