To date, GourmetGiftBaskets.com has doubled its inboxing rate and has been able to not just draw in and convert new customers in the 2020 eCommerce boom but to use automated messaging to help retain them and increase their Life Time Value. That’s why they’d recommend Remarkety to other businesses of their size with similar needs and describe it as: approachable, agile, accommodating, and responsive.
One of the things that attract eCommerce businesses to Remarkety is that it enables even smaller startups to tap into the power of Big Data analytics for automated marketing. Its boutique level of service is also an advantage to well-established businesses with a large number of customers and subscribers (high volume senders), as we see in the success story of GourmetGiftBaskets.com.
GourmetGiftBaskts.com has been using Remarkety for two years now and remains as pleased by its high touch level of personalized service now as it was at onboarding. Remarkety delivers the benefits of segmentation that it has used to improve email marketing that the company plans to apply to new marketing channels.
The Business
The President and CEO of GourmetGiftBaskets.com, Ryan Abood, literally grew up in a business that enhanced life’s special occasions that inspired him. His parents owned a flower shop in New Hampshire where they delivered the highest level of personalized service to their customers within the delivery area. Abood wanted to come up with a way to translate that into a business that would not be as limited by geography, and so the concept of GourmetGiftBaskets.com was born in 2002.
The business started with just two family members in the basement of their flower shop and has now exploded into a multi-million dollar company recognized multiple times by the likes of Inc.500, Internet Retailer, Enterprise Bank, and others.
As big as it gets, it retains the core value of offering the best products to its customers. “We are a premium brand focused on providing high-quality food items as a gift for all occasions,” says Jason Bergeron. “The food quality is always top-notch.”
Bergeron joined GourmetGiftBaskets.com in November 2009 as Vice President of Sales & Marketing. Until recently, he has been managing with just a team of three to handle all marketing campaigns. But now the company has decided to expand that team and brought on people to specialize in different areas, like paid search, email, SMS, social, and SEO.
Try Remarkety for free or book a demo
The Challenge
Having been in business for nearly two decades, GourmetGiftBaskets.com had already tapped into the power of email marketing. It had been using a different provider that utilized its own internal mail servers.
“At first they were doing a really good job, and we were doing well,” Bergeron recalls. “Then something changed.”
They started to get bad deliverable rates, especially in Gmail. They tried to get the company to address the issue, but their provider insisted the problem was on their end and didn’t offer any solution.
They knew that this was a problem they would have to solve by finding a new service provider, one that would integrate with their server and reputation management service at Oracle. Bergeron asked an expert at the Oracle division that handled that for advice to recommend an alternative marketing automation platform.
The Solution
Four providers were on the recommended list, but not all of them offered Oracle connectivity. Remarkety did. Bergeron was impressed with Remarkety because it delivered more “bells and whistles like social media connectivity” than they got from their existing service and made it easier to utilize segmentation more effectively.
Bergeron also appreciated that Remarkety offered what he describes as “a bouquet type” of service that is more “fluid and functional” than a big place in which communication is reduced to tickets: “I personally like that more. I feel we can grow together.”
He explained, “We could see the opportunity within the platform,” and they continue to receive the high touch level they service they received at onboarding.
“I can Slack our Success Manager at 10 pm and get a response, so I know that they are monitoring their customers and taking care of their customers,” Bergeron observed.
The Results
Once they implemented Remarkety and integrated it with Oracle reputation management, they achieved their two primary goals of inbox deliverability: sending their email through and getting them in front of people.
Bergeron recalls they started the implementation toward the end of January. “By Halloween time, we were seeing the results we needed to see to feel we were on the right trajectory.”
In addition to the deliverability, they found they got better reporting with Remarkety. That helped them make effective decisions on what was and wasn’t working.
The numbers show impressive results. Before using Remarkety, their open rates were in the 4-5% range. But now they are seeing 10-12% for high volume email blasts and 27%-37% for email automations like welcome emails, abandoned carts, and browse abandonment.
Perhaps most importantly for 2020 was the ability to quickly scale up with Remarkety, the business was able to keep up with the growing demand for gift baskets for occasions when people were not able to be together in person.
Even with increased demand, marketing strategies for retention in the form of welcome series, carts or browse abandonment, etc. were essential for the longer-term goals of the business.
The challenge is to get customers who have ordered once to the next level with a second order to get them on the path to become repeat customers who offer the best LTV. Remarkety helped them achieve that with their email marketing.
Going forward, GouremtGiftBaskets.com plans to also use Remarkety for new marketing initiatives, including SMS/MMS, social integration to target customers who have opted out of email on Facebook and Instagram, and direct mail. Remarkety’s platform will be used “like a CRM to do all the segmentation that we want,” Bergeron explained.
Bergeron has no reservations about recommending Remarkety for businesses with the same kind of needs: “For our size company and style company, I would definitely recommend Remarkety.”
