Nifty Gifts increased their revenue by 77% in just 2 months

Banish the blah gifts!

Nifty Gifts is an online-only gift shop that specialises in cute, useful and unusual gifts for those hard-to-shop-for people and they've been working hard to banish blah gifts since 2018. They're based in the Western Cape, South Africa, and have stocked their own warehouse with all the products they sell online–meaning no dropshipping, no long waits, and no surprise fees.

The marketing machine in Nifty Gifts consists of the graphic designer Megan Shone, the marketing manager Jordan Luppnow, and Nadia Arnold who's the social media manager.  Jordan’s focus is strategy and concept development, and Megan executes and polishes the design.

As the team outgrew their email marketing plan at the time, they decided to explore other ESP options that better suited their needs for more sophisticated, automated, powerful email marketing. 

Drip was a no-brainer

"We had certain boxes the ESP had to check and a budget to work with, and narrowed it down to two or three choices. But ultimately, it was the customer service, user-friendly interface we could trial and all the resources Drip provides in the platform itself that tipped the scales - game-changing best practices and templates for you to customise! It was really a no-brainer at that point." Jordan says. 

Drip's customer service in particular is what stands out for Jordan and Megan:

"Drip’s support is insane. It’s the same two people that typically reply back to our questions and you end up building a relationship with them over time. They remember what we discussed and they even check in to see how we’re getting on with the workflows we’ve built earlier. One of the other companies I’ve previously  worked for used Klaviyo and it is very much “you just gotta figure it out” and there’s not that same feeling of personal connection" Megan elaborates.

"Personally I would say you guys are comparable to Klaviyo. There are things I’ve worked with in Klaviyo I would get annoyed with that I can do better in Drip: for instance you can easily have multiple triggers in one workflow in Drip" she continues. 

Hit the ground running with 1:1 onboarding

"We started playing around with features, but then realised we would benefit greatly from the onboarding, which skyrocketed our progress. We started list hygiene and setting up all the workflows we had been eager to implement, and the results were immediate."

After initially deciding against the free 1:1 onboarding that Drip offers all new customers over a certain list size, they decided to give it a whirl anyway. 

"The resources within Drip are brilliant, but without the onboarding from our success manager, Arooba, we would not have learned so much so fast! The one-on-one service at Drip is 10/10 and the personal support from the Senior Account Executive, Laurids, who emailed us upon starting the free trial was unmatched." Jordan says. 

Megan and Jordan then proceeded to set up a welcome flow, an abandoned cart flow, a birthday flow and several onsite campaigns to collect leads. Today they have the following active flows: 

• Welcome series
• Abandoned cart flow
• Win-back
• Re-engagement & list pruning 
• Birthday flow 
• Facebook lead forms
• Deactivate unsubscribed people

The day-to-day life with Drip requires minimal work according to the two: 

"It's easy to set up according to best practices and tailor to your brand! They all work together in the background and the maintenance is minimal. The stats are really helpful to keep records and adjust with data-driven decisions."

Best practices, best-in-class support and better than great results

According to Jordan and Megan, the strong combination of available resources, proactive customer support and powerful features is the recipe to their success with Drip. And what a success it's been! 

During the first two months with Drip, they saw a 77% increase in their revenue. Their best performing workflow is their abandoned cart flow:

"Our best performing single email produced a 122% higher AOV than website alone in that same period. That's insane. We’re so happy that we’ve managed to increase our AOV. We would rather have fewer orders at a higher AOV if we had to choose, but now we have more orders and higher AOV, so that’s a win-win," Megan says. 

"It’s really incredible to see that Drip is helping us build a better relationship with our customers so they’re actually willing to spend more" she continues. 

An extra team member

Since switching to Drip, Jordan and Megan almost feel like they've welcomed a new team member onboard the team, but only at the price of a monthly subscription. 

What's even better, the playbooks and resources that Drip provides have proven actually useful: 

"As South Africans we normally look at the trends overseas and it won’t really translate if we apply it now as the South Africa market tends to be 3-5 years behind other first-world countries. But here, we’ve actually been able to see the best practices in application doing what they say they do. So the way Drip has structured the tips, the onboarding, the live support it all works together in this incredible recipe to create a really fantastic marketing plan."

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