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World of Books Group Unlocks Powerful Revenue-Generating Use Cases With Bloomreach
World of Books Group owns and operates five brands that help consumers buy through Wob and Second Sale, sell through Ziffit and SBYB, and support charities through Shopiago. The company was created in 2002 when a group of book-loving entrepreneurs stumbled upon a bag of books in a charity shop that was headed for a landfill. World of Books Group has been rescuing books (and reducing waste) ever since by rehoming secondhand books.
The Challenge
Since World of Books Group serves customers in over 190 countries worldwide, it was essential for the company to have a SaaS platform that was easy to use for marketers and provided reliable marketing automation capabilities. It also needed to power compliant customer data collection.
After struggling to see a complete picture of its customers, World of Books Group implemented Bloomreach Engagement to get a single customer view to help power limitless ecommerce personalization initiatives and connect with customers at every step of their journey with all of its brands.
After implementation, World of Books Group was looking to get value out of the product as quickly as possible, which is where the Bloomreach Academy and Bloomreach Plug & Play use cases came in.
We were looking for a product that would give us a single view of the customer so we could have a better understanding of how our customers behave while on site. Since getting that, we’ve felt pretty much unstoppable with Bloomreach.
Rebecca Reed
The Solution
By using Bloomreach Engagement’s Plug & Play use cases and the learnings from the Bloomreach Academy, World of Books Group was able to start its journey with Bloomreach on the right foot.
Plug & Play use cases are out-of-the-box use cases for Bloomreach Engagement that can be quickly implemented to drive immediate value for ecommerce companies. They are fully functional and ready to launch, with preset analytics that can deliver fast value with minimal effort.
World of Books Group saw immediate success with the easy-access discount code banner use case, which provides customers with an option to easily copy a discount code to their clipboard to use with a purchase. This banner can only be minimized on-site and not closed entirely, meaning Wob customers are reminded of the discount offer during their entire website session.
This use case goes above and beyond in offering customers a discount, as they can get their discount code without having to leave their website session to check their email inbox.
“Usage of the discount code increased dramatically during testing, so much so that we had to turn it off about a week after putting it live because we actually couldn’t handle the volume of orders that were coming from it,” said Rebecca Reed, the CRM Lead at World of Books Group. “We adjusted our usage based on the learning from that and have seen a ton of success since then.”
World of Books Group manages much of its marketing operations with just two main points of contact, which makes having easy-to-deploy use cases essential. Additionally, it was crucial to have proper training and enablement on how to use the platform, which is where Bloomreach Academy helped.
Bloomreach Academy provides the knowledge professionals need to become expert users of the product. Academy courses feature live sessions, quizzes, on-demand materials, and Q&A sessions with product experts so students can gain knowledge and insights that can be applied directly in Bloomreach.
“The knowledge gained through Bloomreach Academy has allowed us to open up a whole new marketing channel for our app through customer segmentation, an insightful A/B testing platform, and powerful analysis tools,” said Luke Cox, CRM Marketing at World of Books Group. “Where we were previously restricted to widespread batch-and-blast email campaigns, we are now able to personalize our app marketing and effectively trigger relevant push and in-app communications to encourage customers over the conversion line at the perfect timing.”
Both Reed and Cox took the Engagement Foundations course to become familiar with Bloomreach Engagement, and each intends to use that course as a springboard into other courses on their learning journeys with the Academy, including Engagement Analytics, Omnichannel Orchestration, or Engagement Jinja.
“When I first joined World of Books Group, I was completely new to CRM marketing,” Cox said. “So for me, the Academy was not only teaching me how to use the platform, but also giving me an introduction to the job itself.”
Combining the knowledge learned from the Academy and the quick wins provided by the discount banner helped World of Books Group accomplish its goal of achieving fast time to value with Bloomreach Engagement.
The Results
Studies show that customers are significantly more likely to make a purchase if they’re offered a discount, and that holds true here with World of Books Group’s usage of the discount banner on Wob.
In its first full month using the Plug & Play use case, Wob saw a conversion rate of 35% on its discount code banner. This was while specifically targeting customers whose basket was over £5, under £15, and didn’t include a brand new book or more than four books (because they would qualify for different promotions).
Additionally, Wob saw a 96% increase month-over-month in returning customers through the code banner promotion and a 142% increase in new customers month-over-month in the same time span.
“We had been trying to do something similar to what the discount banner does for a while prior to Bloomreach,” Reed said. “We could never get the code to work properly and we could never get the HTML or JavaScript correct ourselves. So I was like, ‘If this works, this could be really good.’ That was a huge understatement — it’s been great.”
