Welding Supplies from IOC is a family-owned business and the oldest welding supplies company in the United States. From its beginnings, the company has prided itself on providing the best customer service. In 2000, the team launched their online department. In 2014, they began working with their agency, SmartClick Advertising, for all of their digital marketing needs. To help Welding Supplies with their growing business needs, SmartClick introduced Zaius to their client’s tech stack in 2017 and they have been taking advantage of the platform since.
The Challenge of Selling High Ticket Items
Welding Supplies drives much of their customer engagement through promotional emails. These include flash sales, early access offers, and last-minute reminders. While the company has been satisfied with these campaigns’ engagement rates, they have found the number of conversions lower than desired: When it comes to high ticket items, as many of Welding Supplies’ products are, converting visitors into purchasers is a challenge. Oftentimes, shoppers add items to their carts without checking out because they are hesitant to make large purchases.
Enter SMS Marketing
Welding Supplies was one of the early adopters of Zaius’ SMS solution that launched in April 2020. Shortly after the following release of MMS, Welding Supplies implemented Cart and Browse Abandonment campaigns to re-engage their customers and nudge them towards completing their purchases. Welding Supplies takes advantage of Zaius’ unique capability to use dynamic content that automatically populates the abandoned product’s name, link, and image into the text. To make the texts even more enticing, the team added discount codes to their image-rich messages.
Dynamic content in text messages brings personalization to customer interactions, and Welding Supplies knows how important it is to provide shoppers with 1:1 customer service on every one of their channels. By introducing a personalized Cart Abandonment experience on their SMS channel, Welding Supplies converted their abandoners and saw incredible results:
- Conversion rates as high as 6.7%
- 13-16% click rates
- 37% increase in SMS conversion rates as compared to Email
Welding Supplies and SmartClick are excited for Zaius’ most recent SMS enhancements that introduced features, such as the URL shortener, which they requested during their initial testing period. They continue to rely on this channel, especially for sending reminders to their shoppers on weekends, when they are less likely to be checking their email. To grow their list of SMS subscribers, the team is collecting consent in emails and web modals, in exchange for early access to products and exclusive deals. Currently, they are A/B testing what types of imagery in MMS messages generate more revenue, and we’re excited to see the results!
This article originally appeared in the Zaius blog and has been published here with permission.
