How Bigtent Outdoors Achieved 5,930x ROAS with Channel Talk + Shopify

1. About Bigtent Outdoors

• Company: Bigtent Outdoors

• Industry: Outdoor camping equipment

• Year Founded: 2017

• Revenue: $3 million

• Company Intro: Bigtent Outdoors is focused on curating specialized, high-quality outdoor gear from Asia and bringing them to North America. Their team is made up of passionate campers who hand-select every brand they carry. The goal is to gather these unique brands under one "Big tent". With this mission, they've created a loyal fanbase of customers who buy with complete trust in the company.

2. The Challenge

Problem:

Bigtent Outdoors has established itself in the outdoor equipment space with an online store and offline showroom in Coquitlam, BC Canada. As the business grew, email and phone calls were still the primary methods of customer communication which felt too passive and limited their ability to pursue more proactive customer touch points.

Additionally, with high-ticket products, if Bigtent could identify and engage website visitors in real-time, they could guide customers through their purchase journey and create additional sales opportunities that traditional channels were missing.

What they needed was more than just a communication too, they needed a CRM-integrated marketing solution that could turn website traffic into revenue.

Solution:

Channel Talk provided a solution that combined customer support live chat and marketing campaigns in one tool which allowed the team to increase their response speed and talk to customers along their buying journey.

Bigtent could centralize customer communication through live chat, email, and Instagram messages into one inbox while running onsite pop-ups that targeted specific users.

"To be honest, Channel Talk is the only CRM platform we've found that allows marketing, CS, sales, internal document data management, and internal communication to happen seamlessly in one unified system.

For a small but fast-moving team like ours, that level of centralization is invaluable."

- Scarlet, CX & Marketing Manager

Additionally, the integration with Shopify to view order history and all customers to check their order status directly from the live chat proved to be valuable piece to Bigtent's decision to use Channel Talk.

Channel Talk's Shopify Integration Capabilities

3. Key Features

Marketing & CRM: Create Touch Points Along the Customer Journey

Bigtent Outdoors utilized customer segmentation to create onsite pop-ups at different points of the customer journey to encourage purchase.

Live Chat: Increase Response Speed

The team introduced live chat to the website to meet customers while they were shopping and answer questions more proactively, rather than waiting for an email.

"Marketing and CX are inseparable, it's one full cycle. CX gets the feedback and marketing can create more targeted messages with that feedback.

The fact that Channel Talk has marketing and customer service tools at the same time is a huge bonus."

- Scarlet, CX & Marketing Manager

4. Results

1. 96% decrease in customer response time

2. $24K generated from a sitewide sale campaign

3. 5930x ROAS from a new customer marketing campaign

1. 96% decrease in customer response time

Before introducing Channel Talk, emails were replied to just once in the morning and the team would be busy with tasks the rest of the day. This meant any email that came in after the morning slot would have to wait till the next morning for a response.

After starting with live chat, the response time has decreased to just 20-30 minutes, totaling to a 96% decrease overall.

2. Sitewide Sale Campaign that Generated $24K

Goal: Encourage purchase for sitewide sale of iKamper product

Background: In order to promote a sitewide sale, the team ran a fullscreen pop-up campaign for two weeks. The promotion was a success as almost everything was sold out.

To sell the remaining stock, another campaign was created, targeting customers who visited the iKamper product pages, alerting them of low stock.

Segment: The first sitewide campaign targeted all users. The second targeted campaign targeted users who visited the iKamper product pages.

Result: Almost all iKamper products for the sale was sold out by the end of the campaign and the revenue contributed from Channel Talk totaled to over $24K+.

3. 5930X ROAS from a new customer marketing campaign

Goal: First purchase conversion, turning interested visitors into first-time buyers.

Background: Many visitors were exploring the website but not completing a purchase. Since Bigtent Outdoors offers higher-priced outdoor gear, customers often require more time before committing.

So the team thought, "What if we introduce a lower-barrier product category—something with great design and quality—so customers can experience our brand more easily?”

And then a campaign was created to center their lighting collection.

Segment: Customers who had visited the site 2+ times but never purchased.

Result: The campaign saw a 593,000% ROAS, and over $7,000 in revenue from first-time customers.

5. Future Goals

Bigtent Outdoors has already built a robust customer support process with Channel Talk and plans to introduce a customer tier system and a points-based loyalty program to distinguish VIPs.

With clearer customer tiers, they hope to create more precise marketing campaigns so customers can receive the right benefits at the right moment, making their overall experience more helpful and enjoyable.

Additionally, the team is already using and will continue to explore the full features of ALF, Channel Talk's AI agent. With ALF v2's Task feature, AI will be able to automatically handle address changes, exchange requests, or order cancellations and the team plans to implement this in the new year.