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eCampus.com certainly knows the value of an education, especially when it comes to learning more about its own online shoppers. Using SteelHouse’s Behavioral Commerce technology, eCampus gained new insights into its site visitors and was able to act on that knowledge in real time to increase sales by 114 percent in this competitive back-to-school season.
eCampus.com is the Internet’s leading online destination to help students rent, buy, trade in or trade up their academic textbooks. With an expansive shopper base – youthful students on one end and their parents at the other end – eCampus.com sought new strategies and technology that would enable them to increase their sales across the board.
eCampus.com turned to SteelHouse’s Behavioral Commerce platform because SteelHouse doesn’t rely solely on traditional marketing techniques like targeting offers based on products viewed, demographics or geography.
Instead, SteelHouse is pioneering the emerging field of Behavioral Commerce – giving offers to shoppers based on their shopping personalities and buying behaviors, and delivering those offers in based on their behavior anywhere on the web.
eCampus.com used SteelHouse’s behavioral-based platform to first understand the type of shoppers that visit its site, and then to develop offers that the company can launch immediately toward those shoppers based on their shopping personalities and buying behaviors.
eCampus.com and SteelHouse focused on a particular shopping personality they wanted to optimize – the Cart Abandoners. These shoppers add items to their shopping carts and begin the check-out process, but abandoned eCampus.com before completing the sale.
To motivate these shoppers to complete the purchase, eCampus and SteelHouse developed an offer that would appeal to these shoppers’ personality – a free shipping coupon code – valid only if they continued the checkout. The result: a 114 percent increase in conversions verified against a simultaneous control group.
“Understanding our shoppers enabled us to develop different offers to different types of shoppers,” said Matt Montgomery, CEO and President of eCampus.com. “Since the SteelHouse platform provided behavioral commerce analytics and escalating offer deployment off the same platform, our team didn’t need to learn a new system and we were up and running in no time. With this type of technology, we’re able to maximize our margins and revenue and minimize our discounts.”
eCampus is able to generate these conversion gains across different shopping personalities because the SteelHouse platform offers two key innovations. The first is a reinvention of online analytics that shows shoppers by their shopping personalities
and buying behaviors. The second is the ability to turn that business intelligence into immediate offers without having to switch platforms. SteelHouse was able to help eCampus understand its different shopper personalities and develop offers specific to each personality to maximize revenue and conversion rate.
“Behavioral Commerce frees retailers from having to offer a discount to people who would buy anyway,” said Mark Douglas, SteelHouse CEO. “It’s always a balancing act for retailers – offering incentives to get the sale, but needing to preserve every bit of margin they can get. We’re helping them know their shoppers better, so they can target specific offers to types of shoppers and get the most from their marketing campaigns. With SteelHouse, eCampus is geared up to have its best back-to-school season ever.”
About eCampus.com
Since its founding in July of 1999, eCampus.com has grown into a major online retailer providing cheap textbooks for college and high school students. eCampus.com’s stated mission is to provide the easiest, fastest, and cheapest way for college and university students to rent textbooks, buy textbooks and sell textbooks. eCampus.com believes the Internet buying experience should be fun and that shopping for textbooks should be as fast and convenient as possible. The company makes a personal commitment to every customer that eCampus.com will be the best source for everything they need.
About SteelHouse
SteelHouse™ (steelhouse.com) is pioneering the emerging field of Behavioral Commerce, enabling online retailers to deliver offers to their shoppers based on their distinct shopping personalities and buying behaviors – immediately – anywhere on the web (social, community, online) and through any device (tablet, mobile, computer). SteelHouse’s patent-pending technology is called The Opportunity Machine™, and it’s the world’s first personality-driven offer platform. For the first time, marketers can truly understand who their shoppers are by their shopping personalities and buying behaviors and – just as important – they can act on that intelligence right away with offers that will increase their conversions, sales and revenue. SteelHouse was selected by TiE Silicon Valley as one of the Top 10 Emerging Internet Technologies in the world, and won the top award at the prestigious Launch: Silicon Valley 2011 showcase event in the Next-Generation Internet category. Investors include Silicon Valley legend Ron Conway and venture capital firm Baroda Ventures. The SteelHouse team includes veteran direct marketers and engineers from eHarmony, E*TRADE, Oracle and the Rubicon Project. SteelHouse is based in Los Angeles, Calif.
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