Executive Overview
Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges facing e-commerce companies today. Digital businesses, like VMware, are finding a large percentage of potential customers leaving their websites without purchasing the products in their shopping carts. Enter third-party vendors, who offer affiliate email campaign programs to remarket to customers who have abandoned carts. Although generally effective, such programs can be costly and restrictive in their functionality and customization options. A tailored customer experience has become a must for brands, but VMware realized that the necessary personalization wasn’t possible with their existing third-party affiliate program.

VMware chose SiteOlytics to upgrade their third-party, affiliate email program to a powerful, cost-effective, and fully customizable solution.

SiteOlytics recognized that although VMware was already using both Tealium and Oracle Eloqua technologies, they were being used separately and for very different functions. SiteOlytics recommended their solution: to create an information exchange between the two technologies using Tealium AudienceStream’s connector. The result was a robust cart abandonment program – from start to finish.

Challenge
VMware needed a cart abandonment solution that was cost-effective and capable of customization across the entire customer experience. The current third-party affiliate program was not only costly, but also lacked the flexibility VMware needed. In addition, the existing fee model of a percentage of sales wasn’t practical, and costs were quickly adding up.

Personalized, relevant, and timely interactions have been proven to boost conversions. It became clear that an in-house solution was the best strategy for VMware to achieve optimized results at any stage of the customer lifecycle.

The creation of a fully customizable, yet cost effective cart abandonment program was needed.

Solution
To maximize investments of existing tools, SiteOlytics leveraged Tealium and Oracle Eloqua together to effectively acquire new customers at a higher rate and lower cost.

Tealium AudienceStream and iQ Tag Management were configured to assign or remove badges to customers that abandoned their shopping carts. Next, contact information was temporarily stored in the universal data layer and relayed to Oracle Eloqua by a custom-built connector. This functionality made it easy to categorize customers into their respective marketing groups and target them with personalized messaging.

Within Oracle Eloqua, custom emails were built for each of the different audience segments created in Tealium. AudienceStream took care of the ‘who’ and ‘how,’ by identifying which specific audience segments needed to be contacted about abandoned carts, then transmitting the pertinent contact information to Oracle Eloqua. Campaigns within Oracle Eloqua specified ‘when’ contact would be established and ‘what’ communications would be delivered. Oracle Eloqua’s powerful campaign functionality ensured complete control over the entire process.

Results
SiteOlytic’s expertise with both Tealium and Oracle Eloqua allowed for a seamless transition of VMware ‘s affiliate cart abandonment program to a new customized solution. Leveraging the capabilities of Tealium and Oracle Eloqua proved successful in establishing a cost-effective, customized campaign that could be personalized at a moment’s notice.

About SiteOlytics
SiteOlytics, an Internet, marketing and eCommerce consultancy, provides future- proof strategies and actionable tactics to Fortune 500 companies and major eCommerce businesses around the world. With a unique combination of data driven research and innovative marketing concepts, SiteOlytics helps clients to increase eCommerce transactions, customer acquisition, retention, revenues and profits. www.siteolytics.com