Even the most successful B2C brands face the same challenges most digital marketers do. They’re losing potential customers and wasting the money spent on visitor acquisition because of prospects who leave ’empty-handed’.
Although it’s a huge problem for online retailers, it also provides a significant opportunity to generate more sales.
Below we walk you through the entire process of how the viral sensation BlendJet increased its revenue by 39.2% by including OptiMonk popups in their marketing strategy.
190,000+
subscribers within 4 months
39.2%
extra revenue
ABOUT BLENDJET
BlendJet was founded in 2017 with an ambitious goal: to help make the world healthier! They created the BlendJet One because they wanted a convenient way to make fresh smoothies, shakes, margaritas, & baby food on the go. By the end of 2018, BlendJet.com was one of the most successful Shopify stores. They have reached over half a million customers and the portable blender was even featured on The Ellen Show.
Shortcuts ✂️
- The story of BlendJet
- Industry standards
- Tip #1: Save your cart abandoners
- Tip #2: Help your product page visitors make a decision with a special offer
- Tip #3: Don’t let your early-stage visitors leave without subscribing
- Tip #4: Build a second channel to increase your sales
- Tip #5: A/B test not only your creatives but also your channels
- 5 key takeaways from BlendJet’s success
- Why BlendJet chose OptiMonk
The story of BlendJet
There were two guys, Ryan Pamplin and John Zheng (founders of BlendJet), who had one thing in common.
Let’s start with Ryan’s story which is amazing. Ryan had a freak accident that caused a traumatic brain injury. He couldn’t read, use a computer, phone, watch TV, or even think straight for months. During his recovery, he had smoothies every day.
And there was John, a good friend of his, who has been drinking protein shakes since he was 12, but he hated using a shaker bottle and how his protein shakes had dry powder clumps and tasted terrible.
After a few discussions, they visualized a convenient way to make smoothies and protein shakes on the go: this visualization became a product very soon, called BlendJet.
They wanted to make an impact with their product. To make a sale is not just about making more revenue but making someone’s life better by helping them become and stay healthier.
When they started, they made a video of their product with big dreams, and it was so successful that they sold out of their initial inventory in weeks.
Today, they are one of the fastest-growing Shopify stores in the world. BlendJet is beloved by over 500,000 customers across the globe in nearly every country, especially health-conscious millennials and mums.
Industry standards
Ecommerce store owners face the same uphill battle: 97% of visitors leave an average website without buying, which means wasted time… lost money…
But the ones who succeed, like Ryan and John, are the ones who have the courage to try new things. They’re the ones who are not only focusing on getting more traffic, but they are trying new marketing strategies continuously.
They are not afraid to spend some money to convert existing traffic into valuable sales and leads.
BlendJet realized that early on, so they have been looking into various solutions and they started using Recart as an early adopter of Facebook Messenger marketing.
And then, at the beginning of 2019, our very good friends at Recart suggested OptiMonk to the BlendJet team as the perfect tool to increase their conversion rates.
BlendJet started to use OptiMonk in May 2019, and since then, they have seen a huge increase in conversions and revenue.
Now let’s take a closer look at the campaigns BlendJet used to convert their visitors into customers. I’m going to show you a few little secrets that led up to their success.
Tip #1: Save your cart abandoners
Statistics show that 7 out of 10 visitors will leave the items of their cart behind without completing the checkout.
It is crucial to try to capture those who were nearly ready to press the button and give them a good reason to come back.
With the help of OptiMonk, that is exactly what BlendJet did by offering those visitors a 10% discount to encourage them to return whenever they are ready to grab their portable blenders.
They displayed the popup below on the checkout page and the cart page when visitors were about to leave their site.
Thanks to our automatic coupon redeem feature for Shopify stores, when visitors click on the button on the thank you page, the coupon is added automatically to their cart and they can enjoy the discount.
Thanks to these campaigns, BlendJet was able to collect 15,000+ new subscribers (both email and Messenger) from cart abandoners.
Tip #2: Help your product page visitors make a decision with a special offer
Now, what about visitors who show interest in your products, but did not make a decision yet?
BlendJet didn’t forget about them either. They gave the same discount – 10% off – for visitors who are currently on the product page and haven’t subscribed before.
In this case, they differentiated:
- mobile users and PC users,
- visitors from the United States and visitors from non-US countries.
The offer was exactly the same in all cases, but they wanted to know what works best in the USA and outside the borders.
Thanks to the personalized campaigns, they were able to see that on the product page, the Lead to Sales conversion among the US-based customers is 20.96%, whereas it is only 13.27% outside of the US. Interesting!
Now, let’s see the settings of this popup.
They used a time-display setting, so the popup appeared when a visitor has been on the page for at least 30 seconds. They excluded visitors who already seen any of the other campaigns.
Believe it or now, BlendJet was able to collect more than 155,000 subscribers with the campaigns that were created for product page visitors.
Tip #3: Don’t let your early-stage visitors leave without subscribing
As you can see from the campaigns above, the ultimate goal of BlendJet was to not let visitors leave without subscribing or buying.
We’ve talked about cart abandoners… hot leads who are browsing the product page… what about early-stage visitors?
For new leads, they created a subscriber nanobar that is displayed at the bottom of the screen continuously as they’re scrolling through. A nanobar is great because it doesn’t disturb visitors while browsing the site, yet it is a constant reminder for visitors to take action.
They offered 10% off the first order in exchange for a subscription.
The nanobar did not appear on the product pages, checkout, cart, or thank you pages. So, it did not appear to visitors who had the intent to purchase.
It was only displayed to visitors who were getting to know the brand, browsing the main page, their tips, recipes, or the FAQs.
They also used OptiMonk’s campaign linking segmentation to make sure no one sees this nanobar who has already seen any of their other campaigns.
When visitors subscribed to the popup, the email address was forwarded immediately to their Klaviyo list. This way, they could send a welcome email right away.
Thanks to this campaign, they were able to collect more than 20,000 subscribers within just 4 months.
Tip #4: Build a second channel to increase your sales
That’s not all!
As mentioned before, the BlendJet team uses Recart for Messenger marketing, so they decided to collect subscribers for both their email list and their Messenger list.
Here you can see the same nanobar as above, but this time it has a Messenger subscription box:
To create the best experience and convert more visitors to subscribers, they used OptiMonk’s Smart Display feature.
Smart Display detects if your visitors are logged in to Facebook and allows you to automatically show the Messenger (logged in) or the email (logged out) experience based on that.
This way, you’ll never have to make your visitors log in to Facebook, and you can increase your conversion rates significantly. When you can’t provide the one-click Messenger subscription, your OptiMonk campaign falls back to the email experience.
Using the Recart integration, the BlendJet team was able to send a welcome message in Facebook Messenger immediately after visitors signed up:
Using Facebook Messenger as one of their channels, BlendJet achieved a 84.90% open rate and a 11.40% click rate.
Thanks to all the coupon campaigns, BlendJet was able to generate 39.2% extra revenue with OptiMonk.
Tip #5: A/B test not only your creatives but also your channels
As you can see above, one of the main specialities of all BlendJet campaigns was that they A/B tested their campaigns. A/B testing was a critical part of ensuring if they were making data-driven decisions.
Unlike usual, instead of testing the look of the campaigns, they tested the channels. For each campaign, they created an SMS, an email and a Messenger subscription to understand what is the best channel to get in touch with leads and send promo codes.
This experiment showed BlendJet that for example on the checkout page a cart abandonment campaign converted 20% better via Messenger than email.
We think that every business should test different channels when it comes to communicating with customers and leads.
And this kind of A/B testing gives you a better understanding of what is the best way to reach leads for your business.
5 key takeaways from BlendJet’s success
1) Display an exit-intent popup on the checkout page and the cart page for cart abandoners and generate extra revenue for your store.
2) Pay special attention to visitors who are browsing your product pages and help them make a decision.
3) Don’t let first-time visitors leave without taking any action, get their email addresses with an offer.
4) Build a Facebook Messenger list and achieve higher open rates and click rates.
5) A/B testing your channels can help you make data-driven decisions.
Why BlendJet chose OptiMonk
“My initial thought was that I hate popups, but data doesn't lie and customers vote with their dollars. We methodically tested OptiMonk popups vs. no popups, and proved without a doubt that we make far more sales with OptiMonk popups, and clearly our users want our special offer. When comparing OptiMonk vs. other leading solutions, no one has the valuable integrations we need, robust testing capabilities, and amazing team to support our ever-evolving needs.”
The story of BlendJet shows that segmentation and personalization give you the best possible chance to convert your visitors into customers.
Differentiating your visitors not only helps you better understand them, but it also has a significant impact on your revenue.
As we can see, using some well-designed popups help drive immediate sales and reduce cart abandonment as well.
Congratulations, Ryan!
If you as well would like to achieve such great results, why not try OptiMonk? You can easily create a free account. Or if you already have an account, just sign in.
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