ONLINE AUTO PARTS RETAILER

CarParts.com Increases
Customer Engagement 400% by Personalizing Experiences Around Each Customer’s Vehicle

CarParts.com is the leading online auto part and accessories retailer. Their goal is to help everyday drivers get back on the road by making it simple and convenient to shop for auto parts online. They’ve streamlined shopping experiences by making it easy for customers to find the best parts, at the lowest price, and have them shipped to their door. CarParts.com needed a multi-channel marketing solution that would extend that seamless experience across their channels by personalizing products and content based on each user’s vehicle type, historical, and real-time site behaviors.

+400%

CTR with Personalized
Recommendations

+130%

Message
Volume

50 Hrs

Saved Weekly by
Eliminating Dependencies

BUSINESS

CarParts.com is an eCommerce auto parts retailer that specializes in original equipment replacement vehicle parts. They have assisted millions of drivers across the United States find the right parts to fix their vehicles and keep their cars on the road.

CarParts.com was established in 1999.

HEADQUARTERS

Torrance, CA // USA

INDUSTRY

Online Auto Parts Retailer

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THE CHALLENGE

Legacy Marketing Cloud Lacked Data and Personalization Capabilities

CarParts.com’s legacy marketing cloud limited them to batch-and-blast campaigns which hindered their ability to personalize their messages. To get anything done, it was a huge manual lift as they were reliant on engineering and IT resources. They had no ability to leverage essential data such as past purchases, affinities, or real-time activities. Additionally, their previous solution couldn’t handle their catalogs of over 1 million SKUs and extensive vehicle content, which was required to deliver the 1:1 tailored experiences they wanted.

THE OBJECTIVE

Reinvigorate Their Marketing Through Dynamic, Personalized Experiences

As more consumers began to shift from offline to online shopping, CarParts.com needed a solution that would enable them to autonomously personalize their campaigns by leveraging all of their first-party data, as well as their large product and content catalogs, all while staying compliant with privacy regulations.

CarParts.com set out to:

Deliver relevant product and content recommendations that enable them to build precise audience segments and launch multi-channel campaigns
Improve customer engagement and retention by precisely targeting users with meaningful and trusted content at each stage of the customer lifecycle
Scale with automated, behavior-triggered campaigns often an inventory of 1, to surface relevant, live auctions across channels
Improve user experiences so they can deliver timely, relevant messages without relying on engineering resources

“When Blueshift came on board, it really took our marketing team to the next level. Blueshift allowed us to finally unlock the value of first-party data to make sending compelling messages and sequences at scale easy for our team.. We moved from the $10 table to the $1,000 table rather quickly.”

Marc Hil MacaluaVP, Growth and Digital Marketing, CarParts.com

Strategy

Grow Through Automation and Convert Through Deep Personalization

CarParts.com selected Blueshift because it was the only platform that was flexible enough to unify and utilize their complex data that included large product and content catalogs, customer’s historical behaviors, and real-time user activity across channels. Blueshift enabled their team to collect and act on any data point, enabling them to surface the right auto part recommendations adapted to each customer from across over a million SKUs.

Their team was able to effortlessly launch various promotional, transactional, and lifecycle vehicle maintenance campaigns that are fully automated and event-triggered. This included cart abandonment, viewed products, category abandonment, vehicle maintenance, search abandonment, and post-purchase upsell campaigns. With a unified view of every user, they’re now able to deliver on an orchestrated strategy of personalized email and SMS experiences that adapt to every user.

The following capabilities were essential to CarParts.com success:

Personalized Product and Content Recommendations
Adapt auto part recommendations, repair tips, and news to each user based on their vehicle year, make, and model and real-time website behaviors

Advanced Segmentation
Allows CarParts.com to have more targeted campaign strategies by building precise audiences that automatically update based on the latest customer data

Multi-Channel Campaign Journey Builder
Allows the CarParts.com team to create, automate, and scale more campaigns while freeing them up to focus on high priority initiatives

Advanced A/B and Multivariate Testing
Ensures each user gets the most effective treatment by automating testing and optimization of every component in their campaigns, including templates, subject lines, recommendations, and more

Results

CarParts.com was able to see:

+400% CTR with personalized recommendations

+130% message volume with personalized content

50 Hours saved weekly by eliminating engineering dependencies

Next Steps

To expand further on the success they’ve had personalizing and scaling their email and SMS campaigns with Blueshift, CarParts.com plans to extend Blueshift to additional channels including onsite recommendations, push, and paid media like Facebook so they can deliver cohesive, consistent customer experiences across every brand touchpoint.

“Blueshift’s platform flexibility addresses our complex data structure and makes it simple to deliver personalized messages and grow our channels. The people behind Blueshift really care about our success and are one of the main reasons we’re at where we are today.”

Houman AkhavanChief Marketing Officer, CarParts.com