Whisker Seeker Reels in Sales with SMS & Email Campaigns
What does it take to achieve success? Meeting a need with deep knowledge and passion about the product and the right marketing campaigns to reach your customer base, and a bit of help from your marketing communication platform.
After using Remarkety, Whisker Seekers achieved measurable improvements in conversions as high as 22% and achieved open rates of 40% for their automation! That’s why Matt Davis, the company founder sums up his feelings about Remarkety as “Won’t live without!”
The business
Today everyone has heard of catfishing, though most people associate it with luring people online rather than fish in the water. In fact, catching actual catfish is a passion shared by millions all across the United States, and their needs were not being met by angler suppliers.
Matt Davis was among them. As a kid, catfish were all he aimed to catch, and he continued throughout his life. Over time he grew frustrated with having to make do with equipment made specifically for species other than catfish.
He decided to fix that problem by building a source of equipment exclusively for catfishers that he called Whisker Seeker Tackle. He drew on his experience as a serial entrepreneur to turn his lifelong passion into a successful business that progressed from a basement-based operation to a multi-million dollar company that sells to over 500 retails stores within just seven years.
Davis attributes his success to three attributes he says are to be found among the most successful company founders:
1. Knowing their business inside and out
2. Being passionate about it
3. Fixing a pain point
“All those other companies out there didn’t concentrate on catfish, so it was easy to come in and dominate that marketing,” he observes.
The challenge
Of course, he also had to get the word out and communicate with his target market, and that’s where they ran into a segmentation challenge in setting up a system that would keep them in contact with their customers. This is the form of segmentation that they had to deal with, not the usual division of interests — as everyone was interested in catfishing — but the difference between those who would respond to email and those who would respond to SMS.
“We were growing so fast learning all this in house,” Davis recalls.
At the beginning, they couldn’t afford a full-time marketing manager but knew they needed something to keep eCommerce customers in touch and engaged. They started using Mailchimp for email campaigns, but it didn’t meet all their needs
“We were looking for a system or a company that could help us with our marketing efforts, to hold our hand a little bit,” Davis explains.
They wanted support for creating their email campaigns from start to finish and direction for what kind of remarketing campaigns they should be working on. They didn’t get that from Mailchimp and so started looking for what would give them what they needed.
The solution
Their search brought them to Remarkety. Remarkety then set up a meeting as a demo call. Davis recalled how impressed he was with Remarkety’s Success Manager, NIkita, who walked them through the system to demonstrate the system’s capabilities and what it could do for their business.
That kind of hands-on help was not just there to get them to sign on. That’s the level of hand-holding and direction they were looking for, which extended not just for the first couple of months but to regular bi-weekly and then monthly meetings.
She is even proactive about reaching out to them to point out issues even when they haven’t asked. Even though they’re already familiar with the system, they do appreciate that personal touch.
“Customer support is second to none. If we ever need help, we get a response in minutes.”
They also appreciated that they were able to get up-and-running so quickly with Remarkety.
”I was very impressed with what I saw and the ease of creating those campaigns,” Davis recalls.
As they came on a couple of years ago, Remarkety’s services were still centered only on email. Then they were using a different SMS service, but they really wanted Remarkety to handle it all for them.
They asked for it and got it. After setting up a meeting in which they explained they wanted to use SMS due to their finding higher response and conversion rates than email for that medium, Remarkety made it happen.
“We had been using a system called Justuno, and Remarkety created some custom code to allow us to integrate with that. Now we’re fully integrated with it.”
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The results
“That is huge for us to have one system now instead of one for email, another for SMS,” Davis points out. This allows them to have a complete picture of how well the campaigns are doing for the groups that prefer email, the ones that prefer SMS, and even the segment that is receptive to both.
With that holistic picture, they can plan targeted, segmented campaigns. Segmentation is usually based on different interests for different customers, but that doesn’t apply in such a specific niche market met by Whisker Seeker; their segments are email and SMS customers.
They didn’t have a system that could measure the results of who responded to email and who to SMS before using Remarkety. Now, they know that their campaigns are very successful and can see which customers need to be retargeted through which medium.
Since they started using Remarkety for SMS they have sent over 25,500 messages in under three months and get a handle on who received them, who opened them, and who converted. That’s why they really wanted Remarkety’s solution applied to their SMS campaigns — to get the same level of data analysis they appreciate on their email campaigns.
The metrics speak for themselves::
- They have an impressive 22% conversion on their welcome email campaign.
- They enjoy a successful 11% conversion on their cart abandonment campaign
- They also see a high conversion of 8% on their browse abandonment campaigns
- Overall their open rate for automations is at a 40%!
That’s why when Davis was asked which three words he would use to sum up his Remarkety experience, he said: “Won’t live without.”
