Retailer Leverages Digital Experience Intelligence to Discover a $50M Revenue Opportunity

The challenge

A reliance on devOps/IT delayed analysis of emerging customer behavior trends and prevented timely monitoring of the impact of product developments and A/B experiments. It also resulted in expensive engineering time spent on tagging.

Like in many retail companies, the e-commerce team was tracking a standard set of digital events on their website such as page views, button clicks and revenue in cart. They used these data points to optimize the customer digital experience and increase revenue.

However, every time they wanted to capture new digital interactions or custom events, they needed to request help from their devOps/IT department. This delayed analysis of emerging customer behavior trends and prevented timely monitoring of the impact of product developments and A/B experiments. It also resulted in expensive engineering time spent on tagging.

Specifically, the team wanted to better understand the digital experience of their small business customers, one of their most valuable customer segments. Looking for ways to increase revenues, the team decided to look into the impact of their free shipping minimum order requirement.

The solution

The e-commerce team used Glassbox to quickly and efficiently capture and report on the full set of data generated by their website including personalized messages, customer segments and abandoned cart values.

Self-service conversion analytics incorporating custom attributes 

In a few minutes, using a drag and drop interface they created a custom attribute, “Minimum order amount not met,” for customers who received a message that they needed to add purchases to their cart to qualify for free shipping. An ad hoc conversion funnel report revealed that 55% of small business customers who received this message in the following week did not end up placing an order. 

Reporting on dynamic content

Next, they wanted to determine whether abandonment was correlated with further distance from the minimum spend requirement. The custom attribute ensured the content of each customer's personalized message, which included the amount that needed to be added to qualify for free shipping, was available for aggregated reporting. This meant they could calculate the average for customers that abandoned their purchase and show the distribution of the amounts. To their surprise, it was often less than $50.

Integrated revenue impact for accurate decision making

Finally, to make the case for changing the minimum order amount that small business customers needed to qualify for free shipping, the e-commerce team needed to know exactly how much revenue was at stake. Since Glassbox was already capturing revenue in cart, they were able to immediately quantify revenue lost as a result of this specific issue—over $980K in one week alone. Armed with this data, they decided to remove the minimum order requirement for their small business customers shopping on their website.

Results

By implementing Glassbox digital experience intelligence the e-commerce team shifted to a self-service approach to website data capture and analytics bringing engineering costs for analytics to $0 and reducing time to insight. With new information at their fingertips, the team can make data-driven decisions faster and with more confidence. Ultimately it enabled them to improve their service to small business customers and discover an opportunity to increase revenue by $50M.