RushOrderTees: 1 new Customer.io feature, 140% revenue increase
As the market leader in custom-printed apparel, RushOrderTees is all about personalization, and that extends to how they communicate with customers. They’re also dedicated innovators: they’ve often discovered and started using the newest Customer.io features weeks before they’re officially announced. So when our new event conversion feature was released, they saw the perfect opportunity to optimize an old campaign–which led to significantly improved deliverability and increased revenue.
Zeroing in on customer intent
RushOrderTees’ existing abandoned design campaign had a tricky spot. The time delay they set to avoid bombarding customers with too many messages too quickly couldn’t respond to the complexities of their customers’ behaviors in real time. While it effectively prevented overwhelm and unsubscribes, people’s shopping habits are so varied that customer intent was hard to decipher with the time-delay approach.
Customer.io’s event conversion feature was the missing puzzle piece. In the past, a person had to enter or exit a segment to match a campaign’s conversion goal, which could be cumbersome when customer shopping behavior was especially nuanced. By using events as campaign conversion criteria, RushOrderTees can respond to shifting user intent much more accurately.
“Now the intent of the user is much more clear, so we’re sending what people expect to receive when they perform an action on the site.”
—Matt Hayes, Email Marketing Manager
Using event conversions to send only what the customer wants
RushOrderTees added new functionality to their site to capture users’ preferences for each custom design created. Then, using event conversions and segments, they replaced the time delay controls with a flow that responded in real time to those preferences and customer actions.
With clear insight into customer desires and the tools they needed to turn insights into action, RushOrderTees was giving their customers what they wanted most. Conversions rose quickly as the new flow put the most relevant information front and center.
“At the end of the day, we’re trying to deliver exactly what the customer wants. We’re not just sending more emails, more reminders. By using event conversions and segments, we’re giving them what they need and what they expect to get.”
—Matt Hayes, Email Marketing Manager
The result? 140% more revenue through better email engagement
RushOrderTees’ innovative combination of event conversions and segments got a 140% bump in both revenue and transactions from the campaign. Since robust custom design support is a key brand differentiator for the company, that was a clear win. But it gets better. The best long term effect was that when their new campaign’s click-to-open rate went up by 50%, it increased their deliverability across the board and led to improved engagement across all emails from their domain. Around the same time, the open rate on their weekly newsletter jumped up 7%. This increased engagement means that their email marketing team now can do more testing without worrying about something breaking since their engagement rates are higher.
The good news didn’t stop there. The campaign’s success produced a host of downstream benefits beyond its immediate results. For example, they found that the event data is now much more accurate than what they get from their other tracking tools, enabling more precise campaign performance metrics.
“We were able to increase the revenue and transactions from that campaign by about 140%. But the downstream effects were even greater, because it interlocks with our other promotional efforts, enhancing their effects.”
—Matt Hayes, Email Marketing Manager
The icing on the cake: a Customer Success Manager with your back
Impressive results with one campaign is just the tip of the iceberg for RushOrderTees (check out other ways they leverage the platform here). With Customer.io, they’ve found a customer success partner who shares their enthusiasm for constant innovation to deliver the best possible user experience. They especially appreciate the reliable, responsive, personalized service and top-notch customer success managers who roll up their sleeves and work alongside them to get results.
“Jp is one of the best account managers I’ve worked with in 16 years. He always follows up when he says he will, and when we’re trying to conceptualize things, we’ll put our heads together. He doesn’t just tell us what the features are, he tells us how to use them to solve our problems.”
—Matt Hayes, Email Marketing Manager