Reduce cart abandonment with real-time marketing

How Ancestry.com used Lytics to boost conversions

For its 30 year history, Ancestry has helped enrich its customers’ lives and connect their present and future with their past through journeys of personal discovery, whether in the form of building family trees or investigating their genetic past. With over 27 billion online records, 100 million family trees, 330 million user-generated photos and documents, and 3 million subscribers, it’s no surprise that they’re attuned to the power of data.

And through their use of Lytics, Ancestry’s marketing department has provided another proof point. Ancestry’s Hope Twiss, Sr. Marketing Manager, CRM, and Chloe Petersen, Personalization Manager, CRM recently participated in a customer webinar in which they shared how they’ve used Lytics CDP to increase revenue and customer engagement through two key use cases: reducing cart abandonment and optimizing their onboarding experience.

Watch the video below or read on for more highlights.

Aggregating data from multiple sources

They use Lytics to collect data from a variety of internal partners, including Martech, Member Services/Operations, Marketing, UX/Product Management, Legal, Business Development, and more, and they use it to power engagements across multiple channels including their website, email, and social media advertising in real time.

Reducing cart abandonment

Before Lytics, Ancestry.com had problems with delayed cart abandonment emails, with notifications to customers taking 48 hours to four days under certain circumstances. They implemented Lytics to address the problem, and reduced their response time to just 30 minutes and aligned email, Facebook retargeting, and onsite experiences to remind customers about their abandoned product selection at 30 minutes, 24 hours, and 48 hours.

With the Lytics-powered experiences, they achieved amazing results:

• 23% increase in email open rate
• 29% increase in click rate
• 220% increase in conversion rate

Increasing customer engagement with contextualized onboarding

Ancestry recognized that users who completed certain basic onboarding tasks, like building a family tree or purchasing a DNA kit, tended to convert at a better rate than users who did not. They worked with their product team to identify four key onboarding experiences or milestones, and then used Lytics to create contextualized customer journeys to provide users with prompts to complete those four conversions.

With these customized Lytics experiences, they were able to increase conversion rates for the first step from 54% to 137%, and for subsequent steps at rates from 2% to over 70%. More importantly, users who completed the onboarding converted at a 29% increase in recurring revenue over non-onboarded customers, forming a core of reliable, engaged customers for their services. By adding on paid social media advertisements, they were able to add an additional 6% to their onboarding completion rate and 3% to their site visit rate.

The next generation of improvements

Ancestry is far from finished accomplishing marketing goals with Lytics. They plan to apply their abandoned cart strategy for more product offerings than their DNA tests and for multiple-purchase cart abandonments as well. They plan to implement additional coaching steps to encourage users to complete the onboarding process and to apply it in international markets as well.

And with Lytics’ deep integrations with Google services like BigQuery, Looker, Display and Video 360, and Ad Manager, they’re just scratching the surface of the ways they can apply their first-party data to optimize customer experiences and lifetime value.

Learn more about how Google + Lytics work together.