The holiday shopping season is right around the corner and there’s no doubt that this holiday season will be quite unpredictable and challenging. Today, we’d like to highlight four (4) key e-commerce mobile engagement campaigns that every business can run to generate revenue and ensure a successful holiday season.

As a consumer engages with your app and shows interest in your products, you’ll want to engage with them at different stages of the marketing funnel to facilitate a purchase event. Leanplum recommends businesses actively run four key campaigns at all times but especially during the holiday season to maximize purchases and revenue.

The campaigns are: search abandonment, price drop, replenishment and abandoned cart.

1. Search Abandonment: When someone uses the search functionality on your app to search for products but doesn’t purchase, they are indicating purchase intent. Sometimes they just need a little nudge to complete a purchase. This is where a search abandonment campaign is crucial. Send them a push notification reminding them to come back to the app to complete their search and purchase.

2. Price Drop: When a consumer has viewed a product but hasn’t purchased, they are even further down the marketing funnel letting you know which product(s) they are interested in. If you’re running a holiday promotion on that product, send them a push notification letting them know that the product they have shown interest in is now on sale. This will encourage them to complete the purchase.

3. Replenishment: When someone has viewed a product that is out of stock, send them a push notification letting them know when the product is back in stock.

4. Abandoned Cart: When someone has added a product to their cart but hasn’t purchased, they are indicating serious purchase intent. You want to capitalize on this by sending them a push notification to come back to the app and complete their purchase. This is usually the highest revenue driving campaign for our customers.

In order to effectively run these campaigns and stand out from the onslaught of promotional messaging during the holidays, follow our recommendations on how to uplevel your campaigns from basic to rockstar status.

Let’s walk through our top abandoned cart campaign recommendations:

1. Content: Get creative with your message using any of these themes:

a. Create urgency – “Your item is selling out!”, “Discount ends tomorrow!”

b. Compliment user – “You have great taste!”

c. Promotion – “New customer promo code”, “Holiday deal”

d. Send reminder – “Did you forget something?”

2. Personalization: While a general push notification reminding the consumer that they left something in their cart will certainly do, uplevel your messaging by dynamically inserting the product name that was left in the cart to make the message even more relevant. Keep in mind to limit your content to 1-2 product names due to the character limit and in the event that a consumer leaves multiple items in their cart. Highlight your best sellers or a previously favorited product. Leanplum can guide your team to set up the right events and parameters that can be used to dynamically personalize your content.

3. Conversion Path: Deep link to the cart page so a purchase is only one click away for the consumer. In the other examples, like abandoned search you can use deep links to send the user to a new search, for example at a lower price range

Additionally, Leanplum recommends that you keep the following tips in mind for all 4 e-commerce campaigns:

1. Customer Journey & Channel Mix: We recommend a channel-agnostic approach to ensure you are interacting with your customers in their preferred channel. Typically, we see campaigns perform well when customers use a mix of push notifications, in-app, app inbox and email communication based on their customers’ opt-in information.

For the abandoned cart example, you may want to send a push notification approximately two (2) hours after the consumer has abandoned their cart to encourage a purchase. If that doesn’t result in a purchase, send a follow-up email with the same goal a few days later. Lastly, send another push notification with a final incentive five (5) days later. For customers who have not opted into push or email, set up an in-app message so when they return to the app they are reminded of what they left in their cart during their last visit. Remember, if you’re sending a promo code, use an app inbox message in combination with push or email to ensure the consumer can easily locate the promo code. A sequence of messages like this can easily be created using Leanplum’s campaign composer tool.

Lastly, testing is key! Make sure to A/B test the content and timing of your messages to maximize revenue from your campaign.

Example of a multi-channel abandoned cart campaign flow

2. Message Frequency: During the holidays, we can expect consumers to interact with your app more frequently as they are searching, browsing and adding gifts to their carts.  Create a cap on how often a user enters a campaign to avoid over messaging customers, especially during the holidays.  

In Leanplum, this can be done by setting up a global app messaging limit to designate the maximum number of messages a user can receive per day or setting entry limits on the campaign level, essentially designating how often a consumer can enter a given campaign. 

3. Excluding Audiences: It’s common for a consumer to search for products in an app but later purchase online. Ensure you are tracking users on the web and mobile and exclude consumers who ended up purchasing online for all of these mobile campaigns. Additionally, avoid sending messages to consumers if the item they were interested in is out of stock. Both of these exclusions will ensure your customers only receive relevant messages from your business, leading to a better customer experience.

We wish you and your business a successful and profitable holiday season! To learn how you can use Leanplum to your advantage, request a demo today.

And, we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to share your holiday engagement tips and campaigns with us via press@leanplum.com. 

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