Starshipit is the best practice shipping and fulfilment platform that helps retailers save time and deliver great shipping experiences.
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2023 guide
Prep for Peak with Princess Polly
Peak season readiness means preparing shipping, fulfilment and customer communications before demand spikes, so teams can protect conversion and customer trust. Use Princess Polly’s examples with Starshipit and Yotpo to check delivery options, automate order updates, plan carrier capacity, grow SMS subscribers and personalise campaigns before BFCM.
Introduction
Peak season is always a time of excitement and anticipation. It’s when sales skyrocket, customer engagement reaches its peak, and your online store becomes a hub of activity. But beneath the excitement lies a critical question: are you truly ready to harness the full potential of peak season?
The key to peak is preparation – and we’re here to help. Together with Yotpo, we’ve pulled together 6 actionable tips that you can implement right now, ahead of peak season.
Read on to discover our tips for peak, as well as real-life insights from leading Aussie retailer, Princess Polly.
Starshipit, Yotpo and Princess Polly
With the most advanced solutions for email and SMS marketing, loyalty and referrals, subscriptions, reviews, and visual UGC, Yotpo helps brands accelerate their growth by enabling advocacy and maximizing customer lifetime value.
Princess Polly is one of Australia’s premiere online fashion boutiques – and an international fashion powerhouse.
How Princess Polly WINS during peak season
For Princess Polly, productivity and efficiency are always a top priority for their team – especially around peak season. This is why they adopted Starshipit.
As a platform that can automate the day-to-day, save money and reduce frustration throughout the fulfilment process, Starshipit is an invaluable tool for the team. Instead of manually printing shipping labels and jumping between carrier portals, Princess Polly can automate the day-to-day of their shipping and fulfilment and keep operations running smoothly year-round.
Peak season success for Princess Polly also translates into happy customers. As most retailers know, customers demand choice when it comes to shipping options; not only choice of price but choice of speed. For example, some customers who are willing to pay more to receive a product sooner. With Starshipit, Princess Polly can offer a choice of shipping options to customers, and set the right price points.
80%
of consumers consider delivery options at checkout important for their buying decision.
3 actionable tips
Tip 1: Communicate shipping costs with your customers
There should be no surprises at checkout. Did you know 45% of online shoppers will drop off if you don’t show shipping costs early? It’s true! Instead of displaying your shipping costs after they’ve placed their order, communicate early and effectively on your website to avoid any surprises.
What Princess Polly does:
Leading by example, Princess Polly starts to communicate their shipping prices and policies right from the moment you land on the website. From the start, they show you how to qualify for free shipping and how much you’ll need to spend.
Tip 2: Engage with your customers after they’ve purchased
Did you know 93% of customers want to receive proactive updates from you about their order? That’s nearly every single one of your customers – but this isn’t a downside, it’s an opportunity! Not only does frequent communication during the delivery stage reduce the number of inbound order queries your customer success team will have to deal with, it’s also an opportunity for you to communicate with your customers at a time when they’re most engaged with your communications. It sounds simple, but so many retailers neglect this step.
What Princess Polly does:
Princess Polly understands the power of post purchase communications and sends proactive order status emails right from when customers place an order through to when the order arrives on the customer’s doorstep.
Tip 3: Get in contact with your carriers to stay on top of peak period SLAs
Heading into peak season, it’s a good idea to reach out to your carriers as they’ll be able to tell you if they’re expecting delays and what they think the average transit times might be.
Why? Because with an idea of carrier delays, you can better prepare by letting your customers know preemptively, or even bringing on another carrier to ensure your orders make it out to customers.
What Princess Polly does:
Instead of waiting to feel the impact of a shipping delay (potentially costing them sales), Princess Polly uses several carriers. This means they can remain flexible during the busiest sales period of the year and access a number of different delivery services and price points, passing those choices along to their customers.
How Princess Polly creates seamless customer experiences
Princess Polly partners with Yotpo to consolidate their marketing technology stack and create seamless, engaging customer experiences.
Princess Polly thinks about the full customer lifecycle, so quality reviews help customers find and choose the right products. After a purchase, their loyalty and referrals program builds brand affinity and keeps them in the Princess Polly bubble. Then with SMS and email, they can deliver personalised communications, using data from across the Yotpo stack, to drive repeat purchases.
A critical requirement for Princess Polly is to have a technology partner with true global experience and capability. Yotpo is able to support Princess Polly’s growth ambitions, whether in Australia or the US.
To make the most of peak season, Princess Polly leans heavily on the data synergies that exist natively on the Yotpo platform. The brand creates segments based on triggers such as loyalty tier, if customers recently have engaged with email or SMS, if customers have left reviews or if they have abandoned a cart or the website. In one example, using this data to target a non-engaged segment, Princess Polly was able to achieve 73x ROI on a recent flash sale campaign.
73x
Princess Polly was able to achieve 73x ROI on a recent flash sale campaign through Yotpo.
3 actionable tips
Tip 1: Maximise your SMS subscriber collection
Brands that provide a variety of subscriber collection experiences can increase collection rates by over 40% MoM. Using Yotpo SMS & Email, your brand can collect subscribers everywhere — with tools built to use on-site, across channels, and offline.
Grab your customers’ attention right from the start with an on-brand pop-up on your website, or drive them to a dedicated landing page, to showcase all the great things your SMS program has to offer. And don’t forget at checkout — these customers are already engaged, and 51% of shoppers want to receive order status and delivery notifications via text.
What Princess Polly does:
Princess Polly is an SMS power user, and their high consumer engagement starts with their checkout and pop-up subscription sources — the brand saw 43% MoM subscriber growth when first implemented.
Tip 2: Capture as much abandoned revenue as possible
Set up automatic reminder messages every time a shopper abandons their cart. Send the first message 15 minutes after the cart is abandoned, and a second message one day later, with a clear call to action and incentives.
And don’t forget to make it personal! Go beyond just the name, and make sure the message is timely and relevant to the customer and time frame. Include UGC for the abandoned item, and make sure all of your messages during the season reference BFCM and the holidays — including welcome flows for new subscribers.
What Princess Polly does:
The brand sees 61x ROI using Yotpo SMS’s abandoned cart flows, as well as 84% CVR on welcome flows that include unique discounts to the customer.
Tip 3: Create highly personalised communications
Personalisation is the key to effectively engaging customers, particularly during peak season when they’re being bombarded with offers. Leverage cross-product data that gives you a more complete understanding of your customer, and where they’re at in their journey, to deliver emails and text messages that generate much higher CTR and revenue.
A key way brands can do this is by tapping into loyalty status and reviews sentiment, and leveraging that in Yotpo SMS & Email campaigns.
What Princess Polly does:
With synergies between every Yotpo product, Princess Polly gets more personalised at every step. They send review requests via SMS, reward loyalty points for reviews, ask 5-star reviewers to make referrals, send loyalty members VIP tier-specific texts, and so much more.
Starshipit is the best practice shipping and fulfilment platform that helps retailers save time and deliver great shipping experiences. The key to peak is preparation – and we’re here to help.