Buyagift experience significant sales uplifts with Dotdigital Personalization

Buyagift boosts sales, increases ID rate and increases email open and click-through rates.

Product recommendations have always been integral to Buyagift’s email strategy. But a time-consuming process where recommendations needed to be selected manually meant the CRM team struggled to meet the company’s growing need for more email campaigns and segmentations.

Buyagift’s Senior CRM Manager Charles Kraus wanted to find a tool to help his team save time and boost efficiency, so they could spend more time getting creative and optimizing their email campaigns.

“We looked into a number of different providers and Dotdigital Personalization was the best for us. Our business is slightly different as each time people shop with us, they’re potentially buying for a different person. What’s more, every single product we sell is in a different location around the country. Personalization was able to help us with custom work to fit our needs,” explains Charles.

The implementation was quick and Charles and his team were up and running with Dotdigital Personalization in no time. “It was ridiculously simple to set up. Dotdigital completed our custom work in a few days,” says Charles. “One of my favourite aspects of Dotdigital is the support. With a lot of other providers we’ve used, you have to pay for specialist packages if you require any kind of support. With Dotdigital, I’ve never seen anything like the level of support we received during set up. Support is probably the biggest problem I hear about within the CRM industry. But it’s the complete opposite when it comes to Dotdigital.”

Browse abandonment emails

With Dotdigital Personalization, Buyagift are sending targeted browse abandonment emails featuring the browsed product along with related recommended products. “We’ve seen a 512% increase in sales and Dotdigital has been a big part of that,” says Charles.

More recently, Buyagift has been using Dotdigital Personalization to identify browse abandoners and trigger browse abandonment emails automatically. “Previously, we were only able to identify browse abandoners after the shopper had browsed a discountable product. With Personalization, we can see browsers of non-discountable region pages and sub-categories, and then use that information for additional targeting,” explains Charles. “With Dotdigital Personalization, we’ve seen a 229% increase in ID rate for our abandonment emails,” Charles continues.

When it comes to abandonment emails, timing is crucial. Using Dotdigital Personalization, Charles and his team are now able to send browse abandonment emails more frequently, with emails triggering half an hour after a shopper browses. According to Charles, “The amount of triggers that we’ve been able to set up, adapt and improve using Dotdigital has been incredibly impactful.

“Our browse abandonment email open rates have increased by 53%, click to open rates have increased by 66%, click-through rates have increased by 154% and we’ve seen a 192% uplift in sales per email,” says Charles.

Buyagift’s revamped browse abandonment program has led to an increase in sales per website visitor too. “Sales per unique website visitor are up 913%,” explains Charles.

Email newsletters

Buyagift’s email newsletters have also benefited from Dotdigital Personalization, with Charles and his team saving precious time on the setup. “When we’re creating an email, we have multiple different segments with various discounts, which Dotdigital can handle with one piece of HTML. Using Dotdigital has cut down the process of creating emails by a significant amount.”

“We’ve gone from having to put 12 product recommendations together and a header to essentially just having to create the header. The fact that we’ve been able to automate so much of the process has meant that we’ve been able to focus on so many other projects,” explains Charles.

Buyagift has also been able to improve the relevancy of their product recommendations using Personalization. “We’re seeing a 24% sales uplift when using product recommendations in our newsletters compared to manual products,” says Charles.

The success of the newsletters has encouraged Buyagift to make use of Personalization in their welcome emails too. Charles tells us, “We’ve seen a 51% increase in sales since introducing Personalization into our welcome emails.”

Social proof

Buyagift uses Dotdigital Personalization to add social proof to their automated discount emails, speeding up the buying process by displaying how many people have bought or browsed that particular product recently. “We’ve set the popularity messaging to a minimum threshold of 10 views as we don’t want to display browsing numbers that are lower than that,” explains Charles.

“We’ve seen a 13% increase in sales using Dotdigital’s social proof features in our email marketing,” says Charles.

Final thoughts

Buyagift are taking their customer experience to the next level with their new Experience Finder, a form designed to help shoppers with their search by asking them who they are shopping for, their price range and what categories they’re interested in.

Personalization will be used to populate a follow up email with tailored recommendations based on the information the shopper has shared. “Even initiatives like Experience Finder can take a lot of time to set up, and we would never have had time to do something like it before. Saving time and being able to get creative with new projects is yet another benefit of using Dotdigital,” explains Charles.

“If you’re considering Dotdigital, just go for it! It’s completely revolutionized the way we work,” says Charles.

“You should see an almost immediate return on investment. We made enough money in the first month of using Dotdigital to cover the cost of the platform. Every trigger we’ve implemented so far has performed extremely well,” continues Charles.