Intent Data Is A Gift, With Edible Brands
AdExchanger Talks
A podcast interview with Erica Randerson, Chief Digital Officer!
Edible Arrangements sells 350 SKUs on its website year-round. But for Valentine’s Day and on Mother’s Day, only around 10% of them are available to buy.
That might sound like a counterintuitive move for a retailer on its busiest days of the year. But Edible shrinks its catalog on purpose, says Erica Randerson, chief digital officer at Edible Brands, which owns Edible Arrangements, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
The logic is based on shopper behavior. Most gift shoppers, as it turns out, became terrible procrastinators during the pandemic.
Pre-pandemic, many Edible orders arrived a week or even 10 days ahead of a holiday, Randerson says. Now, most come in during the final 48 hours—and those shoppers know what they want, because they’re in a time crunch.
At peak times, on-site conversion rates can hit between 10% and 15% compared with the 3% or 4% that’s typical for ecommerce, a difference Randerson attributes to the high intent that gift buyers bring.
So Edible gets out of their way. Fewer choices mean a faster path to checkout and a more manageable load for the franchisees who make and deliver every order. The stakes are high, though. Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day together drive roughly 40% of Edible’s annual orders.
But gifting data also has a quirk that most ecommerce data doesn’t. Every order has two customers, the buyer and the recipient—and knowing both is a major advantage, Randerson says.
For example, if you sent your mom a birthday present last April, Edible can remind you to send another this April. And seeing both sides of the equation also lets Edible spot trends and gather insights. It’s noticed, for example, that people who get cookies as part of their gift are far more likely to become customers later.
Edible won’t market to a recipient, however, until it gets explicit permission.
“A customer actually cannot even opt their recipient into communications,” Randerson says. “That mechanism doesn’t exist.”
Recipients can opt in themselves, though. Every Edible gift package comes with a hang tag that has a QR code, and if the recipient scans it, they land on a page offering a free gift in exchange for their email address.
That’s a rather traditional albeit effective approach for gathering first-party data. But there’s also a newer source of intent arriving from a very different place: AI search.
Although chatbots currently send less than 10% of traffic to the Edible Arrangements site, those visitors tend to convert better and spend an average of $10 more per order—which “is not insignificant,” Randerson says.
“It’s clear that these channels are helping convert our customers before they get to us,” she says.
Also in this episode: how Edible Brands decides what tech to build in-house versus what to buy off the shelf, how it’s planning for the chaos of Valentine’s Day—which lands on Super Bowl Sunday this year!—and the origin of Edibles.com, its marketplace for hemp-derived THC products. Plus: Randerson’s former life as a competitive clogger.