Forgot something? Why MVP is more than just basic functionality

The facts

Cart abandonment emails are a well established marketing method and are becoming increasingly popular within retail. If you’ve ever spent 20 minutes (1-2 hours) loading up your ASOS basket only to get distracted, make a cup of tea and carry on with your day without actually buying what you need then you’ll know exactly what I’m referring to. However, if unlike me, you have much better focus or still prefer walking the cobbles to do your shopping, these emails are sent to encourage customers to complete their transactions. Cart abandon emails are incredibly successful with an average conversion rate of 10-20%. Based on these stats, why aren’t we all sending them?

The why

TickX is a booking layer that sits between marketing platforms and ticketing systems. We have marketing tools and integrations which help to fulfil our main objective of encouraging direct bookings and increasing conversions. Creating a new feature that incorporated cart abandonment felt like a no-brainer – 20% conversion rate – yes please! But before we jumped right in, we still had some questions. Would our clients utilise this feature? Would being in the attractions/theatre/events space rather than retail make a difference? Were clients sending these emails already? How can we as TickX add value? So I did what I typically do when I have lots of questions – send out lots of Zoom invites.

The unaware

Speaking with our clients I found that the majority didn’t send cart abandonment emails. There were a number of reasons for this from not having the time to not knowing where to even start. They all agreed on one thing – if there was an easy process for sending Cart Abandon emails they would be doing it.

The enlightened

But, what about the clients that already had a cart abandonment process in place? There were clients that had already set up their own process for sending cart abandon emails. They got this working by adding in GTM triggers and connecting these directly into their CRM.

The pros:

• It worked! They were seeing a good return on the emails converting.
• They could send multiple email reminders in a chain to increase the chance of conversion.

The cons:

• It wasn’t easy to set-up; there was a certain level of technical and marketing ability required to configure.
• Customers were sent to a fixed URL.
• Customers were sent to the start of the flow again with none of the selections in their previous selections in the basket.

The belief

The conversations were all really positive in determining if this was the right feature and my confidence changed from ‘I would bet my car’ to ‘I would bet my house.’ I should mention that we already had a very similar feature in place with our CRM email triggers. This allows our clients to connect to their CRM and trigger event based emails. This feature is mainly used for ‘know before you go’ content, offering upgrades or selling merchandise post-visit and works really well at extending revenue per customer. So how is this useful? These CRM email triggers meant that we already had a good base for building out the cart abandonment feature – we had a trigger system and we had integrations with some major CRM emailers. I believe we had a great place to start but where do we finish – I had to decide on the (occasionally controversial but in my opinion necessary) MVP.

The MVP

Given that the majority of our clients had no cart abandon function at all I thought that the priority should be to get as many people as possible using this feature, rather than worrying about improving the existing function for the two clients already sending these emails. MailChimp was the most popular CRM emailer within our client base so we focused on this integration and how we could trigger a single email. The other aspect which I was keen to include within our MVP was some basic analytics. I thought it was so important for clients to not only have the ability to send cart abandonment emails but also see how they are performing. I believe this is a really key aspect of new feature development that can easily be overlooked; to not only think about the basic MVP functionality but also how you can promote this and represent its value. In this case, including the simple stat of ‘Total Revenue’ has been an incredible asset. This low effort addition provides a real tangible ROI to the feature and has helped us with encouraging its usage and client satisfaction.

The debut

It didn’t take long for us to have the MVP ready. We had a simple configuration built into our MyTickX dashboard for MailChimp that would allow clients to trigger a single cart abandonment email to any potential customers who dropped out of the flow, along with a very simple analytics page that shows performance.

Next task; get a client using the feature. We decided for the first onboarding to go with a client which already had the CRM email triggers set-up so it would be much easier to pinpoint any cart-abandon specific issues. This first ‘real life’ trial went well and the emails were sent successfully. However we quickly realised that having certain merge fields within the client template were essential both for tracking and so we could revert people back to their TickX bespoke flow. The next Sprint we worked on these merge fields and expanded the feature out onto our other 3 CRM platforms.

The pitch

With version 1 fully up and running we did a big feature push to all clients. I found that including the analytics meant that not only was the feature benefit clear to clients it was also clear to our stakeholders. Everyone in the business really got behind promoting the new feature. We created videos, set-up calls, promoted it on our newsletter; really everything we could to encourage Cart Abandon emails.

The holdbacks

There was and continues to be a really great pick-up of the feature however it wasn’t unanimous – so why wasn’t it workable for everyone?

1. As we know there were clients that already had a process in place which had the added benefit of sending multiple emails in a chain. So as yet there was no motivation to make any changes.
2. The CRM systems / emailers being used by the client were different to the four integrations we had in place.

The quick fix

Resolving issue one is pretty straightforward – we just need to build out the functionality so we can support sending a chain. We’ve actually decided to go one further with this so clients can create specific communication streams based on criteria such as ticket types selected or days until visit. The logic being that clients can tailor their Cart Abandonment messaging to be more targeted and increase the likelihood of converting. This work is actually already underway as I’m writing this so fingers crossed we will be up and running with this soon.

The solution

Issue two is slightly trickier to solve. Should we be trying to integrate with each new emailer presented to us by a client or is there another approach we could be taking? We found that some of these platforms had no API documentation or didn’t support transactional emails (action-based/triggered emails). This meant that we couldn’t integrate with every CRM and spending so much resources on getting these up and running just didn’t seem worth it. We needed an alternative. We did have our own account with a third-party emailer – so we looked at using this for our client who was happy to be a guinea pig. We tested out the theory and it worked! We now have our alternative solution; we can send Cart Abandonment emails for every client either through their CRM account that we have an integration for or through our own third party system.

The value

I know what you’re thinking – ‘well using an account on a third party system isn’t scalable’ and you’d be correct. However, it’s actually a cleverer solution than you might initially believe (if I do say so myself). Reason one being there is still a large amount of emails that we can send this way before reaching capacity. But even more importantly having this cheap /low impact alternative provides us with an insight into demand. If the number of clients that take up this option gets too high then we know it’s worth investing more time and effort into providing this whole feature end-to-end. In the spirit of Alberto Savoia we are ensuring that we have enough ‘skin in the game.’

Knowing what to add and what to hold back is so important when building a successful product, and extra functionality doesn’t always make things better. An example of this is the above; the analytics aren’t functional but they’ve added lots of value whereas building our own email solution is great functionality to have but at this moment in time there just isn’t the value.

The learning

The Cart Abandonment feature will continue to develop and grow over time. I have a list as long as my arm of backlog items, ideas on how we can continue to improve and iterate. But the key take-away from this project for me has been: Focusing on not only the functional implementation of a feature but how to prove its value in a tangible way can make such a difference. Including the analytics in the MVP despite them not being essential to release paid off and shows that something with a small technical impact can pack a very big punch. Seeing the ROI as a number has meant that ALL our clients want this feature – it proves itself in figures, something which we can’t always express in words. The feature has been live for a few weeks and already the sales for clients is over £475k.

The takeaway

So next time you're planning an amazing new feature release with all of its lovely functionality that you think is great and you wonder if you ‘forgot something’ remember to consider: How will your clients know it’s great? Can you add something small that really brings home how great it is?