Luring customers to a brand’s website is one thing, but keeping them on the site and getting them to purchase is an entirely different feat. While there’s no silver bullet, 365 Tickets USA found a way to deter customers from abandoning its site — or at least return when they do — by implementing new solutions.
Booking a new vendor
365 Tickets USA sells discounted tickets to attractions, theme parks, tours, and shows around the world. Although the company is based in the U.K., it licenses its platform to people in other regions to expand its ticket offerings and provide local expertise and customer service.
Teresa Holden became an owner of 365 Tickets USA in the beginning of 2015. Around this time, she saw a demo for a shopping cart abandonment tool from digital advertising and performance marketing company Ve Interactive. She knew that she wanted to invest in cost-effective solutions that were turnkey. So, she decided to implement the tool for a client of her separate hospitality marketing business Holden Marketing Group.
After seeing success with her client, Holden decided to start using Ve Interactive for 365 Tickets USA and implemented its solutions approximately six months later.
Introducing multichannel attractions
Here’s how 365 Tickets USA leveraged Ve Interactive’s shopping cart abandonment solution: When customers abandon their carts, 365 Tickets USA sends them an email 45 minutes later as a reminder to purchase. To help jog customers’ memories, the brand features the abandoned items in the email. If customers still don’t buy, 365 Tickets USA sends them a second email 48 hours after abandonment. Terri Mock, chief revenue officer of Ve Interactive North America, says that these emails convey a greater sense of urgency.
365 Tickets USA is also able to segment these customers. While enticing abandoners with discounts is a common practice for many marketers, Holden says she isn’t a fan of sweetening the deal just because a customer could have been interrupted by an everyday occurrence, like a phone call or package delivery.
“I was pretty adamant about not rewarding people for not making a purchase,” she says.
So, for select venues, she worked with Ve Interactive to establish an order value filter that appeared in the second email in 365 Tickets USA’s shopping cart abandonment series. If customers’ abandoned cart value was less than $100, then they received an email simply reminding them to purchase, Holden says; however, if the items in the cart were worth $100 or more, then they received a 5% discount.
In addition to leveraging Ve Interactive’s cart recovery solution, Holden decided to implement its onsite engagement tool VePanel. By dropping a line of data script code on 365 Tickets USA’s website, the brand can present potential abandoners with a sliding panel overlay, which is somewhat similar to a pop up. The overlay summarizes visitors’ product search history and offers them recommendations for other attractions within the same city. It also contains calls-to-action to buy tickets now or head back to the website.
Besides utilizing Ve Interactive’s email and onsite engagement capabilities, 365 Tickets USA worked with the marketing company to enhance its retargeting. Anyone who visits and abandons 365TicketsUSA.com can receive a retargeted display ad, Mock says. 365 Tickets USA is also able to personalize these ads, she notes, with geo-specific creative based on the city of the attractions they were browsing.
Finally, 365 Tickets USA implemented Ve Interactive’s social sharing capability, which invites customers to share their recent purchases with their networks; however, Holden says that this tool has not been a big revenue-driver for the brand.
The ticket to success
Still, it looks like 365 Tickets USA has seen an increase in performance since implementing these solutions. Within the first six months of using the technology, 365 Tickets USA saw a five-time increase in revenue from VePanel. In addition, Mock says that the brand saw a 35% click-to-conversion rate with its re-marketing emails, as well as a 33-to-1 return on ad spend from its retargeting display ads. And despite Holden’s note about the social sharing capability, a case study by Ve Interactive shows that the tool resulted in a 28% average conversion rate and a 22% conversion rate uplift.
Although 365 Tickets USA is still working with Ve Interactive, Holden says that she’s not making any immediate enhancements. However, she says that this experience has reinforced the value of hiring a true partner, rather than just a technology vendor — proving that putting the client’s needs first is the ticket to success.
