How Unimart Drove More Revenue (and Larger Orders) with Wishlist Plus

Overview

Unimart is a large, multi-category ecommerce market serving thousands of products across diverse sectors, including apparel, tech, home goods, and more. Its mission: make shopping simple and convenient. It’s important to Unimart that its customers can discover, save, and purchase their favorite products at their own pace. Customers can use Unimart to stock up on essentials, hunt for new deals, or curate wish lists for special occasions.

However, casting a wide net means providing a diverse customer base with a catalog of options. That means many challenges familiar to ecommerce marketplaces, especially using personalized shopping experiences to turn casual browsers into loyal customers. For Unimart, embracing this challenge means giving customers a “save it for later” experience that encourages them to keep visiting the website, purchase across multiple categories, and provide Unimart with shopper intent data to personalize its marketing.

Challenge: Turning Browsing Into Repeat Purchasing

Unimart’s customers often come to the site looking to browse through multiple categories. With multiple categories comes a nearly infinite variety of customer intentions. Short-term impulse buys, long-term “dream” wishlists, stocking up on everyday items—every style of customer intent needed to fit under the Unimart approach to personalized shopping.

Specifically, Unimart wanted to build a wishlist experience with key objectives in mind. First, they needed to encourage customers to return and complete purchases. A wishlist without an eventual purchase might drive some user intent data, but it didn’t ultimately convert into revenue. Second, they needed to drive larger order sizes by nudging customers towards cross-category purchases. And finally, if Unimart could accomplish both goals while gleaning actionable customer intent data for its marketing team, the brand could create the more personalized shopping experience it was after.

As things stood, Unimart needed more than a simple “save-for-later” button. “We did not have a way for our customers to save their future purchases,” said Adriana Pulido, Co-founder, Head of Marketing and Merchandising at Unimart.com, “or create wishlists to share with others for gifting, which resulted in a missed conversion opportunity.”

Solution: A Multi-Flow Wishlist Strategy

Unimart implemented Swym Wishlist Plus to build a wishlist capable of handling a multi-category shopping journey. The team wanted a multi-layered engagement strategy rather than a featureless “save” button. Now, multiple flows work to keep customers coming back, drive urgency, and inspire customers to save more items in their online shopping carts.

There was no one-size-fits-all solution here. Instead, multiple features provided Unimart with the broad capabilities the brand needed to appeal to its broad customer base.

Wishlist Reminders & Winbacks:

Unimart implemented automated reminders for its wishlists, which helped nudge saved items for customers, keeping them top-of-mind. Ideally, each customer would come back after a period of inactivity—and that’s exactly what the data showed they did. These wishlist reminders ultimately drove 60.92% of wishlist flow revenue.

Back-in-Stock & Low-Stock Alerts:

Wishlist Plus also made it possible for Unimart to implement product alerts (back-in-stock returns or low-stock alerts) based on their backend inventory updates. These real-time alerts created a new sense of urgency for customers who had wishlisted products: to grab that item they wanted, it would be critical to place a new order. Open rates on Wishlist alerts were as high as 13.70%.

Price Drop & Recap Emails:

If a price drops in a forest and a customer doesn’t hear it, will there be a sale? Fortunately, Unimart no longer had to ask this question: price drop alerts and emails notified customers when one of their saved items saw a price drop. Unimart’s team also found that recap emails (highlighting when multiple saved products saw price drops simultaneously) were especially high-converting.

Save-For-Later: 

Unimart recently launched Save-for-Later, which only took a few weeks of rollout to account for 10% of wishlist revenue. Because Wishlist Plus integrates with Unimart’s email platform, the team was ready to scale these campaigns without additional developmental resources. The result was less team workload rolling these out. Ultimately, it led to the kind of customer personalization Unimart had sought.

“Our goal was to have another way to remind our customers about the products they're interested in,” said Pulido, “which is a form of retargeting and a good way to drive engagement through personalized content.”

Results: A Meaningful, Growing Contributor to Revenue

Over the past four years, Unimart’s wishlist program has gone from an added feature to a fully grown cornerstone of its lifecycle marketing features. The numbers speak for themselves:

• 5.29% share of total flow revenue, which is steadily rising year over year, according to the team
• 75.96% growth in wishlist flow revenue, which outpaces overall flow revenue growth
• +4.5% average order value (AOV) for wishlist-influenced orders, including generally larger product baskets (3 items per order vs. 2 items site-wide without the wishlist features used)

Momentum only seems to be accelerating. These days, Winback and Price Drop Recap features are outperforming the classic Wishlist Reminder flows, which signals that Unimart’s advanced retargeting tactics are making good use of the data these wishlists provide. In short, Unimart is using Wishlist Plus to drive more customer features while using its data to drive improved personalization decisions for its team.

The wishlist program has also changed how Unimart thinks about customer engagement. They’ve turned shopper intent data into relevant and low-pressure nuggets, which is leading to an overall experience that customers appreciate.

“Wishlist winback reminders alerting price drops on a wishlist item have performed extremely well,” added Pulido. “It's a great feature that keeps our customers engaged and allows us to store additional data about our customers' interests so we can personalize our messaging even more.”