Shoott launched in the summer of 2018 with a vision to create the ultimate win-win for clients and freelance photographers: Give everyday people access to affordable professional photography and provide photographers with supplemental gigs to support their business.

Since then, the business has expanded to 600+ locations across 60+ US cities, with thousands of photoshoots happening every week. Throughout its growth story, the Shoott team has relied on Ortto and Autopilot to deploy all their email and SMS campaigns. 

The Challenge

Shoott works with local photographers who are vetted for technical skills, experience, and personalities to offer free outdoor photo sessions at local parks and hot spots throughout the year. Clients receive their digital gallery of 40+ lightly edited photos three to five business days after their session. Customers then choose the photos they want to buy - they only have to pay for the photos they love.

Upon receiving their gallery, customers are generally ready to purchase. But indecision and distractions can get in the way, leading to missed sales. Shoott needed to build automated campaigns that would recover this lost revenue.

Strategy: Recovering customers with abandoned cart and recapture journeys

Shoott was originally an Autopilot customer. After our new platform launched and we rebranded, they decided to migrate over to Ortto. 

“Our integration was simple, we did it in two steps,” software developer, Dmitry Feoktistov, explains. “Then we decided to recreate our Journeys and Campaigns from scratch because we realized there was a lot of stuff that just wasn’t worth migrating. We really started leveraging the different customer journeys, and we’re going to use it more to segment customers for more customized journeys.”

Two new journeys, in particular, have helped the Shoott team solve the lost revenue challenge they were facing.

The first is a straightforward abandoned cart journey that has an incredible 83.5% average open rate and 15.1% click-through rate. “The abandoned cart is the journey that generates the most click-throughs because people are already involved and interested,” shared co-founder and COO, Jennifer Yeh. 

“We use behavioral data to enter people when the first step in the checkout process is completed. If the booking is not completed after two hours, we send them a reminder email to checkout.” 

“We have another journey where we try to recapture sales when people haven’t purchased any photos. We use time shapes and custom events to reach them at the right time with an email asking if they need any help or have feedback.”

The Expired Gallery journey specifically targets people whose gallery was created ten days ago without purchase. If the customer has not extended their gallery, they’re emailed right away. If they have extended, a time delay shape holds the email for another seven days.

This journey has an average open rate of 78.6% and a click rate of 46.8%, helping Shoott bring down their no-purchase rate by three percentage points and reduce their time-to-purchase lag by 50%.

When building campaigns in Ortto, Jennifer loves the intuitive user interface and helpful support team, saying, “It’s very clean. We’ve worked with some that are just outdated and it’s not fun! You also have a great support team. Everyone we’ve come into contact with at Ortto has been very nice and just very helpful.” 

Dmitry agreed and added, “The documentation is clear, I like reading through it. Performance-wise it’s good too, you can set up a trigger and then deploy it, and the information comes rolling in within minutes. There’s no refreshing and waiting for it.”