Campaign Summary

1-800-Flowers.com launched an e-gifting experience to decrease the friction and pain points associated with sending gifts. It gave gift givers the ability to e-gift any product and enabled recipients to choose when and where they received their gifts. It even let them select a different gift from any of 1-800-Flowers.com’s family of brands. The new feature was advertised on the homepage, through email banners, and with call-to-action (CTA) buttons that encouraged users to send e-gifts for upcoming holidays.

Strategy

Objective and Context:

1-800-Flowers.com launched an e-gifting experience that leveraged SmartGift, a platform that powers gift websites for global brands, to eliminate the friction and pain points associated with sending gifts. 1-800-Flowers.com offered customers the ability to e-gift any product they wished to send. Customers could instantaneously and seamlessly send digital gifts to expresses their sentiments and let the recipients know a physical gift was on the way. Additional features allowed recipients to choose when and where they would receive gifts, and they had the option to swap a gift for another gift from any of the 1-800-Flowers.com family of Brands.

This new e-gifting experience aimed to address the top three friction points related to gifting: 1) the sender doesn’t know the recipient’s delivery address, 2) the sender doesn’t know which gift to get, and 3) the sender doesn’t know when to send the gift.

Target Audience:

1-800-Flowers.com had two primary target audiences:

1. Last-Minute Gift Givers between the ages of 25 and 55 with a slight skew towards males. This cohort usually used the feature during event-driven holidays and occasions, such as Valentine’s Day, on the same day or very last minute, taking advantage of the feature’s instantaneous gift messaging capability by letting the recipient know that something special was on its way even if the physical gift might be late.
2. Everyday Occasion Gift Givers, who were also in the age range of 25 to 55 but with a slight skew towards females. This cohort primarily used the feature for everyday occasions, such as birthdays, love and romance, and sympathy, to ease the gift sending process, which could be hindered by collecting the recipient’s delivery preferences.  

While both cohorts had high relevance, the Everyday Occasion Gift Givers represented the best use case for the e-gifting feature given the larger cohort size and because their occasions were celebrated year round.

Creative Strategy:

1-800-Flowers.com has been the trusted source for gifting for over 40 years. With the trust associated with the brand, the company decided to introduce the feature on its own digital properties and marketing channels. It advertised the feature by highlighting relevant use cases on the homepage, in email banners, and by creating clear call-to-action buttons on product pages to address specific use cases. 

For example, in the days leading up to Mother's Day, marketers adapted the 1-800-Flowers.com marketing strategy to engage Last-Minute Gift Givers shopping for their mothers. The marketers highlighted the e-gift feature in a "Smart Gift, Smart Mom" email campaign and placed a banner prominently on mobile and desktop homepages.

Additionally, to build further trust and awareness, the company described how the feature worked on several landing pages throughout the e-gifting experience. As a result, 1-800-Flowers.com saw an increase in adoption since the launch of the feature.

Execution

Overall Campaign Execution:

When the e-gifting feature first launched earlier this year, many 1-800-Flowers.com customers were curious about the e-gifting call-to-action (CTA) buttons on the product pages, leading to many clicks but not many conversions. With that insight, 1-800-Flowers.com de-coupled the use cases by creating two distinct calls-to-action, “Don’t Know the Recipient’s Delivery Address? Click Here!” and “e-gift this item.” By de-coupling these use cases and creating two different call-to-action buttons leading to the same seamless e-gifting experience, 1-800-Flowers.com achieved a 60 percent increase in its purchase conversion rate and a 30 percent lift in revenues per session. 

Mobile Execution:

1-800-Flowers.com created the e-gifting experience with mobile users in mind. 1-800-Flowers.com customers had the ability to start and complete the entire e-gifting experience on mobile whenever and wherever they wanted. A sender could share an e-gift with a recipient using either email, SMS, or Facebook Messenger.

The majority of e-gift customers started the experience on desktop but completed purchases on mobile devices. Recipients tended to be more mobile-oriented, with the majority of them opening and accepting the gift message notification on their mobile devices. With this in mind, 1-800-Flowers.com, together with SmartGift, built a mobile e-gifting experience that was quick, simple, and adaptable to all devices. The e-gifting experience could be broken down into three simple steps:

Step 1. Sender shares a gift link via any preferred method: email, Facebook Messenger, SMS text, or a copied link.

Step 2. Recipient accepts the gift or swaps it for something else from any of 1-800-Flowers.com’s family of brands and indicates when and where to have the gift delivered.

Step 3. Sender gets an alert to complete the purchase.

As an added feature to the experience, 1-800-Flowers.com has also incorporated the option for the recipient to send a thank you note back to the sender.

Results (including context, evaluation, and market impact)

1-800-Flowers.com's e-gifting feature has enabled customers to easily express themselves and to seamlessly connect and celebrate with one another across all channels and platforms. After an initial read from one of 1-800-Flowers.com’s peak holidays, results revealed:

• A 15-percent increase in web engagement
• A 40-percent increase in revenues after delivery cut-off time
• A 9-percent increase in new customer acquisitions