Abandoned carts are the perpetual challenge of any online store. On average, 80% of cases where someone adds products to their cart… they abandon it, never completing the purchase. That’s why it’s essential for any digital project to use specialized cart recovery tools, such as Blueknow.
Let’s examine a real case where, through the use of AI-powered improvements in email subject lines, the conversion of these recoveries increased by over 80%. Simply by personalizing email subjects. Tatiana Orellana, Brand & Communication manager of Blueknow, and Iván Piñas, responsible for national product at Oferplan, Vocento, tell us about it.
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Interview with Tatiana Orellana and Iván Piñas (Blueknow and Oferplan)
3:15 For listeners who may not be familiar, could you give us an “official” introduction to Oferplan and Blueknow?
- Ivan: I’m from the central business team of the Vocento corporation, a multimedia communication group. KnowHow consists of newspapers and magazines within the group, but in recent years, it has diversified revenue into other specialties. In 2011, a platform was launched to connect local businesses with the audience of leading newspapers in each location where we have a presence.
We have a team to provide us with insight and a central team focused on product definition, maintenance, and development, supporting our local teams, which are more focused on direct marketing with local SMEs.
Our power lies in having much more reach to access, offer, and monetize deals outside major cities. We connect a loyal and recurring audience of newspapers with local businesses interested in specific advertising and target demographics. As a media company, we have made synergies and agreements to access a portfolio of products, which we offer exclusively with some discounts to our readers and users.
Currently, we have 14 owned newspapers and two associates (La Voz de Galicia and La Gaceta de Salamanca). Within the group, new digital newspapers have been acquired or established, and we are exploring the possibility of integrating them into the project.
The Oferplan.com page does not transact with external newspapers. It is an offer aggregator, where we automatically display the most demanded and visited options or those that provide the greatest benefit in each location. If you click on any offer from La Voz de Galicia, it will take you to the Oferplanlavozdegalicia.es front end, where a wider range of offers is available in terms of experiences, professional services, health, and beauty, all highly localized. This Oferplan.com page also serves to group common offers for all media and avoid duplicate content.
- Tatiana: Blueknow offers proprietary solutions and specializes in cart recovery, helping eCommerce sites prevent customers from leaving the website without making a purchase, and if they do, encouraging them to return and complete the purchase. If the solution is well optimized, it can increase revenue by around 10%, and the best part is that it doesn’t require any technical intervention.
Our collaboration with Oferplan is very interesting. They have a marketing automation platform, which, while useful for sending emails, is not specifically optimized for cart recovery. It’s essential to emphasize optimization for two reasons: on average, 80% of users abandon their shopping cart, and secondly, users are multi-platform, meaning they may start a purchase on a computer but finish it on their mobile device.
Marketing automation platforms do not allow you to generate what we call a “deep link,” which is a link without cookie dependency, doesn’t expire, and allows the user to access the abandoned shopping cart regardless of the device they use to open the email.
Oferplan is a unique case because it actually consists of 16 businesses selling experiences. To recover an experience, such as a theater show, what we do at Blueknow is take the customer to the closest part of the purchase. For example, if the show you’re interested in is sold out but has other dates, we take you to the date selection part, or if the show no longer exists, we take you to the show selection part.
There are legal ways to impact customers. If they are registered, we already have consent, but if they are not registered, we have a pop-up that detects exit intent. If we detect something in the cart but don’t have consent, it’s a pop-up that asks for the user’s email and consent, and that’s how we send a cart recovery email.
16:27 Have you noticed a change since BlueKnow was implemented at Oferplan?
Yes, I have noticed changes, especially with AI solutions. They proposed an A/B test on one of our fronts to see how the automatic processing of the email subject received by the user for cart recovery responds. For example, if you have been on La Voz de Galicia and have seen tickets to a show, the subject line of the email we used to send via BlueKnow was: “don’t miss your plan,” which was impersonal and got lost among so many received emails. Now, with AI, if you have seen theater show X, the subject line’s personalization is “don’t miss your theater show X,” and this has had a very good result.
Conversion to purchase with this A/B test increased by 82%, the click-to-purchase conversion by 67%, and the email open rate increased by 12.43%, putting us at an open rate above 30%.
- Tatiana: This personalization also takes into account user behavior and goes further. Without artificial intelligence, it was limited to putting the user’s name, if available, which is generic, but now it goes beyond and appeals to sentimentality. For now, we focus on personalizing the subject line, which has improved all metrics, and we are testing to extend it to the content.
We have a team behind us figuring out how to teach the AI tool. For example, if there is a case where it sent a very long subject line, we tell the AI, shorten it, or if I don’t like this one you gave me, don’t use it at all. Of course, this learning is done afterward and is not an aesthetic process but a learning one.
This same solution is also being tested in other sectors, and so far, the results are good. It is important to note that the duration of these A/B tests is approximately one month to obtain more conclusive results.
We like to work on a success basis, meaning, regardless of the price and whether you can afford it, if you don’t sell, we’re not achieving anything, and that’s why we don’t put the pricing on the website. Our business model is personalized and scalable, and if you get results, you pay us. To set the price, we take into account the client’s preferred model, whether it’s fixed per month or based on results, the sector, there are different types of commissions and abandonment margins depending on the sector.
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31:19 What is the size of Oferplan in terms of revenue?
Although we have the backing of Vocento, within the sector, we are a small player and have to fight hard to make a name for ourselves in the market.
