Profile
Ryzeo recently talked with Tyler Fisk, E-commerce Director of Grower’s Solution, LLC. Grower’s supplies greenhouses and nursery supplies around the world. The Tennessee-based family-owned business has between 30- and 40-staff. It has over 50-years of experience in the nursery industry, and distributes 1,200 products from 30 suppliers.
Grower’s Solution has recently moved to Shopify for their ecommerce platform. As Tyler says, “We chose to migrate to Shopify from our previous platform because of the opportunities it presented for us. We can access an app ecosystem that was previously unavailable. Our team is excited to take advantage of the myriad of new features on Shopify. But frankly, it is the place to be in e-commerce. Most of the exciting developments we’ve seen are happening on their platform.”
Tyler described how Ryzeo and Grower’s partnered to solve several challenges the distributor and manufacturer had:
- attract and retain visitors to its website, Growerssolution.com
- convert visitors into followers of the company’s targeted sales and discount promotions
- reduce the number of buyers who abandon the site’s shopping cart to increase revenue
Challenge
Early on, Tyler saw that the website was attracting a great many visitors, but that some would leave the website without even providing a way to contact them. Tyler knew he had to find a way to capture the email addresses of visitors so Grower’s could keep in touch with them.
Tyler gave an example of the problem: “We would like to go back to these customers that were looking at greenhouses but didn’t complete the sale. So we’d like to go after them with some sort of drip email campaign.”
Some potential buyers would place products in the online shopping cart, and then abandon the cart. Tyler explained that he understood the behavior. “Everyone does that when they’re shopping: they go add stuff into their cart, their kid comes along and asks them to go do something for them. Then they walk away from their computer or their phone or whatever, and they forget about it.”
The team at Grower’s contacted Ryzeo for help to resolve issues that were significantly affecting the business’s income and growth. “You’re just going to lose that sale,” Tyler said, “if you don’t go back and at least let buyers know they left items in their cart.”
Approach
Tyler described working with Ryzeo as a partnership. “Ryzeo was very good about picking up and taking care of all the technological side of things,” he said. Tyler admitted that if they had had to try and implement a technical solution on their own, “it would have been a difficult row to hoe there.”
Ryzeo’s approach involved thoroughly understanding the challenges Grower’s had in retaining website visitors and potential customers that would abandon their carts. A Ryzeo technical professional then integrated a set of algorithms that Ryzeo calls “Workflows.”
Workflows can serve several functions on the website: backtrack the offerings users have viewed; display popups that offer discounts on relevant products and capture email addresses; serve up automated and segmented email and newsletters tailored to website visitors and customer interests.
Ryzeo workflows use the browsing history of website visitors in conjunction with their email addresses to create highly targeted niche emails.
“And Ryzeo took that and actually made it happen!” Tyler added excitedly. “We had the idea, they saw it to fruition.”
Obstacles
Grower’s had been initially concerned that the technical know-how involved in realizing its goal of converting website visitors into customers was going to be formidable. And it considered the issue of cart abandonment to be just as difficult to solve through technology. Tyler was concerned that he didn’t know how to code or make pop-up windows or segment email broadcasts.
The Grower’s team was also worried about getting a balance in the number and frequency of emails they were sending people. They didn’t want people to feel as though Grower’s was following them around the Internet and spamming them. Tyler wanted to be able to follow up with people “without [their] feeling that we’re just big brother watching them and following them around the internet and just marketing to them all the time. That creates a distrust with customers.”
Instead, Ryzeo did all the technical work for them initially and for ongoing issues involving setting up the logic and rules for workflows to adapt to new business conditions.
Result
Tyler said enthusiastically, “I mean, it’s definitely one of the most effective and strongest ROI marketing techniques that we can put in place … and you’re controlling the data.”
Indeed, a look at Grower’s numbers from during the period from November 2020 to November 2021 says it all. The workflow solutions that Ryzeo integrated with Grower’s website and shopping cart added over $1 million dollars in what would have otherwise been unrealized revenue.
Tyler noted that Grower’s also has more control over their customer data after partnering with Ryzeo than if they were just advertising through Facebook and Google. He added, “I mean, you’re at their mercy as to what kind of information you can put out there and what kind of information they’re feeding into you as far as data points or whatnot.”
He continued, “But instead of sending these broad emails, we send out very niche emails for what that customer is interested in. And then by doing that, the conversion rate is so much higher!”
Tyler is as excited about the results Grower’s Solution has received as with its relationship with Ryzeo. “Ryzeo has given us such good results and such good service … It’s like a personal concierge service!
It’s a way more personal relationship that you have with a company with the way they’re taking care of us.”
