Branding itself as a highly curated fashion marketplace for the style-obsessed shopper, e-Commerce retailer Bluefly hosts more than 3,000 luxury brands across three online stores: B. luxe, B. Timeless and B. trendy. With a fast-growing product arsenal — adding an average of 150 new items to its site per week — the Bluefly team felt it had yet to capitalize on a major opportunity: identifying shoppers and building a personal connection with them.
Luxury sites such as Bluefly typically attract many visitors who don’t make a purchase. But the retailer wanted to ensure that it would engage with shoppers before they left the site. Bluefly implemented shopper activation and cart abandonment programs from 4Cite to capture email addresses of shoppers even if they hadn’t made a purchase. Within five months of implementing the targeted email platform, Bluefly had:
- Increased visitor identification 50%;
- Increased email collection 41%; and
- Boosted email revenue 11%.
“Relevancy is key,” said Kenneth Fernandes, VP of Marketing and E-Commerce at Bluefly in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “If you’re not at that point, you’re eventually going to fall behind. You need to be relevant, hyper-targeted and also re-engage those shoppers that have fallen off.”
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Identifying more visitors to the site drives more incremental revenue to the business, according to Fernandes. Bluefly can place more customer records in the top of the conversion funnel and then take decisive action to help pull those visitors through the funnel. The 4Cite platform tests these actions to determine if they change the visitor’s behavior and drive an incremental sale, or if the visitor would have made the purchase anyway, regardless of marketing stimulation.
One action Bluefly took was to get more specific — and personal — with product recommendations. “Our strategy is to focus more on highlighting the brand or brands themselves as opposed to drilling down to specific products,” Fernandes said. “But we’ve started to implement personalized product recommendations that are dynamic and can change based off of user behavior, past purchase history, what they’re looking at on site and what similar shoppers have bought.”
The cart abandonment feature is designed to gather the shopper’s email when they are at a key moment: the point-of-near-purchase. Instead of showing a standard activation lightbox that asks for the shopper’s email when they enter the site, a lightbox is triggered only when the shopper has items in their cart.
“The platform is able to stitch together experiences,” Fernandes said. “The starting point could be somebody who comes to the web site, browses around, puts a product in their cart and leave. 4Cite would identify the shopper and send them an email asking them to come back to the site, and we’re usually able to then either get them to make a purchase or at least get their email information. Essentially this eases the path for us to close that sale.”
Triggered Emails Provide Personalized Offers Based Multi-Site Shopping Activity
Bluefly also leveraged the 4Cite Shopping Elsewhere triggered email feature, which is designed to prompt real-time, personalized offers at the moment when customers are actively in their inbox or shopping on other retail sites.
The retailer can leverage traffic from other sites that are part of 4Cite’s network, which include apparel retailers, jewelers, airlines and hotels. With the data from these sites, Bluefly can gain more context around the shopper journey, enabling the retailer to send these customers an email when they are in a shopping frame of mind. The Bluefly team is deploying several more initiatives via the triggered emails feature, including sale notifications and expanded product recommendations.
“Let’s say a shopper was looking at a Gucci handbag on the site and that item happened to go on sale,” Fernandes said. “We’re going to send out a message notifying customers that the product is now on sale. That typically drives strong conversions.”
