Omniture Articles

Peet's Tests Email Promo - 21% Net RPV Lift

Opportunity

Peet’s Coffee & Tea wanted the answer to a simple question: What is the ideal minimum order size for free shipping promotions on outbound email campaigns?

Peet’s, a specialty coffee roaster and marketer of fresh, deep-roasted whole bean coffee and hand-selected teas, had developed a very effective email strategy to drive sales from their existing customer base. They knew that strong creative and promotion was predictably driving strong response and conversion rates. But they wondered whether they were leaving money on the table. Specifically, could they optimize their free shipping promotion to drive higher revenue at a lower cost? It was a great candidate for testing.

Unfortunately, while testing emails is becoming more common, and testing promotions is by no means unheard of, email promotion testing leads to user experience and delivery issues that can be daunting for most e-commerce companies. Specifically:

  1. Repetition
    The path from email click to conversion is usually across multiple pages. The promotion must be reinforced to ensure that the customer absorbs the message. Unfortunately, creating a separate site for each version of the email is prohibitive.
  2. Consistency
    You can create three different email bodies with three promotions, but you will likely send the customer to your site for conversion. If another promotion is showing on the site, it introduces noise that can invalidate the test conclusion.

Working with Offermatica, Peet’s created an email test that eliminated these issues.

Actions Taken

Offermatica placed “mboxes,” or content slots, in which the promotion would appear, on existing pages on their site.

The content of those boxes changed depending on the original offer a visitor received via email. If a customer received an email offering free shipping with orders of X amount, they saw a banner on the site offering free shipping with orders of X amount.

Customers who received emails offering free shipping with orders of Y amount saw banners on the site offering free shipping with Y amount.

The promotion was also reinforced deeper within the site, so visitors saw their specific offer not only on the home page but again on gift pages as they browsed –– and again, those banners were specific to the offer they had received via email.

Results

Using Offermatica, testing the promotion via email and reinforcing the promotion on the site, Peet’s found an optimum free shipping threshold that resulted in a 21 percent improvement in net revenue per visit.