Aqua Essentials Uses Personalization to Increase Basket Size & Revenue

The Facts

• 64% of orders contain at least one product found through Clerk
• 41% of total revenues came from personalized product recommendations and emails powered by Clerk
• 13% increase in basket size
• 46.5% of customers buy products via product recommendations powered by Clerk
• 5.3x higher likelihood of customers converting after clicking on Clerk recommendations
• 44% is the average open rate of automated emails delivered by Clerk
• £ 34,009 revenue was generated by Clerk’s email recommendations
• 4.5x increase in conversion rates

Challenges

Aqua Essentials has been using Mailchimp and doing email marketing for 10 years. However, the brand gradually realized that they were spending too much time running the email campaigns. Besides, in an increasingly competitive market, the brand wanted to be different and stand out from other shops.

The team at Aqua Essentials started subscribing to everyone else's marketing campaigns to see how their competitors were doing it. Yet, they soon discovered that most were not running any active email marketing campaigns. Or if they did, it was done horribly, without any relevance. So there was a market gap for more personalized email campaigns. Aiming to drive customer engagement, the brand wanted to fill the void. In other words, the brand wished to stop wasting time on sending irrelevant marketing emails to customers.

Moreover, Aqua Essentials was very conscious of their newsletters and marketing emails being irritatingly salesy. The brand used to send very salesy emails, and they quickly noticed that the emails' open rates started to drop considerably. So instead of being too salesy and general, the brand was looking for a smarter way to do email marketing.

After leveraging Clerk as their e-commerce personalization platform and taking advantage of the market timing, Aqua Essential's e-commerce store achieved £1 million in turnover in the past year.

Results

Driving customer engagement & conversions with personalized emails

In mid-2020, Aqua Essentials started optimizing their email marketing using Clerk’s Email Personalization and Automation tools. At first, the brand leveraged Clerk's Email Personalization engine to improve their email recommendations with highly personalized content. Previously, as mentioned above, the brand was concerned about sending too salesy and irrelevant emails to customers. Now with Clerk, the brand's customers only receive hyper-relevant product recommendations based on their real-time browsing and previous purchase patterns.

For example, Aqua Essentials utilizes Clerk’s Email and Audience Segmentation tools in combination to ensure that only customers who're interested in mosses would actually receive this email campaign:

After sending personalized messages to the right audience, Aqua Essentials instantly saw tremendous improvements in customer engagement and conversion. The average email open rate was 16.97% in 2021. At 44%, the average open rate of Aqua Essentials’ marketing emails delivered by Clerk is 2.59x higher than the industrial average.

As the founder and owner of Aqua Essentials, Richard Cale, puts it: “Our results speak for themselves!” Here’re some of the brand’s best performing email campaigns:

Receiving support & advice from a customer success manager who truly cares

In particular, the brand applauded Clerk's customer service team for always being ready to help and genuinely caring about supporting their business growth. 🥰

The team at Aqua Essentials emphasized that they really enjoyed 1-on-1 sessions with Mo, their customer success manager at Clerk. Because Mo always gave them strategic advice on optimizing their e-commerce business, such as best practices in product recommendations and email marketing, and improvement areas for better conversions.

Because of Clerk's excellent products and customer support, the brand sees a 4.5x increase in conversion rates 😎🚀

Saving time & energy by using AI-powered recommendation logics

Aqua Essentials also leverages Clerk’s AI-powered product recommendation engine to optimize customers’ product discovery experience in its e-commerce store. Powered Clerk's AI (artificial intelligence) technology, product recommendations across the brand’s website are automatically generated based on a number of behavioral data points (visitor's click history, order history, search history, etc.) as well as product data points (best sellers, trending, best-cross sell products, etc.).

Here’s an example of how Aqua Essentials applies Clerk's pre-built logics to automatically and dynamically display both best-selling products and personalized recommendations on the front page of its e-commerce site:

The brand successfully achieved a 13% increase in basket size and a 9% increase in AOV (average order value) by delivering highly personalized product recommendations at scale to every customer, every time. Once Aqua Essentials’ customers interact with product recommendations generated by Clerk, the probability of them converting increases 5.3x.

Needless to say, letting AI technology take over also saves the team at Aqua Essentials so much time, which allows them to focus on other important tasks. 🤖

Clerk’s AI: An easy-to-use tool

Artificial Intelligence (AI) might sound complex. 😵 But it’s NOT for Aqua Essentials, as it settles for Clerk. Clerk’s AI technology is an easy-to-use tool that doesn’t need additional skills and can address different automation processes and personalization tasks with ease.

While talking about one of the biggest benefits of using Clerk, the founder and owner of Aqua Essentials, Richard Cale, told that:

"Simplicity! Once you get your head around how Clerk is operating it's very straightforward and intuitive. It's simply child's play. "

- Richard Cale, Director and Owner at Aqua Essentials

Curious about how you can increase online sales and revenue like Aqua Essentials? 💰 Talk to one of our e-commerce experts today.