How we’ve Increased our Revenue by 15% with only 3 Simple Tactics – Transparency Report 6

This is our monthly report where we share our business insights as part of our transparency policy.

Updates

In June, we shipped 3 minor versions to fix some issues related to the detection of JS files for minification in the footer.

Revenue

• $53 279 in revenue (+16,2%)
• 961 orders (+22,4%)
• 190 renewals (+179,4%)
• 670 new customers (+2,9%)
• 3081 websites added (-1,5%)

As you can see our monthly revenue  significantly increased this month. Looks like our plan to improve our customer acquisition worked.

This is due to 3 simple tactics:

1. A remarketing email campaign on abandoned shopping carts
2. A promotion to increase renewals
3. Content strategy to increase website traffic

For the first time, we’ve beaten the monthly objective which is $50 000 per month.
As stated on our salary grid, this revenue means that Marko, Lucy, Jonathan, Jean-Baptiste and Julio will have a 4% salary bonus on their base salary.

 

Remarketing email campaign for abandoned carts

In 2013, the abandoned cart rate was 70% on ecommerce websites. A consumer has so many reasons to stop his buying process : a beer to drink, a call, a Facebook notification an email, etc…

So it’s crucial for an e-commerce site to set up a remarketing email campaign for abandoned carts.

WP Rocket has a 30% abandoned cart rate. This is well below the average rate, but it is still too high!

To get this data, we have been using Carthook since June. This SaaS allows you to create an email campaign to try to retrieve your abandoned carts.

CartHook’s tagline is “Increase your ecommerce sales by 14% in 30 days”. So we tested it, let’s see what happened.

Here are the results for June :

 

On a total of 265  abandoned carts, CartHook has recovered 78, about 30%. This is a 10% sales increase.

We really recommend all e-commerce owners to set up this kind of campaign!

A brand new conversion strategy on renewals

We have been working for a few weeks to increase the conversions on renewals. The results we had this month validate our decision.

As we said last month, we are thinking like more of a Saas for WP Rocket with a recurring monthly revenue.  We were thinking about automatic renewals, since Matt Mullenweg’s interview on that subject.

For now we’ve decided to not do that because of several issues.

We’ve tested a new way to increase renewals and based on the results, it looks like it’s working pretty well!

We often do some promotional offers for our existing customers. For example, in March to celebrate the 5000 customers milestone, we offered 30% on upgrades.

As a reminder, we’ve decided to not support multi-currency anymore (Dollars and Euros) and to have only Dollars. We will explain that choice in a upcoming blog post.

On June 29, we sent a newsletter to all our French customers to warn them about that. Having only Dollars represented about a 25% increase in pricing, and we wanted to make our customers aware of that.

To allow customers to benefit from the Euros pricing for the last day, we sent a reminder in the email that they can upgrade and renew with 50% off.

We deliberately added the renewal link before the upgrades. We frequently get questions on our website chat and support about the renewal pricing. Even though the answer is in the FAQ (do people read FAQ?!) and on the account page, it looks like few people are aware that renewals are 50% off if they renew before the expiration date.

With this email, we wanted to remind them about the 50% renewal rate. We were very surprised with the results : 80 renewals in 2 days!

This reminder has been a great conversion channel. This month renewals represent 10% of our revenue : $5581

We are going to go further to improve our renewal rate. We tested a new approach during July which seems to be even more successful.
We’re going to give more insights about that in the next report.

For your information, this is our second year in business. Without this email, we had 110 renewals for June which was already an increase of 48,4% compared to the previous month. This natural increase is because of the fact 2013 initial customers can renew for the second time.

Content Strategy to Increase Website Traffic

In the previous report, we  explained that we would like to improve our content marketing strategy on our own blog.
We did that during June, with 3 new big blog posts :

• Is the Avada WordPress Theme Really Fast?
• Which is the Fastest Social Sharing Plugin For WordPress?
• Why you Shouldn’t Care About Google PageSpeed Insights?

The goal of these blog posts is to educate people on some details about website performance. Some of the comments are proving that it’s a good strategy.

These blog posts have been shared pretty frequently on social networks. This explains the traffic increase on our blog (+38,4%)

Last month, we announced that we would like to have some new reviews. I’ve contacted several bloggers to present  WP Rocket to them and provide them a free licence to try it out.

We’ve achieved our objective which was 1 new review per week 🙂

Whereas our website traffic had decreased the past 2 months, it climbed back this month!

 

Support/Happiness Report

This month we had 414 support tickets (+11,6%)

We are not sure what has caused the increase because we didn’t release a major version of the plugin and traffic to our documentation increased by 38,4%.

The increase in traffic to the docs is great news. This shows that customers are using it more and more!

We are going to look closely at the number of tickets during July.

We’ve decreased our first response time to 1h43 (-21%). That’s a great achievement because we’ve been still performing well even with more tickets. Kudos to Lucy and Marko who are rockin’ on support!

 

Happiness Score is 91, which is 3% better than last month (88)

 

 

This month, I’m winning our internal competition with a 93 score. I get a new set of earphones 🙂

 

P.S.: We are looking for a new Rocketeer : Customer Support at WP Rocket (European Timezone)