How ArTea Increased Sales 3X During the Pandemic

Dominique Blechman and Gabriel Moreno founded ArTea Tienda de Té almost by chance in 2013 after Gabriel bought a teapot for Dominique for her birthday. In the process of researching for the right gift, Gabriel found that the website www.tiendadete.cl was for sale. Gabriel mentioned the website when he gave Dominique the kettle and that he saw this website as an opportunity to combine her passion for tea with his interest in technology. They had a conversation with the owner of the domain and decided to buy it. The online family business ArTea was born and now sells tea to both consumers and wholesalers throughout Chile.

The former owner of the domain www.tiendadete.cl provided them with a box with different types of tea and a list with names and addresses of suppliers. The site was originally a very simple blog, and what started as a hobby gradually became a business. The blog was transformed into an e-commerce website, and they started using Woocommerce to make sales directly from the website. Dominique had some reluctance at the beginning, as she felt that by using a shopping cart she was losing the opportunity to maintain a personal relationship with her customers.

In 2016, Dominique began to dedicate herself full-time to the day-to-day management of the business, while Gabriel contributed a few hours each day. They started working with suppliers in China and personally met them in 2018. While Dominique was in charge of managing the clients, Gabriel’s role was to take care of the more technical part of the business

To stay in touch with their customers, they sent email marketing campaigns using Sendy and Amazon SES. These platforms seemed to fit the needs of a startup, but they immediately had delivery rate issues. Many of their clients weren’t receiving their emails because they just weren’t reaching the inbox. 

In mid-2018, Gabriel’s emails started to hit the spam tray, showing all his contacts a warning saying they were being sent from an untrustworthy domain. They had to stop all email sending, resulting in lost sales, as transactional emails also ended up in spam. The Artea Tienda de Teas brand and send reputation was seriously affected. Sendy was no longer suitable for their needs, as they spent an increasing amount of time and effort on a problem unrelated to the business.

Repairing deliverability to increase open rates

In 2019, they considered choosing another tool to replace Sendy. Gabriel had two options on the table: ActiveCampaign and InfusionSoft. They wanted a more advanced tool that would allow them to acquire new customers and retain their loyal customers. 

They chose ActiveCampaign for several reasons: 

• The integration with Woocommerce allowed them to continue using a system that they had established for years
• They could carry out their operations in Chilean pesos 
• They read many reviews from clients who were very satisfied with ActiveCampaign 
• Automations and CRM were a high priority

ActiveCampaign also improved ArTea’s deliverability. Gabriel had learned and applied a lot of best practices from ActiveCampaign after the big crisis they had with Sendy.

With ActiveCampaign, ArTea now has a great delivery rate and their clients are receiving and opening their emails. In one of their last campaigns, their email had a 32% open rate, 2.83% clicks, and no spam complaints.

Saving time with automation

Prior to ActiveCampaign, Dominique’s wholesale sales process was very manual. She contacted prospects individually after they had shown interest. After implementing automations in ActiveCampaign, a potential client who completes a form has the option to download the product catalog directly and receive an automatic email with all the information. The email from this automation has an open rate of 70% and has reduced a significant amount of time spent on manual tasks, enabling Gabriel to dedicate more time focusing on the business. She says: “ActiveCampaign is such a flexible marketing tool that it does not limit my creativity. The solution that I have in mind is likely to work in the tool.”

By using site tracking, forms, and the deep data integration with Woocommerce, their number of contacts increased 5X in just two years. They started with 2,800 contacts and now have almost 15,000. Currently, 75% of their contacts arrive through ActiveCampaign forms.

CRM helps automate the follow-up of their contacts

Before using ActiveCampaign CRM, Dominique kept all of her wholesale contacts in Excel. She had a lot of information about each customer: date of the last purchase, orders, types of products, and all the relevant data to make sales. Dominique spent a great deal of time following up with each client. She valued the personal relationship with sales, but her work days were endless. The existing processes and workload were not scalable.

After implementing the CRM and automations, contact management was much easier. Emails are now sent automatically based on the stage of each customer. Dominique is no longer using Excel and is now keeping track of her clients in the ActiveCampaign CRM. She helps her clients when they need it, without worrying about routine tasks. “ActiveCampaign is like an extension of me because it greatly simplifies the clients’ work while still being personalized. I still feel that I am the one who sends the emails.”

“ActiveCampaign has played a key role in our sales processes, thanks to automations,” Gabriel commented. “In the last twelve months, ArTea’s sales have increased by 300%.” Because of the explosive sales growth over the last year, Gabriel joined the company full-time in September 2020.

When recently asked, “If it were a tea, what tea would ActiveCampaign be?” Gabriel & Dominique responded “I believe that ActiveCampaign would be Oolong because it’s very versatile, very friendly. When a person doesn’t know a lot about tea and tries it for the first time, they usually like it. It has a kind of grace, that way you can try it for the first time you will like it and it can be prepared in different ways and it’s still delicious.”

Looking back from where they started, a simple web domain for a tea shop is now a thriving business and Dominique and Gabriel work full-time at their company. Thanks to ActiveCampaign automations and CRM, they can send personalized messages to their customers in a scalable way.

Discover the versatility and flexibility of ActiveCampaign for yourself – try ActiveCampaign for free today.