HeroThemes is a WordPress theme and plugin development company out of Staffordshire, England. They create tools that help businesses improve and scale their customer service and satisfaction, including knowledge base and FAQ plugins.  

They sell their products using Easy Digital Downloads and have helped tens of thousands of customers optimize the support for their websites.

As a business focused on customer support, HeroThemes has a deep and thorough understanding of how to assist customers when they reach out for help. But HeroThemes also wanted to make sure they were serving customers when they didn’t have an issue requiring direct support.

“We’re all about optimizing our customer service,” said Richard Long, CTO of HeroThemes, “And we wanted to do the same thing with our customer outreach.”

The team felt email would be the best way to stay connected to customers, to help them out in proactive ways, and to cultivate strong relationships with them. But connecting with customers was going to take more than, say, sending out occasional newsletters to their entire list.

“Everyone receives dozens of emails every day,” Richard said, “We didn’t want to add another one if it wasn’t adding value to our customers. We wanted to be able to identify our customers’ needs based on their behavior and send them emails that would bring them value for their specific situation.”

HeroThemes tried a number of email solutions but ultimately chose Jilt for its advanced, eCommerce-focused segmentation—and because of Jilt’s native Easy Digital Downloads integration, Richard said he had “the confidence that we would be able to personalize our outreach and scale this effectively.”

Once they were set up with Jilt, the built-in segmentation rules allowed HeroThemes to “address every single one of our potential or existing customers at a fraction of the time it used to take us—and not just with a generic email, but a tailored interaction.”

HeroThemes also used Jilt to send abandoned cart recovery emails with a customer service-oriented twist. They wouldn’t offer a discount as an incentive to return to the cart, instead they’d ask what went wrong and try to clear up any potential sticking points that might have prevented a customer from finishing a purchase.

As they crafted their campaigns, Richard appreciated the little touches that made Jilt a user-friendly solution. “Jilt streamlines the process of campaign management,” he said, “For example, in the automation screen we can see the campaigns, rules, and summary of emails in an automation by hovering over the envelopes. Seems straightforward, but other solutions we trialled felt clunky in comparison.”

The results have been everything Richard and the HeroThemes team hoped for. “Jilt has been tremendous in starting conversations and reducing sales pressure,” he said, and they’re now expanding to do even more with Jilt, including customer welcome and onboarding automations.

• A 22.1 percent abandoned cart recovery rate. In 2019, HeroThemes recovered nearly one out of four abandoned carts on their website. That’s a very impressive rate—but, Richard said, “It’s amazing considering we don’t incentivize purchase completion. These are new customers that we would have otherwise lost.”
• More repeat customers. “Jilt helps us segment our audience down to very small groups based on their buying behavior on our website,” Richard said, “That functionality allows us to send email campaigns that are particularly targeted to our customers’ situation and needs.” The average HeroThemes customer now makes more than one purchase from the site.
• A reliable integration with Easy Digital Downloads. “The solution needed to be bulletproof,” Richard said, “If the wrong email goes to the wrong person or if our email doesn’t reach it’s recipient, we could not only annoy our customers but also make them lose their trust in us and our ability to provide a professional service.” Jilt’s native Easy Digital Downloads integration and clear segmentation rules ensured that HeroThemes never has to worry about anything going wrong with their email.

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