Planet 54 delivers a connected commerce experience with web push notifications

Planet54 always jumps into new avenues and trends, creating as many touchpoints for their customers. With web push, the brand is able to drive more curiosity, target subscribers in regions that are more likely to buy from them, and use analytics to test and optimize their marketing. Planet54 sees a 359x ROI on their PushOwl spend.

In 2017 for Black Friday, PushOwl did a fantastic job for our business but also a very damaging job. The reason being, it worked so well that we couldn’t cope with the influx of orders coming in.

Shahil Maharaj
Managing Director at Planet54

About

5 years back, there was a massive gap in the South African fashion market. This gap was what brought Planet54 to life, with the belief that someone’s income bracket shouldn’t limit them to look good, feel good, and be on-trend. Through the years, they've seen steady growth, moving into different categories like home, luxury fashion, and during the pandemic, FMCG.

But Planet54 is more than just a fast fashion eCommerce store. Their motto is to give back to the community and they’ve done this well. Their programs foster entrepreneurship among the youth in the country (African Design Platform and E-Retailer Program) and their tech tanks allow rising tech entrepreneurs to bring their solutions to life.

They have multiple partnerships with large corporations like Hugo Boss and Netbank, and have created Stargate, a wholesale portal that allows people to be sellers themselves within their own communities.

Planet54’s customer-first and community-driven approach is what makes them so distinct.

Planet54 and PushOwl at a glance

📈 47,944 subscribers

🏅359x ROI

💰 11.09% of all orders placed on the store are attributed to web push

🛍 17.9% of all orders placed via web push are from new customers

Challenge

In the early days of eCommerce, you couldn't sell online without marking down your prices. Now, customers value convenience more than anything else. Planet54 weaves convenience within its business by aligning its communication for all customers across all channels, creating a connected experience.

Web push notifications are another touchpoint within this omnichannel experience, helping the brand connect with audiences that weren't necessarily on other channels like email or social media.

For Planet54, partnerships are key to growing their business. While they had initially used Firepush for their web push tooling, they switched to PushOwl because of the kind of value and support they received in the early days.

“PushOwl (and Shashank) has given me the best customer service in the startup days than I’ve gotten from any app to date. In 2017, I sent him a message to help me with something that wasn’t at all web push related. It was a bug we had in our system related to Google Analytics. He said he had just hired a Google analyst...and they spent a day debugging my problem.”

Shahil Maharaj
Managing Director at Planet54

Solution

The 2 tenets of marketing for Planet52— omnichannel and analytics-driven

🏆 2.3% CTR for campaigns

💰 AOV of R528 for orders placed via web push campaigns

📈 3.7% increase in AOV with orders placed via web push campaigns

Planet54 has multiple communication channels, each serving its own purpose. With email, their goal is to target a specific type of customer with an intent to open, offering more payment options, and giving them value upfront through their shopping journey. With web push, it's more curiosity-driven, enticing subscribers to click and informing them about their promotions in a faster manner.

Planet54 relies on data to guide their decisions and maximize conversions for all their marketing channels. They send daily campaigns across different channels, tweaking the messaging and style based on the format. They compare how this campaign performs on each channel, how well it sells, what needs to change, and how the offer can be better. This reiterative process helps them increase conversions, improve customer experience, and optimize their performance.

I’d like to say that it’s a testing strategy and I think that’s how you have to see marketing as a whole. You have to be willing to try new things...I love that PushOwl allows for that versatility as well, not many applications do.

Besides comparing channels, they look at their web push efforts independently to enhance their strategy for the specific channel. They use the metrics available on the dashboard (impressions, clicks, revenue, etc) to understand the impact of their web push notifications and whether they need to increase the number of notifications they send. They constantly tweak the kinds of campaigns and strategies they use to understand what customers are responding to.

Everything we do, we base it on our numbers. And we love that PushOwl allows us to pull stats so easily, especially when compared to other web push apps we’ve used.

Using segmentation to target subscribers with high intent

🏆 AOV of R698 when campaigns are segmented

📈 32% increase in AOV when campaigns are segmented

During the peak of COVID, Planet54 used Segmentation to target shoppers in specific areas and inform them about the availability of essential products within those regions. It simplified how they communicated such crucial information.

But, the fashion brand also saw segmented campaigns as a means to fulfill certain trends and communication gaps. For one, they had different shipping strategies based on the location, with certain regions having next-day delivery as well. By segmenting subscribers based on their location, Planet54 was able to highlight this express delivery option for shoppers in those areas, driving in more orders.

They also noticed that certain regions purchased more than others and by sending campaigns specifically to shoppers in these locations, they were able to maximize their CTR and get more orders.

Increasing checkouts with the right formula

🛒 10.4% CTR for abandoned cart notifications

📈 Increase in cart value by 15% to 20% through testing

🏆 Increase in checkouts by 30% through testing

Finding that formula to get people to click on checkout is crucial. The number of people that reach checkout but don't, especially with fast fashion, is massive. Using automated cart recovery, Planet 54 tweaks the timings and restructures the messaging to increase visibility and drive clicks. Through testing, they’ve been able to land on a notification message to something more specific that entices the customer.

The brand was able to drive 30% more checkouts and 15-20% higher cart value after tweaking and refining their abandoned cart reminders over a period of 3 months.

Result

Each marketing channel requires its own tailored strategy and messaging, based on how audiences are responding.  Planet54 took the time to test out web push notifications, understanding the purpose it served for them and how the format fit within their omnichannel experience.

This thorough process and their reiterative testing and optimizations have helped the fashion brand achieve a 359x ROI on their PushOwl spend.