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Whether retailers are ready or not, the holidays are finally here. From cart recovery to browse abandonment campaigns, here are three last minute campaigns you can implement before Black Friday to ensure you have a happy holiday season.

CART RECOVERY

Online retailers lose nearly $4 trillion worth of merchandise each year due to cart abandonment.¹  The obvious solution is to create a cart recovery campaign to combat these numbers; however, an astounding, 62% of retailers are not recovering abandoned shopping carts.²  When creating a cart recovery campaign remember these three tips:

1. Include Product Recommendations. Pull dynamic product recommendations similar to, or often purchased with, the product left in the shopping cart. This is a great way to expose your customers to other products they might have missed. By doing this, you have the chance to lead your customer to purchase their originally abandoned item, or, better yet, a much larger order.
2. Don’t Be a Grinch.  Your customers are in the gift giving spirit this time of year, and you should be equally as giving. It's a good idea to use incentives to entice potential customers to make a purchase; however, it’s important to give these gifts at the right time. Use a three part cart recovery series to make sure your message is being heard and leave that special discount, promotion, etc. to the end.
3. Enable Anti-Gaming. When using incentives as part of your marketing strategy, it’s important to make sure you don’t teach your customers to abandon their carts for a discount. Anti-gaming technology allows retailers to automatically detect customers who are considered serial abandoners and serve them a separate set of emails that don’t include discount codes. These emails will pull in dynamic product recommendations and showcase the abandoned products, but any mention of a discount or promotion is wiped from the copy.

SEGMENTED PROMOTIONAL CAMPAIGNS

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to create segmented campaigns. Segmenting promotional campaigns can be as involved or as simple as you want. Instead of creating a custom email for each segment, SkinMedix (emails shown below) simply changed the promotion to reflect the interest of each particular cohort.

Here are 3 key segments you want to hone in on this holiday season:

1. Last Year’s Holiday Shoppers. This cohort shopped with you last year, so the goal is to get them to come back and shop with you again this year. Simply join 2 logical filters: last purchase is greater than or equal to 10.31.2014 AND last purchase is less than or equal to 12.25.2014.

2. Procrastinators. Identify any customer whose purchase date was after December 15, 2014. Make sure to use language to show that you are there for them this year. Free or expedited shipping and gift basket options are all great ways to grab the attention of this segment.

3. Best Customers. Make sure your best customers know how valued they are. Remember, not everything has to be a discount – free samples, gifts, or even early access to the Cyber Monday sales are great ways to show your appreciation, You can use RFM analysis to easily find your best customer cohort, all you need is recency, monetary, and frequency information and access to excel. You can learn more about how to do RFM analysis here.

BROWSE ABANDONMENT CAMPAIGNS

A recent study by Experian, saw a 4x lift in transaction rate and a 6x lift in revenue per browse abandonment email when compared to promotional emails.³  With the uptick in site visits that inevitably come with the holidays, it’s imperative that retailers have a way to ID visitors and send them helpful emails based on their onsite behavior.  The trick to browse abandonment emails is to make sure you aren’t creeping out your site visitors. Here are a few tips to ensure your email is helpful and friendly.

1. Create a Curated List. The email below is by Wasserstrom. They spin the entire experience by telling customers they’ve saved a list of all their recently viewed items and include a nice bold button to “Continue Shopping”
2. Use Dynamic Recommendations. William-Sonoma leverages product recommendations in their browse abandonment emails to allow customers to learn more about related products.
3. Create a Sense of Urgency. The language PACSUN uses in their email on the right does a fantastic job of creating a sense of urgency. External urgency (created by the retailer) can help motivate customers to complete their purchase.

Whether you decided to focus on all three campaigns or just one of them, the underlying theme is personalization. Customers want to feel like they’re part of the family and with these three strategies, retailers are sure to win this holiday season:

1. http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-retailers-can-reduce-shopping-cart-abandonment-and-recoup-billions-of-dollars-in-lost-sales-2014-4
2. http://blog.windsorcircle.com/how-to-reduce-abandoned-shopping-carts
3. https://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/white-papers/cross-channel-loyalty-wp.pdf