How Snatcher made over $120K with automation

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, with the founder wanting to see if his online business could become a viable source of income so he could 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, the founder really put his weight behind the store and took 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’s challenge

One of the most important things for Snatcher was to make sure that they treat their customers well and keep them coming back.

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 BigCommerce 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 BigCommerce 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 various automation workflows, such as Customer Reactivation and Welcome Campaigns, are utilized at Snatcher Online, the cart abandonment features have proven to be the most powerful tool.

In order to get back abandoned carts and abandoned checkouts, a simple automation workflow was set up:

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

Upon seeing the results Snatcher achieved with Cart Recovery, it was decided to set up additional 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.”

Automation workflows are viewed as a key factor in giving Snatcher Online a competitive edge.

Looking ahead, there is excitement about the new challenges and lessons that lie ahead for Snatcher. “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.”