Coffee wholesaler goes ‘gangbusters’ after using SMS
The challenge
Melbourne institution Coffex Coffee Roasters has been roasting and blending coffee beans for more than half a century, and selling them wholesale into cafes, hotels and function centres.
Recently named the official coffee partner of the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, the family business went through a big period of growth in the 1990s. And with new facilities in New Zealand and Malaysia, it has become a large and very well-known coffee roaster in the Southern Hemisphere.
While Coffex has been selling coffee online for more than a decade, it has long relied on sales representatives, phone calls and face-to-face meetings to orchestrate the bulk of its sales. During the pandemic, website sales started booming – and it’s a trend that looks very likely to take off.
But the roasters have endured plenty of ‘almost sales’ too. For every handful of completed online sales, Coffex faces an abandoned shopping cart – a would-be customer who’s gone to the trouble of registering their details online and picking out a few products, but not gone on to seal the deal.
When the scale of this problem started to become apparent, Coffex tried to solve it with automated emails – but these were more or less ignored.
So they approached MessageMedia to see if text messaging would reap better results.
The results
The return on investment is amazing. It’s such a small price per text message, when you think about it, but we’ve been using them to get $90-$100 transactions. It’s just been really successful.
Wendy Faire, Marketing Manager, Coffex Coffee Pty Ltd
Let’s crunch the numbers after the business started using MessageMedia.
Visitors to the Coffex website abandoned $4,127.24 worth of potential online sales in a 6 month period. In response, 205 reminder text messages at a total cost of $28.56. Quickly after, an impressive $4,875.18 was sold.
In other words, the text messages retrieved more money than what was originally missed.
As Marketing Manager Wendy Faire happily puts it, sales from the texts “have been going gangbusters”.
A lot of people are not just following up on their original purchase, but they’re purchasing even more.
Wendy Faire, Marketing Manager, Coffex Coffee Pty Ltd
The solution
There wasn’t anything particularly fancy about Coffex’s texts. They were just short, simple, friendly reminders sent out to potentially forgetful customers within an hour of abandoning their carts.
“I just set it up using MessageMedia templates and let it do its thing,” says Wendy.
It was really simple, so I didn’t have to call our web developer or anything, but I did have great support from the people at MessageMedia. They helped me to think about different ways to utilise it in the future as well.
Wendy Faire, Marketing Manager, Coffex Coffee Pty Ltd
The future
Next up: New Zealand. With online business and services starting to grow across the Tasman, New Zealand customers will also be able to experience the same great customer service and shopping features as in Australia. But once sales grow, abandoned carts will too – and the company plans to use MessageMedia to track down all their owners.
