How Beauty Store Doubled Orders with Seasonal Campaigns?

beauty store

Regardless of the occasion, holidays are always important for e-commerce store owners. These are the times when they get the chance to build a customer base and trust. Chances are that the better offers we communicate these times of the year the more visitors will buy that one special gift from us.

I’m pretty sure that as an e-commerce store owner, seasonal periods mean tough days for you as well. You always aim for the best so you put prolonged working hours and big money to create your seasonal campaigns. And when it all comes to an end, all you’re wishing for is a well-deserved rest. Does it ring a bell? 🙂

If your answer is yes, I have good news for you: we, at OptiMonk, are working day-by-day to help you succeed in seasonal periods as well with minimal effort. If you’d like to know the secret, read our case study below where we’re showing you beautiful seasonal templates that will help you succeed during the holidays.

Results

Let it be Christmas, Valentine’s Day or coupon days, the e-commerce store called Szepsegcenter runs short, seasonal campaigns regularly during these important periods of the year. The main goals of these campaigns are usually to inform visitors, to redirect traffic and to collect email subscribers. Besides these campaigns, they run regular campaigns to decrease cart abandonment rates as well.

Statistics

+ 20% revenue during Valentine’s Day
+ 2,000 subscribers
+ 100% increase in revenue during Spring Coupon Days

With the help of the lucky wheel campaign created before Christmas back in November, they have collected no less than 2,000 email addresses. With the help of the campaign launched during Valentine’s Day, they have managed to increase their revenue by 20% in only 2 days

If we take into consideration that during this period of the year visitors are more willing to buy sweets for their loved ones rather than cosmetics, this is an amazing result. Their latest, 3-day campaign launched during Spring Coupon Days has brought record results: they have managed to double their order numbers on the very 1st day of the campaign!

Meet the beauty shop, called ‘Szepsegcenter’

Meet the beauty shop

The SzepsegCenter.hu e-commerce store is selling exciting, quality and effective Asian products for skin treatment and professional make-up products. Besides this, they also place a great emphasis on educating their visitors.

Their skin-care products are paraben free, free of any harmful substances and are 100% skin-friendly and hypoallergenic. Visitors can also find aroma-free cosmetics in their store. One cannot neglect the fact that Asian cosmetics and make-up products they sell are ‘cruelty-free’ products.

Challenges

The goal of Szepsegcenter was to keep their visitors on-site and decrease the cart abandonment rates – this is why they have decided to use the exit-intent popups offered by OptiMonk. The main challenge that they were facing was the on-site redirection of visitors.

Since they have started to use OptiMonk they can easily communicate the current offers with the help of popups. This way, they are able to direct their visitors to the landing pages of the current campaigns. The redirection option is also useful for them when the product that the visitor is looking for is not currently on stock – in this case, they can redirect the visitor to other, available products.

This is a great way of directing visitors to buy in cases when the product they are looking for is no longer available. This is a method that absolutely worth trying as once we have hardly acquired our visitors we won’t like them to leave with an empty cart. Don’t let them go even if the product they are looking for is not currently available. Show them alternative products and hold their hands to buy the product that we’d like them to.

As we can see from the example of Szepsegcenter, as e-commerce store owners, we have to take control of our visitors into our own hands. We shouldn’t expect them to spend hours browsing our store until they find the right product. 

Nowadays we’re always in a rush so people don’t have time for browsing long hours. This is especially true during the holiday season. If we don’t show them the products that we’d like them to buy they will simply move on. They will move on to our competitors where they are shown with the perfect gift right away.

Solution

Based on Szepsegcenter’s experience, addressing visitors with the help of popups is much more effective than the product recommendations placed on the bottom of the pages. This is especially true during holidays when everybody goes a bit crazy when it comes to buying the perfect present 🙂 

In most cases, in-built product recommendations go unnoticed by visitors and are not as attractive as a popup.

It cannot be emphasized enough that visitors are all different. Why would we show the same in-built product recommendation to everyone if we have the option to communicate personalized, real-time offers?

The seasonal campaigns of Szepsegcenter are proof of how a seasonal popup can bring us more orders as compared to a simple product recommendation module. With using OptiMonk, this is an easy win. 🙂 For that, all you have to have is a great campaign plan and the seasonal templates of OptiMonk.

We have interviewed Eszter Sári, the Webshop Manager of Szepsegcenter about how did they increase their orders with the help of OptiMonk.

Hi Eszter, can you tell us more about your main responsibilities as a Webshop Manager?  

As a Webshop Manager, my main responsibilities include introducing innovations and technical questions. Every programme related to the store is my responsibility. 🙂

Who is the target audience of the store?

The target audience of Szepsegcenter is 16-65 years old women who care for their skin and makeup.

What was the main goal that you wanted to achieve?

Collecting email subscribers, increasing on-site conversion rates, traffic redirection, decreasing cart abandonment rates, collecting customer feedbacks, keeping visitors on the site.

How did you get in touch with OptiMonk?

We started to use OptiMonk during a previous Black Friday campaign.

Why OptiMonk?

Because of the easy-to-use, beautiful and varied templates, because of the segmentation options and because of the also easy-to-use administration interface.

What type of campaigns did you use to achieve your goals?

We’re using several campaign groups and templates that are in line with our goals. When it comes to building email lists, the Lucky Wheel template brought us unexpectedly incredible results. 

We’re using the Madrid template for cart abandonment rate and it has proven very effective so far. Besides these, we are not letting our visitors go without products in case of an empty stock, with the help of the Triest template we offer them alternative products to order.

We love to alternate between the templates during seasonal campaigns so that our visitors are always presented with new stuff. Usually, we adjust the design of a classical template to fit the outlook of our store and we use attention-catching CTA buttons, texting and countdown timers to make sure that visitors will actually take advantage of the offer.

What campaign settings did you use?

We’re trying to use the popups in a very user-friendly way as we don’t want them to go to the nerves of our visitors. They usually fire after a certain period of time or exit-intent. There are some that only fire on specific subpages. 

We’re using OptiMonk on most of the subpages, therefore we usually use the exclusion rule on some subpages not to have too many popups firing on the same subpage. We also love the Link OptiMonk campaigns setting with the help of which we can, for example, exclude those visitors who already signed up via another popup from seeing a certain offer.

How did you find the setup process?

The setup is as easy as pie, it’s transparent and logical – we’re saving a lot of time by being able to set up new campaigns within seconds.

How do you measure the effectiveness of OptiMonk?

We monitor the statistics in the OptiMonk account, we have connected the campaigns with Google Analytics and are doing regular A/B tests – we are constantly fine-tuning the campaigns based on the results achieved.

How long did it take you to see the first results?

It was instant under all of the campaigns.

How did OptiMonk impact your core metrics? Did you experience any increases in revenue or growth after starting to use OptiMonk?

We can see the positive change in case of all of our indicators. Compared to the period before OptiMonk, we’ve been collecting much more email subscribers, there are fewer cart abandoners and visitors are spending more time browsing the store. 

The final conversion varies from campaign to campaign, but as compared to the period before OptiMonk, the results are much more positive.

Which is your favorite OptiMonk function and why?

It’s hard to pick one – maybe the ‘Link OptiMonk campaigns’ setting. We’re using this setting when we’d like to show a campaign that’s connected to another one. 

For example, after an email subscription popup has been filled out by the visitor you can communicate a coupon code as a reminder or a countdown timer about the expiry of the coupon code. 

This works very well without disturbing your visitors and helps the campaign become successful on a large scale.

What would you tell those ecommerce store owners who didn’t yet start conversion optimization on their store?

They are missing a huge opportunity if they are not starting to work on the conversion rates. OptiMonk wouldn’t be used by so many people out there if it didn’t bring such great results and you wouldn’t like to use your visitors, right?  🙂

Templates and campaign settings

Now let’s take a closer look at the seasonal campaigns of Szepsegcenter and their settings.

1. Christmas Wheel

With the Christmas period approaching, the Szepsegcenter store launched a lucky wheel campaign with the goal of collecting more subscribers and drive more sales.

Before OptiMonk they were using another popup tool, however, the lucky wheel campaign started on the 29th of November was so successful that they’ve been using the same template ever since.

It’s clearly visible that in terms of email addresses growth was limited before using OptiMonk. Since activating the lucky wheel campaign we can see a nice increase in subscriptions. This growth is visible in MailChimp as well:

Mailchimp subscribers

Besides experiencing a growth in terms of subscriptions, coupon codes and gifts brought the desired effects – currently, the coupons spun with the Lucky Wheel campaign are the most popular amongst their visitors. 

The coupons were used in more than 30% of the purchases and beside the increase of orders, they saw a 22% increase in the average cart value as well (in spite of the fact that the coupon code with the highest value offered a 20% OFF only).

They ran an A/B test under the campaign and created 2 variants. The goal of the A/B test was to check how lower volume discounts work as compared to the ones with higher volume. 

Surprisingly, the results of the test show that visitors of the store are more willing to take advantage of lower volume discounts and provide their email addresses if they come with a gift.

When an A/B test is run, the variants under the campaigns are proportionally displayed to visitors in 50-50%. With the help of the test variant A (lower volume discounts and a gift) managed to collect somehow more email addresses (1,074) as compared to variant B (higher volume discounts without any gift) which brought 1,008 subscriptions.

The campaign is a great example of the fact that you don’t necessarily have to communicate offers that won’t do any good to our wallets – similar to Szepsegcenter, it’s worth testing what kind of discounts work with our visitors best and take a decision based on these results.

Variant A:

Although we can see several discounts on the wheel, from these only the 500 HUF discount and the free make-up bag could be spun out by the visitors. You might be wondering what’s in showing a discount to your visitors when they will never be able to get it? 

If we look at the Spinning Wheel from a marketing perspective this setting can do the trick as it has a strong psychological effect on your visitors. 

The reason is quite simple: the more attention catching discounts you place on the wheel, the more willingly your visitors will provide their email data to spin. As our goal with this setting is to collect as many email subscribers as possible it will take us closer to our ultimate goal 🙂

The coupon codes could only be applied to orders above 4,990 HUF, so besides building an email list they could increase the average cart value as well:

Besides using coupon codes they’ve been trying to cause a sense of urgency in their visitors by limiting the expiration date of the coupon codes to 1 week:

Lucky wheel popup campaign

A Tab was used under the campaign. You have the option to set up a so-called ‘Tab’ under each campaign which is useful because it makes the offer remain visible in the right or left corner of the site. 

This way you can make sure that the message communicated on the campaign will be accessible anytime to your visitors and to those who already closed it before.

The campaign was set up in a way that the Tab was accessible to those who closed the popup, therefore offering them a second chance to spin.

Variant B:

Besides the 500 HUF discount and free make-up bag, higher volume discounts (5% and 10% OFF) were communicated under variant B:

Lucky wheel popup campaign

Similarly to variant A, discounts under variant B were only granted in case of cart value above 4,990 HUF. The only difference was that they couldn’t be used on products that were already discounted or luxury samples:

Lucky wheel popup campaign

The campaign ran with the following settings (the email addresses were forwarded to MailChimp):

Popup campaign settings

The campaign proves that it is definitely worth to run use A/B testing – with the help of it, Szepsegcenter managed to collect no less than 2,000 email subscribers since November. And as we’re talking about a campaign that’s still Active (only the background has been changed after Christmas passing by), these numbers will be definitely growing further.

2. Valentine’s Day offer and Nanobar reminder

With the approach of Valentine’s Day, Szepsegcenter launched a 3-day campaign. During these 3 days, they offered a free make-up bag to every order above 4,990 HUF. 

As the campaign’s main goal was to inform the visitors about the offer, they communicated the offer to each visitor who attempted to leave the site without ordering and was browsing the site for at least 1 seconds:

Valentines Day Offer popup campaign

The message of the campaign was quite simple and since the popup was the primary source of communicating Valentine’s Day offer visitors were informed instantly about it right after arriving to the store.

When they have launched the campaign they were well aware that sweets and small gifts are more popular during this period of the year than cosmetics, therefore they didn’t have high expectations from the campaign. 

They didn’t use any advanced segmentation options and they still managed to achieve a 20% increase in revenue in only 3 days by communicating the offer via the popup. Given the fact that their products are not the most popular ones during Valentine’s Day, this was a nice achievement.

The campaign was running with the below settings:

Popup settings summary

Since they didn’t want to ruin the browsing experience, during these 3 days only this campaign (and the nanobar reminder tied to it) was running and available for every visitor.

(Note: if you’d like to make your seasonal offers available for every visitor, feel free to use basic campaign settings. At the same time, in case of long-term offers, to support the browsing experience, we’d recommend using advanced settings and segmenting the visitors as much as you can.)

During the Valentine’s Day campaign, the following nanobar reminder was used:

Valentines Day reminder nanobar

The nanobar was displayed to those visitors browsing from mobile and PC who clicked on the popup to see the offers and were browsing the site for at least 10 seconds. It was also visible to those visitors who closed the popup and were not interested in the offer at first, therefore offering them a second chance:

They tried to cause a sense of urgency in their visitors with the help of the countdown timer. By emphasizing the expiry of the offer they were trying to make their visitors place their orders now without any hesitation. 🙂

Similar nanobar reminders can work well in case of coupon campaigns as well. For example, it might be worth using them if we have a coupon campaign and would like to remind our visitors of their coupon codes. This way, we can even increase the chance of the coupons being used during checkout.

During the set up of nanobar reminders in case of coupon campaigns, we should keep in mind to only display them to those who already filled out the popup with the coupon codes. This way, we can make sure that we won’t disturb those visitors who were not interested in the offer communicated on the popup.

If it’s a seasonal campaign that we have created the nanobar for, we can safely use the settings similar to the above Valentine’s Day nanobar reminder.

3. Coupon days campaign and nanobar reminder

With the Spring Coupon Days approaching the Szepsegcenter e-commerce store launched another short, 3-day campaign.

They’ve been using a template different from the Lucky Wheel one under this campaign, the Milan one. 

With the help of this template, they were able to direct their visitors to the landing page of the offer and by using the link OptiMonk campaigns setting they were able to set up a nanobar reminder to communicate the expiry of the offer to their visitors. 

By communicating a clear message during the campaign they have managed to double their orders and to increase the average on-site conversion rate with 21%. The fact that people are more willing to do their shopping during this period also contributed to this result.

During the coupon days, visitors were offered a 40% OFF on certain products and those whose order value reached the previously used 4,990 HUF value received a free face mask. This way, they were able to increase the average cart value as well:

Coupon days popup campaign

Similarly to the Valentine Day’s campaign, the goal here was to reach out to as many visitors as possible with the offer. This was successfully completed as they have managed to double the orders within only 1 day during the campaign!

The campaign ran with the following settings:

popup settings

To remind their visitors of the offer and to create a sense of urgency they were using a nanobar reminder connected to this campaign as well:

Reminder nanobar

The nanobar ran with the following settings:

nanobar settings

The nanobar was displayed to those visitors browsing from mobile and PC who clicked on the popup to see the offers and were browsing the site for at least 10 seconds. As in case of the Valentine’s Day nanobar reminder, it was also visible to those visitors who closed the popup and were not interested in the offer at first, therefore offering them a second chance.

Summary

We can see that with the help of seasonal campaigns we can increase our revenue even if the product that we are selling is not the most popular one during the given holiday. 

With the help of the Valentine’s Day campaign, the Szepsegcenter e-commerce store managed to increase their revenues with 20% in only 3 days, in spite of the fact that cosmetics are not the most popular products during this time of the year.

The Lucky Wheel campaign launched for the Christmas season is proof that we can build a subscriber database effectively with using minimal discounts. The results of the A/B test and the collected 2,000 subscribers prove this further. 🙂 

With the campaign launched during the Spring Coupon Days they have managed to double the orders on the very 1st day of the campaign which is an amazing result and it reflects the importance of guiding and directing our visitors on the site, in real time.

Congratulations to these wonderful results!

“We use our seasonal campaigns to inform our visitors about the current offers. Besides spending more time on the site, we have managed to catch their attention and they were able to understand our campaigns better. This was also visible on the order numbers. Generally speaking, I can safely claim that with the help of OptiMonk, we were able to increase the order numbers no matter which template was used even in the periods where there were only a few orders - something that we couldn’t achieve when no popups were used.”

If you as well would like to achieve such great results, why no try OptiMonk? You can easily create a free account. Or if you already have an account, just sign in.

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