Moss Bros attributes up to £5,000 of sales per week to its use of cart abandonment emails

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Moss Bros has been an iconic brand on the UK high-street, since the company was established and founded in a quiet corner of London's Covent Garden in 1851. As a leading formal menswear specialist the company has over 135 retail stores and a burgeoning e-commerce business, Moss Bros online, which was launched in 2009.

The challenge

Moss Bros initially contacted Triggered Messaging to help with a common problem that faces e-commerce retailers of all sizes and sectors – shopping cart abandonment. However, the company soon realised that as well as improving online sales for its ready-to-wear business, Triggered Messaging could deliver even greater benefits. It could provide Moss Bros with access to real-time visitor data that would deliver insight into customer needs, wants, trends and behaviours, positively impacting its e-commerce, marketing, sales and customer service operations.

The solution

The Database Services Manager at Moss Bros, Matthew Grisman explains the reason for choosing Triggered Messaging for its cart abandonment challenge: "We recognised that with Triggered Messaging we would have a great opportunity to engage with customers who visit Moss Bros online but leave without making a purchase, and encourage them to complete their transaction."

Grisman was familiar with other solutions on the market but he was particularly impressed by the experience of the team at Triggered Messaging, the technical ease with which it could be implemented and integrated with its existing Ecommerce systems, as well as the monthly subscription pricing structure. He adds: "The Triggered Messaging team worked closely with us to implement the system on our site, whilst we built the emails that would be sent to visitors."

Today, if a customer visits Moss Bros online and abandons their cart and does not return, they will receive a personalised email after 20 minutes that includes the items that they expressed an interest in. Furthermore, to maximise the sales opportunity the message also includes crowd-sourced product recommendations based on what is new on the site, in order to generate cross and up sell opportunities.

The company typically sends between 200 and 300 automated emails via the Triggered Messaging system each day, although during peak period such as Christmas, the mid-season sale and end of year clearance, the volumes skyrocket and well over 1,000 messages per day is not uncommon.

The benefits

"Our online ready-to-wear sales are now growing at an astonishing rate," comments Grisman on the success of the system. "Last year we turned over approximately £110million, of which 5% was from Moss Bros online. This year it is set to be between 8% and 10%."

Moss Bros online carefully measures the success of the Triggered Messaging system based on strict criteria, looking closely at whether a transaction is the result of a customer receiving an email, clicking through and ultimately buying. "We can attribute up to £5,000 of sales per week to this process, equating to approximately 2.5% of our online business every week," explains Grisman.

Because of the tight integration between the Triggered Messaging solution and the Communicator Corp email management system used by Moss Bros, the company is also able to monitor the open rates of the emails. "We are recording open rates of 60% which is in contrast to the 20% of our standard marketing emails. "The open rates of our cart abandonment emails are truly outstanding. This means as a tool for engaging with customers it is a very valuable one," states Grisman.

The cart abandonment initiative has proven to be major success story for Moss Bros online, but the company sees even greater value in working with Triggered Messaging to capture and use the vast amounts of visitor data it collects and to pump this directly in to its new FastStats CRM application. Grisman observes that: "It is like turning on a data fire hose! We are now filling our database with rich and usable information." The CRM system marries the data flooding in from the Triggered Messaging 'fire hose' with transactions, customer history and visitor behaviour, helping to provide a single customer view.

Grisman adds: "This is exciting as we are able to be very clever in how we analyse this up-to-date knowledge and in turn understand, predict and rapidly react to customer trends and behaviours. We are in the early stages but we anticipate the return on investment impact to be huge."

Grisman concludes: "The Triggered Messaging solution is something I believe that every e-commerce retailer should have live on their site."