5 Ways To Captivate Shoppers During The Holidays—And All Year Long

Personalizing the shopping experience with timely, relevant messages will captivate customers shopping during the busy holiday season. Here are five ways to get started.

5 Ways To Captivate Shoppers During The Holidays—And All Year Long

The holidays are a favorite time of the year and for good reason. They provide laughter and joy to families and friends and typically give retailers their most successful shopping season of the year.

For this reason, retail marketers spend a lot of time strategizing their holiday promotions to increase sales during what is a highly competitive shopping season. Last year, Amazon took 39% of holiday e-commerce spending due to the convenience and personalized nature of its customer experience.

To stay ahead—now and all year round—retailers need take a page out of Amazon’s book. Prioritizing convenience, 87% of shoppers admit to buying more when they receive personalized messages from brands. With the influx of shoppers offering massive amounts of behavioral data, retailers have the opportunity to capitalize and put it to use automating current and future personalization campaigns.

Personalizing the shopping experience with timely, relevant messages will captivate customers and prevent them from getting distracted or overwhelmed while shopping during the busy holiday season. I’ve listed just five of the many ways you can get started:

1. Respond To Interactions With Real-Time Abandonment Campaigns

As your customers are actively browsing and carting on your website, it’s important to keep them engaged since most will be price shopping and determining what to buy for themselves and their loved ones.

During the holiday season it’s essential to send browse and cart abandonment campaigns as soon as possible to remind shoppers of what they had shown interest in before they purchase it somewhere else. Update the creative components of the campaign so that it is holiday-centric and features your best offers. Following these guidelines can increase conversions by 23%.

2. Increase Average Order Value With Dynamic Cart Threshold On Your Website

When running promotions that include cart thresholds, feature messaging on your website and in the cart that’s personalized per visitor and explains how much more they need to add to their cart to receive the promotion.

For example, if the promotion is to “spend $100 to receive 50% off your highest-priced item” and an individual has carted $60 of the product, show the person how far away he or she is from receiving the discount by saying, “You’re $40 away from receiving 50% off your highest-priced item!” Using this method can increase sales by four times during the promotional period.

3. Intercept Disengaging Shoppers Before They Leave Your Website

Website popups can be an effective engagement tool, except when they are on all websites and they are triggered as soon as shoppers hit the homepage, which in turn causes annoyance to the shopper’s experience and an immediate “close” action.

Instead, it’s much more effective to trigger the website popup as they are leaving your website. During the holiday season, showcase your best deals and promotions to browsers using a popup as they exit. For those who have items carted, create a “free shipping” promotion if they buy now. Using this strategy can increase conversions by 36% and lead to a 12% increase in average order value.

4. Sale Notifications And Cart Mop-Ups

During the holiday season as you run ongoing or new offers and promotions, send personalized sale notifications to shoppers featuring products they have engaged with in the past to make it easier for them to click “buy.”

It’s also a good idea to target shoppers who have carted items but have not come back to purchase by sending a special, limited promotion to give them an incentive to make their final purchase. We call these “cart mop-up campaigns” that can regularly see $5 in revenue per email from the highly targeted campaigns.

5. Re-Engage Shoppers With Product Catalog Updates

If shoppers didn’t purchase items they heavily engaged with during peak days within the season, catalog changes are the perfect opportunity to re-engage them. A price drop notification email for items they’ve previously carted or heavily browsed may be the tipping point for the shopper to make the purchase.

In fact, using a product catalog update garners results similar to the $2 average revenue per email for cart abandonment campaigns. When hot items sell out and you’ve got it back in stock, send a notification out to previously engaged shoppers to give them first dibs.

We’ve found that the more retailers send personalized messages, the less emails they actually send, capitalizing on quality versus quantity. Using personalized email marketing campaigns, retailers can see revenue increase by 15% and customer lifetime value steadily increase over time. It’s never been easier to personalize, and shoppers are asking you to make shopping a convenient experience. It’s time to give Amazon a run for its money this holiday season.