JUNE 2015 © Copyright 2015.

Forbes Insights.All rights reserved.

Ask any online retailer: Abandoned

shopping carts are the bane of their existence.

Some estimates say at least 70 percent of online

shoppers leave items in their carts without ever

clicking the “buy” button.1 Abandonment rates for

fashion and footwear sites are even higher.

Most online retailers don’t do anything about it. But by

June 2014, casual shoe company Crocs decided to take

action to recover lost sales attributed to the dreaded

abandoned shopping cart. “Our goal was to reengage

site visitors who placed products in their shopping

carts and left before completing their purchase,” says

Kelsey Vendetti, email marketing manager, North

America, at Crocs. “We knew we were leaving money

on the table.”

Founded in 2002, Crocs shot to fame in 2007 when

its colorful clogs were embraced by boaters, gardeners

and children. Today, the company sells more than 300

footwear styles, including boots, wedges and loafers.

Closing more online sales in an ever more competitive

market was a matter of getting “the right content in front

of the right customer at the right time,” says Vendetti.

With today’s busy lifestyles, some people need a

gentle reminder or an offer of help to get that job

done. Providing that input in a non-pushy way was key.

Toward that end, in June 2014 Crocs tested a

marketing conversion platform aimed at turning

around its soaring cart abandonment rates. The system

identifies shoppers who leave items in their cart

without completing the purchase and sends targeted

emails at specified intervals to encourage them to

finish their purchase. Since the full implementation of

the tool went live at the beginning of 2015, Crocs has

improved its abandonment rates by nearly 5 percent—

better than expected. Plans are in the works to expand

the use of the marketing platform to tackle abandoned

browse and abandoned search.

Through Targeted Emails, Crocs Entices Customers Back to Their Carts

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Casual shoemaker Crocs is recovering lost revenue by encouraging shoppers to return to their abandoned online carts.

BY LAUREN GIBBONS PAUL

FORBES INSIGHTS 1

C A S E S T U D Y

1. http://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate

“Abandoned shopping carts are probably the biggest

problem that e-commerce websites have,” says Glenn

Gow, CEO of consulting firm Crimson Marketing.

“[E-tailers] spend a lot of money trying to get people

to the website and get them engaged. The Holy Grail

is the checkout. If the shopping cart gets abandoned,

they struggle to try to figure out why.”

MISSION: CONVERT BROWSERS TO BUYERSAbandoned shopping carts have been a problem for

Crocs ever since the company opened up shop online.

In recent years, cart abandonment rates approached a

disheartening 95 percent. Crocs is far from alone in

facing this problem (see Figure 2, “The Scope of the

Problem”), but that doesn’t do much to soften the blow.

HEADQUARTERS: Niwot, Colo.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 4,000

INDUSTRY: Casual footwear

YEAR FOUNDED: 2002

ANNUAL SALES: $1.2 billion (2014)

PAIRS OF SHOES SOLD: More than 300 million

POINT OF INNOVATION: Croslite™ material, a

proprietary technology that makes Crocs shoes

soft, lightweight and odor-resistant, according to

the company.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ACTIVITY: Since 2007,

the Crocs Cares program has donated more than 3

million pairs of shoes to people in need all over

the world.

FIGURE 1 Crocs at a Glance

Source: Crocs

FORBES INSIGHTS

Prior to implementing the marketing conversion

solution, Crocs used a homegrown cart recovery

program that triggered up to two emails, the first of

which was sent 24 hours after a shopper abandoned

the cart and a second that followed at the 72-hour

mark. “This ‘send cadence’ was not optimized,” says

Vendetti; in other words, 24 hours is too long of a time

lapse before sending the first email. “By then, people

had either moved on and bought something

somewhere else or forgotten about it,” she says. “Our

program was not serving our customers well enough

to get them back to the site.”

At the same time, the company did not have sufficient

internal technical development staff to devote to

creating a solution. “We knew we needed an

automated solution to help fight abandoned carts,”

says Vendetti.

ENGAGING WITH CUSTOMERSWhen Vendetti and her team looked for a tool to

recapture cart abandonment revenue, their top

priorities were ease of implementation, quick

implementation and ease of use. Early on, they chose a

full-featured marketing conversion solution that would

give them the functionality to expand beyond email

campaigns in the future.

Now, with the automated solution in place, browsers

who abandon items in the shopping cart receive an

email shortly thereafter, followed by another message

a day or so later and a final one, possibly containing a

discount code, if the purchase is still unconsummated

up to a week later.

“We wanted these messages to be customer-focused

rather than pushy,” says Vendetti. To that end, the first

message assumes something went wrong on Crocs’

side with the transaction that prevented the purchase

from being completed. The second message is, “How

can we help?” The third one—if necessary—introduces

an incentive, asking, “Does your shopping cart need a

little push?” “We try to take the approach of ‘Let us

help you’ vs. ‘You forgot to buy.’ That is important,”

she says.

Crimson Marketing’s Gow applauds Crocs’ use of email

follow-ups, particularly the one that blames the site.

“It’s an acknowledgment they may have made a

mistake,” he says, even if the site most likely was

functioning just fine. “They’re making their users feel

good,” Gow adds. “I give them huge credit for that.”

However, he cautions all e-tailers against overuse of

discounts as an enticement. “Word gets out really fast,

and then your shopping cart abandonment rates will

actually go up as people hold off on making the

purchase until they get the discount,” Gow says. Save

these offers for VIP customers and use them sparingly,

he advises.

Since the full implementation of the tool went live at the beginning of 2015, Crocs has improved its abandonment rates by nearly 5 percent—better than expected.

2 FORBES INSIGHTS

C A S E S T U D Y

FIGURE 2 The Scope of the ProblemForecasted online sales 2014

$1.4 trillion

Abandoned online sales 2014

$3 trillion

Source: Rakuten

FIGURE 3 Recoverable Revenue $4 TRILLION: Amount of merchandise forecast to

be abandoned in online shopping charts this year

75%: Percent of shoppers who have abandoned

shopping carts and say they plan to return to the

retailer’s website or store to make a purchase

63%: Percent of abandoned cart merchandise

that is potentially recoverable by online retailers

Source: BI Intelligence and SeeWhy

The pilot program took about six weeks to get up and

running. “That was on our side, creating the emails and

setting up the tags,” says Vendetti. The tagging was

done on Crocs’ website so that the tool could link the

items the shopper had been looking at to the follow-

up email messages. The trial program offered a

sufficient proof of concept, and Crocs went ahead with

a full implementation in January 2015.

FORBES INSIGHTS

Marketers see email as one of the most effective

digital channels (see Figure 4, “Email Effectiveness”),

but critical to the program’s success, Vendetti believes,

is that the messages avoid the hard sell. “Our

customers now receive timely, engaging, personalized

messages so they can return to the Crocs.com website

at their own pace to complete their purchase,” she

says. “It is important for our team to treat this as a

service-level campaign and not come across as overly

marketing-heavy or pushy.”

Overall, the cart recovery campaign is generating

additional incremental revenue each month and

growing. “We’re thrilled,” says Vendetti. “This program

has proven the value of real-time triggered emails.” •

ABOUT FORBES INSIGHTSForbes Insights is the strategic research and thought leadership practice of Forbes Media, publisher of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com, whose combined media properties reach nearly 50 million business decision-makers worldwide on a monthly basis.

Bruce RogersCHIEF INSIGHTS OFFICER

Brian McLeodDIRECTOR, NORTH AMERICA

Writer: Lauren Gibbons Paul has written extensively on customer

relationship management and customer experience management for

more than 15 years.

Crocs’ email campaign nurtures customers as opposed

to pushing them to buy. “It’s continual outreach to

someone you know something about. You want to

create a great shopping experience that will bring

customers back,” says Gow. Studies also indicate that

buyers who abandon carts are recoverable by savvy

online retailers (see Figure 3, “Recoverable Revenue”).

EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONSCertainly, the numbers suggest Crocs is very much on

the right track with the cart recovery campaign. “We

didn’t have a clear conversion rate goal so [the 5

percent boost] exceeded our expectations,” Vendetti

says. Gow agrees that the reclamation rate is

impressive. “The email cost is almost nothing because

you automated it, so those additional sales go right to

the bottom line,” he says.

“We are seeing incremental revenue grow month to

month,” adds Vendetti. “It is exciting.”

“We are seeing incremental revenue grow month to month. It is exciting.”

—KELSEY VENDETTI, EMAIL MARKETING MANAGER, NORTH AMERICA, CROCS

FORBES INSIGHTS 3

C A S E S T U D Y

FIGURE 4 Email Effectiveness

Fairly effective Very effective

Email

2012 31% 13%

2014 34% 24%

Online display

2012 30% 19%

2014 36% 23%

Advertising search engine

2012 33% 19%

2014 37% 24%

Mobile

2012 32% 18%

2014 33% 25%

Social media

2012 30% 18%

2014 34% 22%

Base: 581 senior marketers Sources: CMO Insights/Accenture, 2013/2014

Of all the digital channels, email has seen the highest growth in perceived effectiveness (percent of respondents).

Achieving One-to-One, Personalized Engagements Through Real-Time Contextual Marketing Consumers today are more digitally and socially connected than ever before. In fact, according to a

study by Vivaldi Partners Group, 48 percent of U.S adults can be considered “always-on” consumers:

they use three connected devices everyday, get online multiple times a day and do so from at least

three different locations. As a result, they are much more knowledgeable about products and services.

Forbes Insights spoke with Rosa Hu, director of solution marketing at SAP, about how marketing can

reach these new consumers.

How has marketing evolved to keep up with constantly changing customer expectations? Marketers have been striving to deliver highly personalized and relevant customer engagements at

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What does contextual marketing entail? Context comes from understanding who each customer is, what they are doing and what they are

likely to do. Developing that full context enables you to market in a way that is uniquely relevant to

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How can businesses market to an audience of one through contextual marketing? An average marketing department has over 36 different customer management and interaction systems,

often relying on separate tools for email, Web, social listening, social marketing, mobile apps, etc. Most

of these systems offer little or no integration with other systems, and by the time it’s all pulled

together, the customer data is no longer relevant.

SAP’s hybris Marketing solution enables marketers to unify the customer view by consolidating key

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Contextual marketing systematically enables marketers to mass-personalize customer experiences by leveraging insights into customers’ unique intentions and motivations, derived from relevant data sources in real time.

C A S E S T U D Y