Snatcher Online is an ecommerce retailer based in South Africa that strives to provide its customers with the best online shopping experience along with excellent customer service. It offers a wide variety of products—everything from pet accessories to health & beauty, electronics, and more.
It all started as a pet project by founder Dirk van Greuning, who wanted to see if his online business could become a viable source of income so that he can quit his construction job.
Initially, Snatcher used suppliers to dropship orders. But this didn’t offer his customers a quality experience. “We lost out on a lot of potential new products as all our suppliers were not able to fulfill the dropship function for us.”
That meant that if Snatcher wanted to sell more products, they’d have to stock inventory.
In the second year, Dirk decided to really put his weight behind the store and take Snatcher to the next level. “I took a leap of faith by signing a lease agreement for a new warehouse, along with Customer Support,” he says.
That’s when Snatcher’s business really started to take off, and he was ready to take on the world of ecommerce.
Snatcher Online founder Dirk van Greuning standing alongside his wife. He was able to earn more than $120,000 using cart recovery automation alone.
Snatcher’s challenge
One of the most important things for Dirk and Snatcher was to make sure that they treat their customers well and keep them coming back.
We definitely try our best to treat our customers well, to the best of our ability, and thereby create loyal customers. We believe that in such a competitive ecommerce industry, success can only be created by your loyal customers returning.
But Snatcher Online faced a retention challenge for how to convert one-time buyers into loyal clients.
Various experiments with email marketing platforms like Mailigen proved unsuccessful. “Mailigen has no Shopify integration which results in no automation—no cart recovery, welcome message, and customer reactivation, just to name a few,” he says.
That’s when he was browsing the App Store and found Omnisend. Not only did he find the feature capabilities attractive, but he also saw the great reviews which showed that the platform was effective and didn’t require a lot of setup.
It was also an added bonus that Omnisend easily integrates with Shopify stores.
“That made the move from our previous platform easy since most of our contacts were already on this platform.”
He then started looking at the automation features and decided to really boost his customer retention.
The Omnisend solution
While Dirk uses various automation workflows like Customer Reactivation and Welcome Campaigns, he found that the cart abandonment features have been his most powerful weapon.
Our biggest revenue generator is definitely our cart recovery campaigns. This is what we were missing in our previous email tool, and the payoffs have been amazing so far. We’ve been able to generate more than $120,000 in less than a year with just this one feature.
In order to get back abandoned carts and abandoned checkouts, Dirk first set up a simple automation workflow:
His email was also pretty straightforward. The short-and-sweet subject line (“Still shopping?”) and to-the-point email really appealed to his shoppers.
“We decided to go with Omnisend’s default layout with a few changes, just to see what would work and how we could improve it.
“But we immediately saw great results with the campaign. On our first try, we were able to get a 50% open rate and 19.8% click rate. I was completely blown away by the results.”
“Actually, I kind of kicked myself when I think about how much sales we could’ve gotten back had we started with cart recovery sooner.”
Moving forward
When Dirk saw the results that Snatcher was able to achieve with Cart Recovery, he decided to set up more automation workflows.
“In total, compared to our regular campaign sales, automation workflows have increased our revenue by 74%. It’s not just been an amazing increase, but also pretty easy because it’s automation—you don’t have to do anything. You just set it up and that’s it. It makes money for you.”
Dirk also sees automation workflows as giving Snatcher Online an edge over their competitors.
When talking about the future of Snatcher, Dirk is excited by the new challenges and lessons he’ll learn. “There is still a lot we’re learning every day and also a lot that we need to improve to be where we want to be. But discovering these challenges and then finding the solutions is part of the journey.”
