Challenge

Targeting very specific cohorts of customers (those who love decorating their truck with outstanding LED lights), Vivid Light Bars' niche products seem particularly difficult to do marketing massively to everyone. They found it tough to sell their products as a bundle because basically all products had similar styles or functions, while selling individual products lowered their revenue and discouraged customers’ shopping experiences.

Struggling to find a solution to introduce more products to each visitor was not the only problem that they encountered. Vivid Light Bars admitted that they also suffered a lot from sending emails to retain their customers. They were really frustrated to manually prepare weekly email content and selectively choose the right segment of customers to send out emails. It wasn’t the worst, it took them the whole day to digitalize the records of new arrivals and list them on bi-weekly newsletters.

“We had a plan of sending emails to our frequent customers on special occasions but we never actually did send out any of that sort of emails. We’re just a small shop, spending the whole day to create an email totally sounds dumb. We have no choice.”

Solution

Vivid Light Bars decided to count on marketing automation which was said to be a very effective tool to take out the most of marketing activities and boost monthly revenue on the online platform. They believed that with the right approaches, marketing automation could improve customer’s Average Order Value (AOV), site’s checkout rate and retention rate.

For months, they had been looking for the top-notch apps on Shopify store and had tried several of them in order to achieve that business goal. “We were not really satisfied with the results contributed by some apps until we found Beeketing. Now we're a big fan of Beeketing’s apps. All the apps were super easy to set up yet the change in our sales was huge!”

First, Vivid Light Bar came to Beeketing’s Personalized Recommendation app to resolve the issue of the low AOV by introducing more products to each customer.
Personalized Recommendation suggests highly relevant products to customers at multiple touch points of the shopping process and in turn, creates a natural boost in conversions and also increases AOV by providing 4 useful features:
- Store best sellers
- Who bought this also bought
- Cart recommendations
- Recently viewed & featured recommendations

Understanding that personalized recommendations could change the game situation, Vivid Light Bar has taken out the most of app’s features with setting up positions of recommendation widgets.


More specifically, we can look at the example of 2 widgets that they put on the Product page: “Who bought this also bought” and “Recently viewed featured recommendations”. It makes totally sense regarding customer experiences. Once a customer clicks to view a product, he or she will be likely to look for references from previous buyers to check whether that product is a good value for money.

At this stage, “Cart recommendations” widget (which is likely to appear on cart page) and “Store best sellers” (which is perfectly displayed on the home page for those who have no clear ideas of what to buy yet) are definitely not the perfect matches to be put on the product page.
Vivid Light Bars has achieved a very impressive result with Personalized Recommendations. In total, they’ve got approximately $10,000 in revenue with roughly 2,500 carts added.

Personalized Recommendations is not the only friend that has helped Vivid Light Bars increase AOV. Boost Sales app also played as a great companion by creating smart and relevant upselling and cross-selling deals for customers.

In the first place, we - Beeketing team - suggested they create a bunch of upselling & cross-selling bundles, in which they display a number of complementary products to be bought together. The most important thing is to recommend customers relevant products that they might be interested in buying. When customers add one of these products to cart, the bundles will pop-up and convince them to buy the whole set at a reasonable price.


For example, those who love car’s LED lights definitely want their cars to be impressive by various sets of different coloured shaped light bars. This is when Vivid Light Bars suggested their customers to buy a bundle of unique and magnificent light bars to change each of them frequently. This made Vivid Light Bars’ visitors consider adding more items to their carts and in turn, improved the company’s average order value.

One more trick that Vivid Light Bars has applied was to smartly using customized themes (i.g the Firework theme above) on their upselling and cross-selling offers to immediately attract their visitors’ attention and motivate them to have a look at the good deals.

Born with big data and machine learning technology, Boost Sales automatically picked the appropriate products to recommend to the right customers. After the free-trial period, Vivid Light Bars decided to stick with Boost Sales’ premium plan to continually taking advantage of the automatic advances that the app has brought them and so far, Vivid Light Bars is doing pretty good to create more sales monthly.


How about the pain of manually sending emails that has been mentioned above? Vivid Light Bars got rid of it, too! “Mailbot actually takes the burden off our shoulder!” That was what they talked about Mailbot - the Beeketing’s email automation tool which helped send personalized automation emails to follow-up each unique customer based on their behaviors. “All we need to do is just lift a finger and “approve” all emails to be sent out. How come life could be that easy?”


There were a wide range of top-notch features of the app that Vivid Light Bars has succeeded in making a good use of.

First, in order to fight back their high abandonment cart rate, Vivid Light Bars activated one of the most effective automation email campaigns of MailBot: Cart Abandonment. The app would instantly send a follow-up email to those who added items to cart but didn’t check out. This tactic has been proven to be one of the most efficient re-marketing strategies, which aims to remind customers and encourage them to come back and buy.

Secondly, Vivid Light Bars also took their chance to promote similar products based on customers’ browsing histories and send these personalized orders via the tailored upsell emails. By showing that they cared about and took time to understand their customers and introducing them appropriate deals, Vivid Light Bars has taken out their opportunities of doing business.

Last but not least, Mailbot helped to create a variety of well-designed newsletters with many well written templates to promote their new arrivals every week. Not only did the app pick the products and send these newsletters in an automatic way, but it also randomly chose a email subject line, preheader and email template for each customer, so that the store’s newsletters have never made their customers feel bored.

Results

Vivid Light Bars has already tried out 8 Beeketing apps and decided to stay with 3 paid apps for the long run. Needless to say, they saw practical benefits generated from Personalized Recommendations, Boost Sales and Mailbot apps. Vivid Light Bars generated $23,000 in revenue with 3 Beeketing paid apps only and brought their ROI to a higher level. They also experienced a 53% uplift in their AOV after 3 months. It’s pretty much a huge achievement and Beeketing is proud of our contribution to their remarkable success.