How The Cake Store increased conversions 32x

Founded by Tom Slatter in the early 1900s in Brockley, South London, The Cake Store started life as Slatter’s Bakery and is now a third-generation family business.

Their mission: to make customized quality cakes for every occasion.

The company employs full-time cake decorators who continue to constantly design and create new cakes, earning it a reputation in the UK as a trustworthy supplier that will not let any memorable celebration pass without an astonishing, tailor-made treat.

Lasting three generations means they have been able to adapt to changing consumer habits. The Cake Store is one of the first cake makers in the UK to sell personalized cakes online, dating back more than 20 years. But online success did not come overnight.

“It took a long time for consumers to realize that we could properly fulfill a great Birthday cake being delivered to someone’s house across the whole UK, within a couple of days’ notice,” says Tim Slatter, the current owner of the store.

For a business that sells occasion-based products it’s critical they not only stay top-of-mind with their customers throughout the year but also send helpful reminder emails at just the right time.

Looking for a solution that enables them to do just this is when Tim crossed paths with Omnisend.

The challenge

When the Cake store started on its email marketing journey, the goal was straightforward: remind the customer about the wonderful collection of cakes right before his/her special occasion.

Tim and his team were looking for a tool that could automatically remind the customer that their special occasion is approaching and offer a variety of new products.

Initially, The Cake Store started their email marketing career with MailChimp, but soon they realized that the platform was just too complicated.

“I found MailChimp so complicated to use and couldn’t fathom how to import our products into an email. Still not sure that it does,” Tim says.

Even worse, MailChimp didn’t offer Tim and The Cake Store what they really wanted: a custom, automated workflow. For them, sending out bulk campaigns didn’t meet their needs.

Shortly after the gloomy start with MailChimp, Tim came across Omnisend in the BigCommerce apps marketplace.

The Omnisend solution

When Tim started working with Omnisend and started building his first campaign, he used our unique feature “Product Picker.” This enabled The Cake Store to pick and import products straight from their store, which saved a lot of time in preparing their email campaigns.

Adding this feature with Omnisend’s simplicity and support, and they had themselves a winner.

Tim quickly enabled a custom reminder automation workflow.

Here’s the simple, custom automation workflow he created with Omnisend:

To remind customers about their upcoming celebration, Tim set up a trigger for “product placed” and a 340-day delay to send a prepared email right before that occasion.

You can view the email below:

The feature helped The Cake Store to effortlessly upsell more to a highly engaged audience.

The custom workflow single-handedly generated more than $37,000 (£30,000) in sales and a whopping 32-times higher conversion rate compared to bulk promotional email—and Tim couldn’t be happier.

Looking forward

Tim plans to continue working with Omnisend and keep an eye on the sales generated from automated emails.

Tim is excited to take advantage of all of the great features Omnisend offers to help them further increase sales. Tim also has some great advice for all the retailers out there:

“Try to keep things simple. Less of a great product is better than thousands of products that are difficult to supply.”