@In the Inbox I’m personally very excited to test different Abandoned Cart incentives with my clients this month, leading into October as we prep for BFCM. A few of these are luxury brands, where they either don’t discount at all, or they discount rarely.

My favorite type of incentive to test is a free gift. Usually offered to only “high value” carts, it’s a straightforward way for a brand to reward those customers, while preserving their profit margins. What’s interesting to me is determining where that “high value” line is drawn. It’s common for brands to offer perks once a cart reaches $100, but for some brands, that’s the cost of a single item, so it doesn’t make as much sense to call that a “high value” cart.

I’m curious what you’ve seen across your clients? Is there a recurring threshold that seems to indicate a pattern of “high value” customer behavior? One thing I’ve noticed along these lines is there tends to be a pretty significant drop between customers who’ve ordered at least 2 times, and then the third order is where the beginning tier of VIPs shows up...

Thanks @In the Inbox for the shout out!

A few things come to mind (in no particular order):

• Updating Cart Abandonment messaging to be aligned with BFCM.  So for a few clients, we have messages setup ready to go during BFCM so that it can speak to some of the promotions or offers that will be happening. 
  • A neat trick is to use a Universal Content Block so you can update this quickly across all the Cart Abandonment messages during BFCM.
  • Another trick is to setup a “A/B Test” and switch the weights during BFCM to 90% weighted on the BFCM Message so you can quickly switch back and have some data to see if it helped.
• Live Countdowns - there’s a few tools out there that do this, but personally I like sendtric.com.  For some brands where this type of messaging is appropriate, I’ll be curious to see if this helps drive conversions as people are flipping through their inbox looking for deals and seeing that it’s about to expire/end.  This doesn’t have to only apply to Cart Abandonment but also Campaign messages too!
• Link to BFC Deals/Offers - Conventional wisdom is to link cart abandonment directly to checkout to ease the conversion.  But during BFCM when there is so much “discount FOMO” and urgency to purchase - a link to a dedicated landing page about all the BFCM offers of the brand might be compelling too.  They may end up buying more than what was in their cart.
• One Click Upselling Opportunities - At least for Shopify, you can create a link that can adjust quantities (and apply discount).  Creating a “Double my Order and Save More” link could be useful for certain consumable brands (cosmetics, health, etc).  So during BFCM where many times these are first time (and only time) customers, try doubling the quantity with an incentive might increase the AOV for these once a year type customers.

Looking forward to seeing what others are doing too!

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Joseph Hsieh // retentioncommerce.com // twitter: @retenion 

Hi Every-one,

Thanks for the timely topic @In the Inbox and am loving the contributions from @retention and @ebusiness pros !

In addition to these three things we’ll be introducing for our clients is;

• Identifying those that purchased from us last BFCM, which a personalized message within the Abandoned Cart email. This recognizes the customers previous purchases during the sale period and personalize the communications
• As part of the upsells, we are going to show at least one sell-out item. This is to increase the FOMO and showcase that products do indeed sell out due to demand.
• As per my comments for the welcome series, Customer Reviews! These are key to highlight peer to peer thoughts 

Good Luck to everyone for the upcoming promotional period!

Hi @ebusiness pros 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and recommendations. I really like the special consideration for “High Value” carts and how best to define them. I agree with you, it is very brand specific and dependent on their AOV. 

When it comes to defining “High Value” with some of my clients, we’ve looked at a couple of other aspects include number of purchase to define a customer as “VIP” or looking at their actual loyalty program. In both cases, we didn’t offer any additional discount or incentive (though, I love the free gift idea), but merely use the email copy to give the customer a more personalized and exclusive experience while simply reminding them of their benefits of being a loyalty member. 

If someone was not a loyalty member but a returning customer, we not only used the cart abandon emails to market the items they left, but prompt them to join the loyalty program to be able to apply those benefits (automatic saves, free shipping, etc). which has really helped.

One of the other things I’ve seen be successful for new customers is to remind them of their welcome coupon (ie. they were given a discount for signing up, but haven’t used it yet). Rather than try to sway them with yet another discount/coupon, we inject the same discount/coupon code in the cart abandon which has been a successful reminder. We’ve also gone as far as embedding the coupon so that if someone clicks back from their cart abandon email, their welcome coupon is already pre-populated in their cart for faster checkout.

I love the recommendations and discussion! Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

@In the Inbox 

Hi @retention 

Thanks for sharing some of your recommendations and tactics for BCFM. 

A neat trick is to use a Universal Content Block so you can update this quickly across all the Cart Abandonment messages during BFCM.

Another trick is to setup a “A/B Test” and switch the weights during BFCM to 90% weighted on the BFCM Message so you can quickly switch back and have some data to see if it helped.

I love both of these suggestions! I’ve recommended the universal blocks (a feature I think it really under used throughout the year) but really impactful during BFCM. 

The weighting of BFCM messaging and being able to toggle those weights for both testing and need, is really smart. I will definitely look at implementing this with my clients!

Lastly the idea of redirecting to a dedicated BFCM LP containing all of the deals is super interesting. So to make sure I understand the idea correctly, in your cart abandon emails, you still dynamically show the items that were left, but rather than link back to the cart/checkout, you link to the LP. Presumably the items would still be in the cart, but this has the potential for people to add more to their cart on return. So good!

I appreciate the discussion and recommendations!

@In the Inbox 

Hi @Kylie W 

Thank you for sharing your top three recommendations! You’re 100% right about customer reviews. The more social proof, especially during BFCM, the higher likelihood people will be motivated to complete their purchase.

The idea of including an item in the cart abandon email that has already sold out is interesting. Do you have any examples of how you present that!? If you have any examples, I’d love to see that. 

I am also really intrigued by the idea of personalizing campaigns to people who have purchased during this time. Do you give them early access? Do you offer them different deal that non-returning customers would have? How do you set up your segments? I would image there is a subsegment of people who ONLY purchase during BFCM and people who have purchased during BFCM as well as throughout the year. How would you message them differently?

Thank you so much for your feedback and I am excited to learn more! 

@In the Inbox 

@Kylie W I love your ideas! Thanks for sharing that inspiration too.

I’m especially curious how you’re planning to personalize the messages for those who purchased last BFCM? Are you using a custom profile property to do this, or segmenting based on past purchase events?

Also - when you’re showcasing the sell-out item, are you planning to change those daily? I’d be curious to learn how you’re going to make this execution as painless (and reliable) as possible in the midst of a high-stress week...

@In the Inbox it’s my pleasure!

Thanks for sharing your insights as well. I’ve been curious of implementing a loyalty program for my clients and their brands, but have been unsure what the best tool to use is… Is there one that you especially like? I’d love to be able to use that as an incentive to help people complete their purchases.

Also, for this reminder of the welcome discount: I love this, and appreciate how it keeps discounting more streamlined. When you’re embedding the coupon, are you typically using dynamic codes or static ones? I’ve found dynamic codes a little difficult to work with sometimes… I hate not being able to adequately preview what code someone was sent every time lol.