How Extreme Digital Acquired Over 65,000 Subscribers in Just 41 Days

How Extreme Digital acquired more than 65,000 subscribers in 41 days?
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Extreme Digital is an ecommerce brand established in 2001. In the beginning, Extreme Digital was solely a digital camera retailer. They’ve since increased the product selection they offer their shoppers.

Today, Extreme Digital sells multiple product lines—from computer equipment to office furniture—becoming one of Hungary’s leading ecommerce stores.

Extreme Digital isn’t just a sales leader in its category. According to online sales data from 2014, Extreme Digital has the highest online traffic of any Hungarian store. In recent years, the brand has expanded and thrived internationally with stores in the following countries: Slovakia, Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, and Bulgaria.

Here, we’ll examine how Extreme Digital grew its email database by over 65,000 subscribers in just 42 days.

Introduction

No matter how good any brand’s online store is, the majority of first-time visitors won’t convert to buyers. They’re simply not in a purchase-ready state. 

Extreme Digital is no exception and recognized the importance of top-of-funnel activities to engage and nurture early-stage buyers. Email newsletters are a great tool for collecting shopper information and messaging them with personalized offers in the future.

Prior to working with OptiMonk, Extreme Digital had a newsletter subscription module on their website promoting a sweepstakes contest. The formula was simple. Visitors subscribe to a newsletter by providing their email address in exchange for being entered into the sweepstakes.

However, Extreme Digital’s results from this tactic were less than ideal. The conversion rate for the sweepstakes was only 0.02 percent, adding essentially nothing to the company’s bottom line.

Challenges

Extreme Digital’s challenge was growing its low subscription rate while not compromising sales or conversion rates. 

OptiMonk’s analysis of Extreme Digital’s website indicated two key reasons for the low conversion rate:

1. Poor promotional timing and placing

Extreme Digital’s newsletter promotion module was in a secluded place below the fold. The chance that the visitor would notice the call-to-action—mixed among others ads on the site—were slim to none.

2. Irrelevant and impersonal advertising

The second reason for Extreme Digital’s low subscription rate was the lack of targeting and personalization of the onsite offers. Every visitor was seeing the exact same advertisement. Moreover, most visitors weren’t even interested in the sweepstakes. Shoppers were visiting Extreme Digital’s site to complete a specific purchase goal like buying a notebook or camera. 

There two major challenges in increasing their email subscriber number were what caused them to seek a solution like OptiMonk.

Solution

OptiMonk is purpose-built to address problems exactly like the ones Extreme Digital was experiencing. For problem number one—poor timing and placing of promotions—OptiMonk’s exit-intent popups were a perfect solution. More noticeable advertisements that cover the entire screen increase conversions. 

These popups only appear when visitors attempt to leave the site without converting as either a buyer or subscriber. This minimizes the annoyance factor typically associated with popups. 

The second issue of irrelevant advertisements was a bit more complex. But with OptiMonk, Extreme Digital was able to display and customize the most relevant—and personal—offer for each visitor.

Therefore, Extreme Digital needed to categorize — and classify — visitors according to demographic information via personas. Extreme Digital already had a wealth of information about their customer base. 

First, we could correlate the fact that if someone visited a page promoting a laptop that the visitor is interested in a laptop. 

Second, we know if someone is a new or returning visitor. We have a grasp on where the visitor came to Extreme Digital’s site from — Facebook, Google Search or newsletter link, for example. 

With these details, Extreme Digital could create more relevant offers for visitors. 

Technically, presenting more relevant offers works exactly like remarketing. OptiMonk takes the information about visitors and shows them an offer that would be of greater interest than a normal advertisement. 

Extreme Digital could have the best offer in the world. But the offer and message need to reach the right customer at the right time to actually convert into sales. 

Based on the need to create and personalize offers, Extreme Digital setup numerous campaigns using OptiMonk.

Here are four campaigns that garnered the best results:

  • Sweepstakes Offer. For customers who aren’t purchase-ready.
  • Dynamic Discounts. Offers on products for new visitors.
  • Black Friday. Season notification offers for Hungarian Black Friday.
  • Christmas Offers. Promoting products to new visitors during Christmas. 

Now let’s take a closer look at each campaign and Extreme Digital’s results. 

1. Sweepstakes offer campaign

First, Extreme Digital boosted its general sweepstakes offer using an exit-intent popup. A relevant, well-targeted offer isn’t enough so it’s important that the visitor notice the offer at the right place and time throughout the customer journey. If the visitor doesn’t notice the popup on the website then there’s no chance for a subscription.

Therefore, we communicated the sweepstakes in the form of a popup. 

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In campaign settings, the Extreme Digital team took even more viewpoints into consideration. Extreme Digital wanted to show this message only to people for whom it was relevant. 

Furthermore, Extreme Digital didn’t want the popup to appear to visitors who clicked through from a Facebook campaign. The reason is that Extreme Digital didn’t want to divert attention from the special offer landing page after redirection from a social media page.

Simultaneously, the company didn’t want the popup to disturb visitors who had already subscribed. Extreme Digital needed to exclude those customers who already subscribed via one of the previous campaigns.

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When visitors arrive at Extreme Digital’s store, they typically start by searching directly for the product that they desire. Visitors often times will leave the browser with the cursor. The visitor isn’t necessarily trying to leave the page, so a popup appearance isn’t quite warranted. 

However, it’s also not good if a campaign appears to visitors when they don’t have an idea about what the exact website provides. Therefore, it’s best to give the visitor some time to experience the content.

Extreme Digital set the timer for ten seconds, which is enough to exclude the two cases above.

In some cases, visitors open a website and realize they’re on the wrong page. They’ll then move the cursor to potentially exit the page. 

These visitors tend not to be interested at all in the offer. They’ve simply visited the site by mistake. It can either be a user error or the fault of an incorrect advertisement. Since these visitors weren’t part of the targeted group, it’s not necessary to message them with any type of campaign. 

In this scenario, we can use the “Visitors who opened at least X number of pages” condition. There, we can designate at least how many pages needs to be opened for the popup to appear. 

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Extreme Digital set three pages, assuring that the campaign will appear meaningful for only certain visitors. The company wanted to target visitors who already expressed some kind of interest — meaning they have shopping intent — with the pages that they’ve seen already.

Result:

Extreme Digital increased its 0.02 percent subscription rate to 2.3 percent. This represents 115x growth in conversions. Meaning that the campaign brought in over 7,000 subscribers over the first 14 days. An extreme improvement compared to the previous, highly generalized offer. This is more than a conventional subscription model that could produce in four months. 

Want to learn more about using popups? Click here to download our free eBook with over 100 pages of tips, tricks and best practices for engaging — and re-engaging — customers with onsite retargeting to boost site revenue.

2. Dynamic discounts campaign

Just because new visitors aren’t coming to Extreme Digital’s site purchase-ready doesn’t mean they have zero interest in the products. Therefore, the company set the following exit-intent popup for visitors who expressed interest but had yet to subscribe or purchase.

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Extreme Digital opted for a two-step solution, rather than a traditional one-step popup form. That’s because previous campaigns verified that these two-step solutions have a higher subscription rate. 

Campaigns were constructed so that when visitors surfed the smartphone category, the discount was related to smartphones. But when browsing laptops, discounts were offered for notebook accessories. 

Campaigns have been set up for these two categories based on analytical data. These pages have higher than average traffic but a lower conversion rate. Extreme Digital hoped for improvement in these areas using well-targeted campaigns. 

Extreme Digital sorting things out with an option called “dynamic replacement of popup texts.” The essence of this functionality is to change any variable based on popup text. Therefore, we don’t need to create different popups for each groups for our targeted audience. We can now display fully personalized information in popups that will be more attractive to visitors. 

Result:

This campaign had a ten percent conversion rate. One out of every ten visitors who saw the popup subscribed to the newsletter. Within seven days, more than 900 subscribers were collected from just the notebook and smartphone categories. 

3. Black Friday campaign

Extreme Digital held its first Black Friday event in 2014. The result was a huge achievement. They had 600,000 visitors during one day, who purchased items for 700 million HUF, which led them to save 204 million HUF. Seeing this, they expected even more interest in 2015. It was therefore reasonable to set up an OptiMonk campaign a week before Black Friday. The increased number of visitors was an excellent opportunity for newsletter subscribers.

The exit-intent popup was as follows:

The bait is the promise that subscribers will be the first to know about Extreme Digital’s Black Friday sale. And the success of the previous year’s Black Friday sales gave shoppers confidence that signing up for the newsletter was worthwhile.

Result:

Over six days, the group of the visitors who showed interest grew by over 50,000. The list ended up having an 11 percent subscription rate. It was an outstanding achievement for Extreme Digital, as they were accustomed to only a 4-6 percent conversion rate. 

4. Christmas offer campaign

Targeting isn’t the only critical aspect when implementing OptiMonk campaigns. Newsletters sent to subscribers also have to be collected. For this reason, Extreme Digital created a campaign for the Holiday Season. For their Christmas campaign, Extreme Digital segmented new visitors by gender during the subscription.

Unlike the majority of campaigns, this message appeared at the arrival time to the page instead of the exit intent:

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By selecting one of these options, visitors revealed their gender to Extreme Digital. From that time it became possible to communicate separately in the Christmas newsletters with women and men.

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Result:

In 14 days, Extreme Digital collected nearly 7,000 email subscribers. They also gathered demographic information about their customers’ genders for use in future marketing campaigns.

All results

The cumulative effect of Extreme Digital’s four OptiMonk campaigns was quite staggering. The company ended up gaining over 65,000 newsletter subscribers in only 41 days.

And upon diving deeper into the numbers, Extreme Digital experienced the following benefits from utilizing OptiMonk’s online journey optimization platform:

  • 61 percent increase in average page views
  • 18 percent more time spent in the webshop
  • 6.5 percent better e-commerce conversion rate

In the end, Extreme Digital collected nearly 75,000 email address in only four months. And the campaigns weren’t even running consistently throughout this entire period. That’s approximately 13x the value that the company would have earned had they not chosen to work with OptiMonk.

Extreme Digital is one of the many concrete examples of how OptiMonk’s onsite journey optimization platform helps companies increase conversions at all stages of the buyer journey, including email signups and subscriptions. 

If you want to learn more, create a free OptiMonk account in order to see the results with your own eyes.