Send Me A Christmas Tree

Who are they?

This brand really does what it says on the tin - it's an ecommerce business that sends Christmas trees out nation wide, but they're not necessarily what you expect from Christmas tree farmers... They're a tech-savvy team who are all about improving efficiency.

What they needed

The Challenge.

As such a seasonal business, Send Me A Christmas Tree experiences a number of challenges that the typical ecom doesn’t. Customers can place an order online anytime throughout the year and choose a specific delivery date in November or December. But as the months turn colder, their orders increase rapidly and they’re required to grow their customer service team & ramp up their marketing almost overnight…

The Result.

When it came to their customer service, there was only one tool that really fit the bill – Intercom. I worked with the team to implement Intercom onto their Woocommerce site several years ago, and still go back several times a year to train new members of staff on how to use it. I set up a ‘tree choosing chatbot‘, helping site visitors answer most Christmas tree purchasing FAQs on a self serve basis, which massively reduces the number of pre-sale enquiries the team get, but without losing any of the business. The bot also answers and triages any customer queries from delivery issues, to Christmas tree care questions. It means that the temporary customer service team in the office have all the info they need from a customer to be able to deal with any issues, as soon as a conversation gets assigned to them.

I also spent time connecting Intercom to their other channels such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, email, and contact forms, making it a godsend for the team when it comes to seeing all of their enquiries in the same place.

To top it all off, after looking far & wide for a CRM solution which would talk to Woocommerce, play nicely with Intercom, and not cost a bomb for the 10 months of the year that it wasn’t used, I helped the team build out an Airtable base & frontend interface as a custom solution. It’s a place where ongoing tickets are managed, and the team can pull up a customer’s order without having to look in the backend of the website.

On the marketing side of things, they rely heavily on email to retain their customers year on year. Again with limited marketing resource, automation is key. I created a clever automated campaign which is triggered on the anniversary that the customer last ordered which reminds them it’s timer to order this year’s Christmas tree. This included designing & writing the emails, as well as organising the data in Omnisend, using Zapier. I’ve also created automated campaigns which are triggered around the time the customer can expect to receive their order, to help manage expectations of their Christmas tree delivery – after all, it is a bit of a weird product to receive in the post!

As a team who doesn’t need a constant marketing resource, Send Me A Christmas Tree also opt to go with my Full Email Campaign Management package on the run up to Christmas, so they don’t have to worry about organising their regular email sends or managing the content calendar!

Some kind words from Will

Will Kidger, Send Me A Christmas Tree

We've worked with Sophia since 2019 and she’s helped to turn our marketing and customer care setup from a manual mess to a slick and efficient operation. She has great business know-how and really ‘gets’ ecommerce, which coupled with her creativity and technical smarts makes her a goldmine of ideas and solutions which have done wonders for our business.

What it looks like in practice...

I helped Send Me A Christmas Tree with...

Chatbots

Creating a clever chatbot can save you & your team bags of time, whether you want it to solve simple customer issues before they hit your support team’s inbox, or even direct hot leads to the most relevant sales rep.

No one wants to be met with a “Sorry, I don’t understand that.” response, and building a bot that doesn’t disappoint can be tricky. One of my chatbots on the other hand, will route your users to the response they want in a matter of seconds. One of my chatbots, might just be your next employee of the month 🤓

Peek into my toolbox for this project...

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