Profile
Chris Berger started RokkitWear back in 2012. RokkitWear is an online apparel store service based in Ohio that offers school- and team-branded shirts, jerseys, and merchandise to schools.
Chris explained, “We’re located right down the street from a 1 million square foot warehouse. When we place an order with them, that order is ready within two hours. We can decorate it and then get it out the door to the customer.”
RokkitWear’s main competitor is Amazon. So it was critical to RokkitWear that visitors to its website stay around long enough on the site and later follow its offerings to understand the company’s competitive advantage over Amazon.
RokkitWear enables schools and teams to set up online stores that promote customer themes and merchandise. Schools receive a percentage of the sales to individuals and families.
More than seven years into the business, though, and Chris saw RokkitWear was losing significant revenue. He contacted Ryzeo to help him find the company’s unrealized income. Ryzeo helped with two issues key to RokkitWear’s growth:
- Thousands of website visitors were bouncing off the website without placing orders
- Prospective buyers were abandoning the online shopping cart without completing sales
Challenge
Chris further explained RokkitWear’s challenge as, “You had folks coming in through pay-per-click advertising and you also had folks coming in through generic search. They would land on the site, and we would see those numbers grow.” The likelihood then was that visitors unfamiliar with RokkitWear’s unique customer-focused approach were looking around the website, then going to Amazon to complete their orders.
“So we would have 100,000 visitors, but you end up with a 1% conversion rate,” Chris said. “I wondered what was happening to the rest of those folks, how do we go after them?” We had no way of knowing who they were and how to reach back out to them.”
Approach
Chris noted that, “You better have a good abandonment strategy and partner.” Ryzeo provided all that and more.
“They were always very clear up-front: about what we were going to be paying and that it was all about the ROI (return on Investment).” Chris made the point that Ryzeo “totally measures themselves” against the ROI they bring their customers.
Ryzeo advised RokkitWear that it needed two components to increase its pool of buyers. Chris explained, “One part was right when you first visited the RokkitWear site. You get presented with a little light box that pop s up and it says, ‘Hey, enter your email for discounts.'”
Chris continued, “The other piece is once the visitor has entered their email address and is browsing the website, we can later send out abandonment emails.” The solutions to RokkitWear’s requirements, however, can require technical expertise to apply.
Ryzeo, however, had that covered for RokkitWear.
Obstacles
“Ryzeo handled most if not all of the technical end of things, “Chris explained. “You [Ryzeo clients] don’t have to hire anybody to translate ‘techie’ into business.”
Ryzeo used sets of programming procedures it calls Workflows to track visitor activity on RokkitWear’s website. Workflows are steps that software should take to perform a series of actions. RokkitWear needed the Workflows to take actions like:
- capture what products and merchandise a website visitor investigates
- display a popup message that offers a sales discount in exchange for an email address
- tag users who abandon the online shopping cart
- send out emails tailored to the different kinds of users of the RokkitWear site, and more …
Chris said enthusiastically, “It was pretty straightforward. I mean, those guys have run this play on that playbook a lot.”
He continued, “That’s part of the reason why we went with these guys: just their technical, deep technical expertise. They see so many different businesses and many different industries. They can help guide and shape your thinking around the solution.”
Solution
Ryzeo helped Chris’s company put together an online shopping cart abandonment strategy to address three aspects of RokkitWear’s problem with prospective customers: visitor abandonment, cart abandonment, and visitor outreach.
Ryzeo designed a dialog box that would pop-up on the website after a user would browse items for a set duration. Chris said, “We’ve gathered an awful lot of email addresses that way, and they’ve become part of our contact database. And now we reach out to those folks on a weekly basis. And that’s been very helpful.
He also highlighted the abandonment email [report] that Ryzeo gives RokkitWear full access to show “that revenue converts day-in and day-out”.
RokkitWear’s relationship with Ryzeo continued even after Ryzeo had implemented the solutions. Chris added, “we’ve made some tweaks along the way just based on timing and delivery of those types of emails.”
Result
Chris greatly appreciates how Ryzeo “really holds themselves accountable.” Ryzeo sends RokkitWear a weekly report of website activity, conversions, and revenue realized from website visitors after they have abandoned the website or the shopping cart.
For instance, during the 12-months to November 2021, RokkitWear gained more than $300,000 in revenue from abandonment buyers. RokkitWear would have otherwise completely lost that revenue without the solutions Ryzeo implemented.
Chris said, “We lean on them for guidance. We don’t have all the answers.”
For instance, he added, there’s a lot of functionality available with the email in terms of segmentation. We don’t use it as much as we probably should be. They’ve got ways to filter and segment who’s an active subscriber, who views your emails, who doesn’t view them at all.”
“We can say, ‘let’s segment those guys out and let’s give them a compelling reason to buy and let’s convert them because they’re not buying today for some reason.”
So while RokkitWear sees email segmentation on its business horizon, they know that Ryzeo will be right there beside them as a trusted partner to find the best solutions.
