You know that feeling when you discover something awesome, and then as you learn more about it, you find out it has even more potential than you initially realized? That it’s actually transformative? Well, that’s been the case for Jeff Robertson, President of Cabinets.com, in his experience with BlueConic. We recently sat down to chat about his experiences as a hands-on BlueConic user and advocate.
Kristin: Tell me about Cabinets.com.
Jeff: We’re the largest online retailer of US-manufactured and assembled cabinets. Purchasing kitchen cabinets online is a new experience for many homeowners and renovators. Our team works to make this process easier by staying true to our company's mission and building shoppers’ trust online.
Kristin: What does your team look like? Who’s responsible for what?
Jeff: Well, I’m the president of the company and I use BlueConic, so that should tell you something. We maintain a lean organization. We have a development team that's very distinct, technical, and project driven. They don’t have time to engage in marketing activity. This made it important for us to have access to technology like BlueConic that puts marketing in the driver’s seat when making customer experiences and journeys come alive on our website.
Kristin: What work experiences, past or present, informed your selection of BlueConic as Cabinets.com’s customer data platform (CDP)?
Jeff: I come from a heavy analytics background, yet I didn’t choose BlueConic because of analytics. I needed a very specific solution to make things that had previously been challenging — e.g., designing and delivering customer experiences and journeys on our website— easy. Our decision to use BlueConic has fundamentally been driven by not wanting to rely on IT resources to support our marketing efforts.
Kristin: Tell me more about your CDP milestones. What were you and your team solving for first and how has it evolved from there?
Jeff: Our journey as a customer has been an organic process. We initially used BlueConic for one specific purpose and then we realized all the extra stuff we could do with it.
We began by using BlueConic to create, serve, and manage pop-ups [BlueConic Dialogues]. We set them up, got them running, and they did what they needed to do. They’re very easy to create and deploy and provide a seamless customer experience on our website.
Over time, we began to explore additional BlueConic capabilities that enable our marketing team to do things on their own without needing to engage our development folks. Each has been out of the box and easy to use. Soon, we were using BlueConic to serve dynamic site content, with COVID-19 messaging being an early example.
Then we realized, look at all this data! Look at what we know about our customers and our opportunities to personalize experiences. It was neat, from an analytics perspective. It got us thinking, we can create uniquely tailored experiences for small, targeted segments of people that move them further along in their journeys.
In our early use cases, we looked at people who were using our site to design their kitchen, but not taking the step to order sample doors, or vice versa. BlueConic enabled us to effectively remind these groups of consumers to take key next steps in ways that have been shown to drive purchases and loyalty.
Since then, we've pursued additional similar opportunities. For instance, we've been focusing on using BlueConic to reengage form abandoners and inform our email outreach.
Kristin: This is great to hear. What do you think has helped you and your team be most successful in these pursuits?
Jeff: It’s worked well when we have a specific solution in mind and then we let the data accumulate. Conversations with the BlueConic team have inspired us to think about our business in new ways and how we can replicate our CDP success to move even faster and achieve higher levels of impact in the short-term.
Kristin: What’s your favorite piece of advice for peers who are considering BlueConic?
Jeff: One of the first things I always tell folks is you can't imagine how easy it is to take control of your site and not have to rely on somebody else program it for you. Also, the fact that A/B testing and optimization are built into BlueConic is valuable for somebody like me because it not only offers us advanced testing capabilities, but it lowers the strain on my team by providing us with the infrastructure to randomize it and track it, all out-of-the-box within BlueConic — that’s a huge bonus.
Want to learn how BlueConic can help you reduce your reliance on IT and increase agility across the organization? Request your demo today.