BigCommerce Email Marketing Case Study

How Purple Turtle Toys Boosted Their Sales By Over $150K Using Automated Email Marketing

Melbourne-based Purple Turtle Toys, has been selling toys to children of all ages through their BigCommerce web store for over 12 years. Their expansive selection of inventory is produced by leading manufacturers from around the world such as LEGO, Star Wars, and Furbie. By incorporating an integrated automated email marketing strategy using SmartrMail’s BigCommerce application, Purple Turtle Toys was able to generate an additional $150,000 in revenue.

Gaining A Competitive Edge by Personalizing Each Customer’s Shopping Experience

In October 2016, Purple Turtle Toys was generating steady revenue, but were feeling swamped with only 2 people on the marketing team. The small company was finding it hard to manage all aspects of their digital marketing strategy, including social media, email, remarketing, and paid search. The team was pressed for time, and needed to find an automated solution to handle their email marketing campaigns. But they didn’t just want to automate – they wanted to be able to send individual product recommendation emails that were personalized to each customer’s unique browsing activity. The eCommerce toy industry is highly competitive, and personalizing their customer’s shopping experience was necessary to give them the competitive edge they needed to succeed.

Traditionally product recommendations have been generated primarily by using a customer’s past purchase history. However it would be nearly impossible for the 2 man team to manually analyze and segment their dynamic customer database to create those recommendations on their own. And for Purple Turtle Toys, purchase history alone wouldn’t be enough. As children of their customers were quickly growing up, product interests rapidly changed, as did purchase behavior. They wanted to be able to track not only past purchase history, but all aspects of the way individual users browsed the site to generate highly accurate recommendations.

“The ecommerce toy industry is very competitive and only retailers that offer a personalized shopping experience succeed.”

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A Smarter Solution to Ecommerce Email Marketing

The team chose SmartrMail after comparing it to other email marketing apps – finding it offered a more powerful and affordable solution. After they installed the app on their BigCommerce store, SmartrMail immediately began analyzing their customers’ browsing behavior, purchase history, and email clicks. This data was fed through an algorithm which would automatically email personalized product recommendations straight to their customers’ inboxes.

Purple Turtle Toys’ BigCommerce Email Marketing Strategy

Purple Turtle Toys set their product recommendation emails to send each week to their entire subscriber list. The weekly automated emails keep their subscribers engaged throughout the month with minimal effort, and also gives them time to design and produce content for a monthly newsletter that they compose through MailChimp. The emails Purple Turtle Toys sends usually include a discount offer or a free item giveaway when possible. The marketing team has found that including a free item in orders over a certain value was the most successful tactic to increase sales and average order value.

BigCommerce Product Recommendation Email

In addition to product recommendations, Purple Turtle Toys also automates abandoned cart recovery emails. These emails are triggered when customers leave the site with items in their cart.

BigCommerce Abandoned Cart Email

Over 5 months they have recovered over 50% of the sales abandoned in their carts. Considering that up to two-thirds of customers are abandoning items in their carts, implementing abandoned cart recovery emails makes a significant and immediate impact on store’s revenue.

The Result

With only their 2 person marketing team, Purple Turtle Toys was able to generate an extra $150K in sales for their store.

BigCommerce Email Marketing Results

New technology allows store owners to take the hands off the wheel and have automation apps handle the bulk of their marketing channels.

Purple Turtle Toys’ Advice for Other Ecommerce Marketers

“Automate when possible, read everything you can on ecommerce marketing, and learn from the success of competitors in your industry.”

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