10 Holiday marketing campaign examples & ideas for Ecommerce [2022/23]

Black Friday & Cyber Monday had just passed, and although it might seem that the peak season for sales had just passed, don’t let your guard down as the holiday season continues through Christmas and New Year’s Eve. 

If you are looking to make the most out of seasonal sales and want to give your customers a memorable shopping experience, then this blog is for you. We’ve compiled 10 of the best holiday marketing campaign ideas from some brands that are delighting their customers through their campaigns.

What to expect this holiday season?

Source: Deposit Photos

Before we go any further with the examples, let’s break down what this holiday season might look like for marketers. 

According to the 2022 Consumer Insights report from Google, customers are being more intentional about how they are spending their money. 80% of the customers had researched before making a purchase, while only about 20% had made the purchase on impulse. This might reflect in your campaigns by highlighting the emotional and physical benefits of your offer and showing reviews and comparisons to boost confidence.

The report has also shown that balancing pricing and quality has become a decisive factor when purchasing during the holiday season. In fact, 80% of them also stated that it is important that the products purchased are of the best quality too or that guarantees such as displaying high ratings or offering free delivery and returns also played a key role. 

Now, let’s get to some examples of great holiday campaigns rolling out in 2022

10 Examples of great Holiday Marketing Campaigns

1. Apple: Share the joy
2. Coca-Cola: Christmas always finds its way 
3. Amazon: Joy is made
4. Puma: Email Marketing Example
5. Disney: The Gift
6. Macy’s Holiday 2022 – Speechless
7. Erste Group Bank  #BelieveInChristmas
8. Aldi Christmas Advert: #KevinTheCarrot
9. Lidl Christmas: ‘The Story of Lidl Bear’
10.  Spotify: Your year Wrapped

1. Apple: Share the joy

 

Every year, Apple’s holiday ads are well-awaited, and this year was no different. For 2022 they decided to focus entirely on AirPods Pro using the slogan “Share the joy”, after the roll-out of the Audio Sharing feature.

Historically, the company has been known for releasing ads that lean more towards the emotional side, however this year they’ve decided to stand out. The ad is upbeat, fast-paced, more dynamic and even less cold than the typical ads.

Why it works: Definitely, this ad goes against traditional and emotional marketing selling, and although it doesn’t bring up tears to our eyes, it surely makes a difference from its competitors.

2. Coca-Cola: Christmas always finds its way 

Coca-Cola is well-known for its emotional holiday ads. During the ad for 2022, they decided to capture one of the most nostalgic yet beautiful feelings of missing a mother during the holiday season.

Why it works: Coca-Cola is keeping loyal to its marketing direction, which sets them as an industry leader in holiday ads. The ad also managed to convey such a range of emotions in just 30 seconds, and finally, the way nostalgia is brought up is done through careful actions that make it heart-warming. 

3. Amazon: Joy is made

‘Joy is made’ is the newest holiday ad from Amazon. It recounts the story of a father’s love for his child and his desire to create a memorable experience for his daughter. He recognises the special attachment his daughter has developed to a snowball, and he then decides to recreate a life-size version of it in the backyard.

Why it works: Undoubtedly, the emotional factor plays a crucial role in this ad. Contrary to Coca-Cola, in this ad, Amazon showcases their platform directly as one of the means to create joy. It links their services with positive emotions.

4. Puma: Email Marketing Example

Just like any other email marketing mail campaign, this one is well-branded for the holidays. It is an incredible campaign as it has everything embedded in one layout showing the discounts available and offering gift cards, gift guides and even a holiday FAQ.

Why it works: Besides the great design and clear offering, it truly understands one of the biggest pains, and it is not having enough time for holiday shopping. The email was designed with a clear audience in mind, one that isn’t hunting deals but simply was too busy during December.

5. Disney: The Gift

#FromOurFamilyToYours is the slogan Disney chose for its Ads series of The Gift. As every year, Disney remains loyal to its style and main audience. This company is the king of emotional marketing, highlighting the joy and magic of being surrounded by family during this season. 

Why it works: It has been using storytelling since 2020 and engaging the audience in a series that is expected year after year. Another relevant point is the powerful vocal support, which yet again, brings the classic Disney flare. On top of that, this ad doesn’t remain digital and emotional, but also follows a social cause. Disney is encouraging fans all over the world to join and donate to ‘Make-A-Wish’ with the promise to match all donations up to $100,000.

6. Macy’s Holiday 2022 – Speechless

The ad relates the classical story and scene for Christmas: a family gathered exchanging gifts next to Christmas gift. The story of just under 30 seconds starts with the husband giving the last gift to his wife. To her surprise, it was a diamond necklace, which left her speechless.

Why it works: The cast is inclusive, giving visibility and representation to minorities, and the company wants to present itself as the best option for choosing gifts. At a time when the economic recession is impacting consumption and discretionary spending, the ad is straightforward and precise.

7. Erste Group Bank  #BelieveInChristmas

This year’s animated advert continues the success of Erste’s previous ads, such as “Henry Hedgehog”. In this spot, the message is clear: togetherness ensures that no one and nothing can steal our joy this Christmas! When it comes to creating such holiday offerings, Erste Group, based in Vienna, has become one of the world’s most successful brands with 225 million views.

Why it works: It is appropriate and takes into mind the current global situation, conveying sympathy and emotion in the same ad. As a society, we are facing a lot of challenges in the present day, and the advert this year addresses how we are all dealing with these challenges.

8. Aldi Christmas Advert: #KevinTheCarrot

For the seventh consecutive year, Aldi has unveiled its Christmas advert featuring Kevin the Carrot from the hit 1990 film, Home Alone. 

As the company states:  it wouldn’t be the festive season without Kevin the Carrot on our TV screens, and this year’s Yuletide performance is sure to get the nation shouting ‘KEVIN!’

Why it works: It brings consistency year after year. People are expecting to see the main character and await an entire year for him. In addition, it doesn’t have a realistic approach but plays with a fantasy element, creating a truly warm and festive sensation. 

9. Lidl Christmas: ‘The Story of Lidl Bear’

The ad tells the story of a Lidl Bear that, without looking for it, became famous through a Lidl jumper and lost its way home with his owner, an adorable little girl. The expressionless Lidl bear has caught the attention of the viewers as it completely breaks the stereotype seen before in other ads.

In the last clip, we see Lidl Bear realise that his fame makes him miss his family. He leaves everything behind, takes his parachute, and surprises his loved ones by making it back for Christmas Day lunch.

Why it works: During the ad, there are also lots of Lidl’s favourite dishes to be seen in the clip. Among other things, the family eats British turkey, Christmas pudding, sausages in a blanket, parsnips, potatoes, cheese, and champagne. This ad remains culturally relevant while evoking emotions through a new way of displaying characters.

10. Spotify: Your year Wrapped

In regard to the new year’s celebration, Spotify never goes unnoticed with its yearly wrapped personalised playlists. One of the most popular end-of-year items this year (and in many recent years) is Spotify Wrapped, where the music service compiles an overview of everything you have listened to this year in various statistical formats, wrapped (yes, that’s what it’s called, is not it?) in colourful, fun graphics. You can see which music categories you followed, get a playlist of your top 100 songs, see where you stand compared to others, and find out what your listening personality is.

Why it works: Year by year it is expected and has huge success in all the social media channels. The reason is simple, it engages users through personalisation reminiscing great memories throughout the year, as a way to celebrate the end of the year. A bespoke summary email evoking good memories is definitely a great strategy to engage with users during the holiday season.

Frizbit recommendations for crafting successful holiday campaigns

Source: Plann / Pexels

Creating goals and objectives for your holiday marketing campaign is essential in order to ensure success. Goals provide direction and motivation, while objectives give you measurable results that can be used to assess the success of your efforts. The real question is how to increase sales in the holiday season without losing the spark.

Next, creating a promotional calendar is an essential step to ensure your business’s success during the holiday season. A promotional calendar outlines all the marketing activities you plan to undertake during specific holidays and helps you stay organized and on track with your goals.

During this stage also make sure to define and select which channels are you going to use. Analyse your audience and which channels typically perform best for your business industry.

Email marketing tends to be the number one chosen channel during this season, and crafting engaging holiday email marketing campaigns can be a challenge too. However, if you are looking to stand out from the crowd, considering alternative channels to (re)target your audience can make a difference in your sales. 

For this, we are talking about incorporating web push notifications in your marketing strategy during the holiday season. We have created a dedicated guide on web push notifications, and we have also created a quick reference guide featuring 7 Christmas campaigns and tips using this channel.

Conclusion:

When it comes to creating a successful holiday marketing campaign, make sure that it accurately reflects your business’s brand and message. For this, defining a clear holiday marketing strategy is essential. If you wish to look further into it, we have a dedicated blog post on Christmas marketing ideas and strategies to build a solid marketing strategy.

Overall, be creative with your content and focus on what sets your business apart from others in the industry. Appealing to emotions, memories, and nostalgia certainly plays a crucial role in most of the best campaigns. Don’t forget to track the success of each promotion so that you can adjust as needed throughout the season if something isn’t working as expected.

Email marketing is the practice of sending emails to promote products or services and engage with customers. Through email marketing campaigns, businesses can share news, updates, inform about new products, special sales and much more. 

This channel has been the favourite for many businesses for a long time and with good reason. Here are some interesting stats:

• The global e-mail marketing market was valued at $7.5 billion in 2020 and is projected to increase to $17.9 billion by 2027. (Statista, 2021)
• There are 4 billion daily email users. This number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025. (Statista, 2021)
• Across all industries, the average email open rate is 19.8%, the click-through rate is 11.3%, and the bounce rate is 9.4%. (Constant Contact, 2021)

So, whether you are already using email marketing campaigns as part of your digital marketing mix or not, is a channel that, after many years, is still very much alive and has a lot to offer: 

Email Marketing Advantages

1. It helps you build long-term relationships with your audience
2. It drives traffic to your website
3. Cost-effective
4. Highly customisable
5. Provides value to your customers
6. Increases revenue
7. Any type of online business can use them (ecommerce, travel, B2B, SaaS)

As marketing professionals it’s our job to recognise the value of tools that help us connect with our audience and reach our business goals, leaving aside rumours and prejudices. Having said that here are: 

Types of Email Marketing Campaigns You Should be Sending

1. Welcome Emails – (All industries: ecommerce, travel, B2B, real estate)

Sites usually struggle and jump through hoops to get people to share their email addresses and become subscribers. So, once they do, make sure you show them your appreciation! The best way to do it is to send them a nice welcoming email introducing yourself and thanking them for joining your mailing list.

The welcome email is your opportunity to start creating a connection with your audience. Seize this opportunity to give a very good first impression about your business, share relevant information about what you do and (maybe) give them a small gift. 

This is not the moment to try and sell something or ask anything else from your audience. They already gave you their email address, which is something very valuable for most of us, and not everyone is always willing to share it.

The welcome email is where you set the foundation of the type of relationship you want to build with your audience. Here is where you let them know what to expect from you, so also make sure you design an eye-appealing email that pleasantly surprises your new subscribers and you can also give a discount as a thank you for subscribing. 

According to invesp, “subscribers who receive a Welcome email show 33% more engagement with the brand” and “have 14.4% click rate compared to just 2.7% in other types”.

2. Informational / Update Emails – (All industries: ecommerce, travel, B2B, real estate

Informational emails are used to share news and keep your subscribers database up to date with everything going on in your business that might be of their interest. You can use them to let them know about new arrivals, product launches, new features or invite them to read a new blog post!

There are different types of informational emails:

• New content announcements
• Product updates
• Newsletters

These types of emails are great to keep in touch with your subscribers and let them know you are constantly updating your products or services to please them and offer them a better experience.

Informational emails don’t tend to be very long since they might be the least interesting type to receive from the user’s end. If you are going to include a call to action (which you should always do), you can invite them to visit your site and check out the new feature/service/product you have. 

3. Cart Abandonment Emails – (Ecommerce, travel)

We are living in the era of digital marketing automation to simplify processes and make our lives much easier. That’s why automated email marketing campaigns are a must for any online business. 

Behavioural emails are automated campaigns delivered to users based on their individual behaviour and actions taken inside a website. The way they work is by website owners defining certain scenarios that trigger the event (email being sent) when a user completes a specific action.
The most popular type of automated email campaigns are the cart abandonment recovery emails. 98% of users leave sites without completing a purchase, leaving behind products in their virtual shopping carts. Abandoned cart emails are sent to those users some time (usually 30 mins to 2 hours) after they leave the site with a message inviting them to go back and finish the purchase.

Cart abandonment emails have proven to be a great strategy that offers wonderful results, we have seen it work for our clients with::

• 4% increase in sales

• 3.8x conversion rate

The good thing about cart abandonment emails is that they usually have higher open rates than any other type of campaigns because they present subscribers with personalised content. These emails have information regarding the product they like and are usually enriched with images, price and a custom message inciting them to go back and finish the purchase/booking.

These types of emails are most commonly used for ecommerce sites. However, the travel industry can greatly benefit from them by sending emails to users that didn’t complete a hotel reservation or didn’t finish booking a flight, for example.

Suggested read: Are cart abandonment emails GDPR compliant?

4. Post-purchase Emails – (Ecommerce, travel)

By now you should already know the value of repeating customers:

• The probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70%. (Semrush, 2021)
• Existing customers are 50% more likely to try your business’s new product. (Semrush, 2021)
• Existing customers are also 31% more likely to spend more on their average order value with your business. (Semrush, 2021)

So we have established the importance of taking care of your existing customers and building loyalty with them. One way to do so is by using post-purchase email campaigns. These are the emails you send to customers after they complete a purchase/reservation on your site. 

To build trust and loyalty, you can send an email with useful information related to their purchase. For example, if they bought an eyeshadow palette, you can send a post-purchase email with a tutorial on how to combine them, or if they booked a flight, an email with the details of their reservation information or maybe a few suggested activities they can enjoy at their travel destination.

If you apply this strategy, most likely your customers are going to really appreciate the gesture since they will find the information very useful. You will create loyalty because you keep showing interest even after having made a sale, thus increasing the chances they purchase from you again and decreasing the possibility of users unsubscribing from your mailing list. 

5. Cross-sell Emails –  (Ecommerce, travel)

Cross-sell emails are another type of post-purchase emails. They are sent to customers who already made a purchase with suggestions of other products that could complement the one they already got.

By suggesting other products from your catalog based on the consumer’s purchasing history, you can turn one-time shoppers into repeating customers. The objective is to create loyalty that ultimately generates you more sales. 

When sending cross-sell emails you should highlight the main product you want to make reference to and also add a couple more options. Since you are not 100% sure what your customer wants nexts, it’s a good idea to give alternatives and increase even more the chances of a new purchase. 

Cross-sell emails usually work so well because you are reaching out to a customer that has already engaged with your business before, and they also help make discovering new products so much easier. 

They are also valid for the travel industry. For example, if a customer booked a flight to Paris, you can send a cross-sell email suggesting accommodation, car rentals or tours.

6. Price Drop Emails – (Ecommerce, travel, real estate)

Price drop emails, as their name clearly explains, are emails sent to customers who expressed interest in a product or service, but didn’t complete a purchase, announcing to them that its price dropped below a certain threshold.

These types of emails work very similar to cart abandonment emails because they are behaviour based and triggered by the user actions. They let shoppers know that a product or service they wanted to purchase is now available at a much lower price, thus presenting them with a great opportunity they wouldn’t like to miss. 

Price drop emails are very effective because they are based on user behaviour and have the added value of presenting a sale or offer on that specific product the user liked. They offer relevant, personalised information with a great appeal of a lower price. 

Using price drop emails is a great tactic to bring users back to your site and also clear stock, finish filling a flight or finally rent that property you have been trying to get out there for a long time.

7. Back to Stock Emails – (Ecommerce)

Back to stock emails are probably the most neglected type of emails because usually everyone focuses on more traditional ones like welcome, cart abandonment and post-purchase emails.

However, back to stock emails represent a huge sales opportunity. Consider the fact that, if a product is sold out, it must mean that it’s popular, that people like it and it might sell out again. How many people might be expecting for it to go back to stock to purchase it?

That’s your opportunity to reach out to them with a fabulous back to stock email and let them know the product they want so badly is available again! 

8. Lead Nurturing Emails – (All industries: Ecommerce, B2B, travel, real estate)

Lead nurturing makes reference to the process of developing a relationship between brands and potential clients helping them with their decision making process and move down the funnel until they complete a purchase.

This process is so important because it keeps your product or service in people’s top of mind. Using lead nurturing emails showing more details and highlighting features of your product/service helps you tip the scales in your favor when the time comes to make a decision.

You can automate lead nurturing email campaigns by creating different sequences depending on the stage of the funnel the user is at the moment. These campaigns can be sent through a predefined period of time with personalised, specific messages. 

For example, if someone subscribes for a free demo period of your software, you can add that user to a sequence of emails that first show how to use the platform step by step, then highlights the features and ultimately invites the user to make the purchase with information about how many days are left of the free demo. 

General Tips to Make the Most Out of Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Whichever business you run and the campaigns you decide to implement, there are a few good practices you should follow to make the most of you email campaigns:

• Make sure you write an appealing and descriptive Subject line
• Include emojis in the subject
• Personalise them as much as possible
• Make them easy on the eyes taking care of the design
• Add a clear call to action inviting them respond
• Include links to your social media profiles
• Keep track of your data and analyse your campaigns to optimise them later

We hope you find this information useful and apply these strategies and tips to your email marketing campaigns. 

You can also check out: 

• How to Use Web Push Notifications for B2B
• 6 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your E-commerce Website
• How can Marketing Automation Help you Sell More

Shopping cart abandonment makes reference to the action of initiating a checkout process on an online store by adding a product to a virtual shopping cart and leaving the site without completing the purchase.

There are many reasons why customers abandon their shopping carts. Maybe they were just looking around, perhaps they weren’t ready to buy, they just wanted to see the final cost of the transaction before making a decision or didn’t have enough time. Unexpected shipping costs, complicated site navigation or confusing checkouts can also be the cause. 

However, all of these reasons don’t mean they aren’t willing to complete the purchase and this is where cart abandonment strategies come into play. Cart abandonment emails have been the number one strategy for e-commerce sites to bring customers back to finish a transaction they left halfway.

But, what happened with cart abandonment emails when GDPR came into the picture? 

GDPR makes reference to the General Data Protection Regulation. Is the legislation enforced in May 2018 that aims to protect users’ data privacy. It applies to any business that provides services to EU residents, even if it’s located anywhere else in the world. 

This legislation states that no business can disclose users’ personal information or send any type of communication to users without their previous consent. It’s pretty clear that this raised many eyebrows of concern for marketers wondering what would happen with their customer’s email database.

Cart abandonment email retargeting is the main practice marketers rely on to tackle the issue of only 2% of users converting. If the appearance of GDPR meant they would lose the user’s database they have built with so much effort and time and wouldn’t be able to retarget customers that initiated a transaction on their site, it would be a disaster. 

So, are cart abandonment emails GDPR compliant?

In order to answer this question as accurately as possible, it’s important to clarify that there are three different types of emails. Each one of them fulfills a purpose and depending on its objective.

1. Marketing Emails

Marketing emails are the ones that contain a commercial message and it’s sent to groups of customers or to prospects. The objective of marketing emails is to push leads down the marketing funnel.

These types of emails are not sent programmatically, they are timed and sent strategically like newsletters, announcements or welcome emails. 

2. Promotional Emails

A promotional email is an email sent to inform email subscribers about offers and time limited sales, like Black Friday or Mother’s Day. They have a specific time frame and could be recurring given the nature of the offer.

Its objective is to get the word out about and inform email subscribers about something special. Promotional emails usually also include some sort of promotional code or coupon with the goal of encouraging customers to move down the funnel and complete a purchase. 

3. Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are direct one-to-one emails with personalised information regarding a transaction a customer did or started on a site. They are not sent to a large group of subscribers or to the entire list because transactional emails are triggered by an action a user took when browsing the site.

They include:

• Order confirmations
• Delivery updates
• After purchase receipts
• Post-purchase review requests
• Cart abandonment reminders

Cart abandonment emails are considered transactional emails because a user that added a product to the shopping cart showed an intention to buy, thus initiating a transaction. 

Unlike marketing and promotional emails, transactional emails are programmed to be triggered by specific user behaviour on site. With platforms like Frizbit, you can set up an event that sends an automated email to users that add a product to their carts but leave without finishing a purchase.

One of the main attractions of transactional cart abandonment emails is that they only need to be configured one first time. Since they’re automated and triggered by the scenario you define, you just have to take time to create templates and content once to set up the campaigns and then everything runs smoothly by itself. 

You can schedule a sequence of emails to be sent:

• 1 hour after adding a product to the cart and leaving the site without completing a purchase
• 1 day later
• 3 days later

These automated cart abandonment recovery emails, include hyper-personalised information such as user name, product name, price and image. These features increase the value of the communication between sender and recipient by making the information much more relevant. 

Is sending cart abandonment emails still allowed under GDPR? 

Now that you know what types of email exist and what their objectives are, you’ll understand the answer is yes. According to the European Commission’s definition of legal grounds for processing data, cart abandonment emails are compliant as long as you have explicit consent from users to receive those emails. (Source Nosto.com)

Abandoned cart emails are categorized as direct marketing and can work under the legal grounds of legitimate interest which basically states that if the recipient is really going to be interested in what you have to say and find value from it, it’s ok to send it:

“Processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party except where such interests are overridden by the interests…” icoo.org.uk

Processing personal data for direct marketing purposes may be considered done for legitimate interest. (BOE.es)

This means that you might not need specific consent from users to send this type of communication because when customers share their email addresses with you in the intent of making a purchase and don’t complete it, both parties have legitimate interest on the transaction being finished.

That being said, we strongly recommend you to not take any chances on this and be very explicit and straightforward in order to receive consent from users before sending any type of automated cart abandonment campaign. 

You can make sure your emails are compliant by checking the following:

• Users need to actively opt-in or subscribe. Unchecking a box is not enough, this has to be a voluntary decision. 
• Include a registered address.
• Make sure your website’s privacy policy clearly states the type of information being collected. Specify you’re going to send transactional cart abandonment messages. Here are a couple of examples:
  • We will use your data to suggest products or offers based on the profile you create based on your purchase history, the products you view when you browse our platforms, or the products you leave in your cart when you do not finish the purchase process.
  • Your data may also be used for other marketing and advertising purposes. These suggestions can come to you through push notifications, banners, or even to your email using the abandoned cart feature.
• If you’re going to rely on legitimate interest, your privacy policy should say something like this:
  • Why do we process your personal data? Guarantee the correct processing of your order, in the event that you purchase any of our products.
  • The Responsible Party treats user data for the following purposes: other commercial communications by email about the Responsible and the provision of services
• Check the source of the email list you have before automating an abandoned cart recovery campaign. GDPR also affects data collected before its implementation, so it’s very important for you to verify what type of consent previous subscribers agreed to. 
• Include an easy way for users to unsubscribe from your list.

Should you be using Cart Abandonment Emails?

Cart abandonment recovery emails by Frizbit have reported a CTR of 17,1%  and conversion rates of 4,1%, making them the highest performing channel in automated cart recovery campaigns. 

When it comes to GDPR and cart abandonment emails, consensus says that there’s no problem with sending these types of emails to users that voluntarily subscribe to your mailing list thanks to the base of legitimate interest. 

If you haven’t implemented a strategy for cart abandonment recovery, getting started with automated and hyper-personalised emails is a great way to go. If you’d like to know more about how to do so, get in touch with us and we will be happy to guide you. 

This information might also interest you:

• Private Shopping Sites: Web Push Notifications Strategies
• Are Web Push Notifications GDPR Compliant?
• Cart Abandonment Recovery Strategies for E-commerce – Recover Lost Sales

Cart abandonment recovery is the biggest issue e-commerce sites face every day. According to Statista on a study including different industries, for March 2020 an average of 88.05% of online orders were left behind without completion. Specifically, the online retail sector has an average of 84.51 percent shopping cart abandonment rate.

Since it represents a huge leak of sales, it’s one of the most (if not the most) important problems to tackle if you own or run any type of online store. There are many reasons why customers abandon their shopping carts. Before we go into detail on how to mitigate this issue, let’s point out some of the:

Main reasons shoppers abandon carts:

• Confusing site
• Unexpected costs in shipping or taxes
• Confusing checkout process
• Online “window shopping”
• Security concerns
• Found a better deal on another site

If you want to implement cart abandonment recovery strategies, there are many techniques you can apply as for today and start getting results. Even though all users are different, with their own likes, dislikes and needs, there are some similarities and commonplaces to be identified within the segments and come up with a strategic approach that offers the right solutions.

Cart Abandonment Recovery Strategies

1. Use retargeting channels strategies

Marketers are very lucky. Yes, cart abandonment is a big issue for online stores, but there’s a wide variety of channels and marketing tools to use and tackle the problem from all angles with a tailor made strategy that fits your needs and fulfill customer’s expectations. One of the most important moves to make is to implement retargeting strategies. 

The following table shows an estimate of how each channel performs for cart abandonment recovery strategies. The numbers where measured for a average e-commerce site.

• Opt-in rate: The op-in rate shows how many visitors subscribe to each channel.
• % of subscribers in sequence: the % of subscribers in sequence makes reference to how many of those subscribers can be reached by the respective channel.
• Number of messages in sequence: when it comes to the number of messages in the sequence, it shows how many messages where designed to include as a series.
• CTR: is the click-trough rate for each channel, it show how many subscribers who received the messages clicked on it.
• Conversion rate: how many subscribers who received the messages and clicked on it, finished a purchase.
• Increase in sales: how much revenue said channel generated for the site.

Channel	Opt-in Rate	% Of Subscribers in Sequence	# Of Messages in Sequence	CTR	Conversion Rate	Increase in Sales
Email – Cart Abandonment	1- 3%	100%	3	17,2%	3,8x	4%
SMS – Cart Abandonment	0,5-1,5%	100%	1	35,4%	5,2x	2%
Web Push – Cart Abandonment	5-10%	10-15%	3	12,1%	2,3x	1%
Web Push – Full Funnel	5-10%	100%	3	10,7%	0,8x	2%

Users that have reached the checkout stage of the shopping funnel are easier to convert than visitors or potential customers. There’s no reason not to make the biggest effort on this step. 

You have three main channels available for cart abandonment recovery and recover lost sales while retaining users: automated web push notifications, emails and SMS.

• Cart abandonment recovery automated Web Push Notifications

Web push notifications are messages sent through browsers to, either mobile or desktop, to subscribers that opt-in to receive them. They’re delivered the moment users open the browser and start navigating online, indistinctly of the site or page they’re on at the moment.

Automated web push notifications allow to send users automatic messages related to the step of the shopping journey they were on the moment they left the site. For example, when users put an item in the basket, but abandon the web without completing the order, they will receive an automated web push notification reminding them about the product they left behind. 

You can recover lost sales from abandoned carts by sending automated notifications to users who left products in their basket but didn’t complete the purchase. You can schedule a sequence of messages to be delivered after certain amounts of time, like 1 hour, 1 day and 3 days after the user abandoned its shopping cart. 

The most engaging feature about using this channel to recapture lost customers, is that you don’t need any type of personal data from them. Unlike email or SMS, you can retarget visitors and anonymous users with web push notifications and bring them back to your site so they can finish their purchase. 

• Cart abandonment recovery emails

Cart abandonment email might be the strategy online stores use the most to tackle this issue. When using automated emails, they’re automatically sent to users that left the site on some step of the checkout process without completing a purchase after they added products to their cart.

Frizbit allows you to set up automated behavioural emails to recover abandoned carts.  The configuration process only needs to be done once, so implementing this strategy won’t represent a continuous effort or add to your normal workload.

Recovering abandoned carts emails should be as highly customised as possible. When users identify and relate to the content of the message, click-through and conversion rates increase significantly which translates to a recovery of lost sales and an increase in your revenue. 

This strategy has always been so popular, because it has presented a direct communication with users by contacting them through their email accounts. The downside is that, in order to do so, you need people to share with you their personal information and they don’t always do that. So, basically, if a user leaves the site before reaching the part of the checkout process where they’re supposed to submit their email address, you lose that user for good. 

Even though cart abandonment emails have always presented encouraging results for online stores, combining them in a strategy that also includes automated web push notifications will help you optimize your strategy and take it to the next level. Keep in mind that with emails, you can only reach those people that registered, while losing visitors and anonymous users. Adding an additional channel, that allows you to communicate with all visitors might be what your strategy is missing. 

You can check out our Success Story with Bidcom, an online retailer in consumer electronics that uses a combination of Frizbit’s automated behavioural emails and web push notifications campaign to recover abandoned carts. 

• Cart abandonment recovery SMS

SMS cart abandonment are messages sent to users that left a site during some step of the checkout process after adding a product to their basket. They work with the same principle of cart abandonment emails, but instead of receiving the message in the inboxes, users receive them on their mobile devices.

The format of SMS presents a great opportunity for online stores, since the information is delivered directly to the hands of the user through their phones, which makes it a very direct form of communication. Everyone has their mobiles nearby and constantly checks them during the day. Unlike emails, with SMS you don’t have to wait for users to go and check their inboxes to get the message. 

They are also highly customisable as well, and can include user name, product name, category name, brand or pretty much anything you wish to highlight about the article. This helps by making the message more relevant and harder to ignore by the user. 

However, the way it happens with emails, you need users to provide information: their phone number. If people are already reluctant to share their email address, this unwillingness increases a lot when it comes to sharing much more personal information like their personal number. If they don’t, you’ll lose them as well. 

Create a multichannel cart abandonment recovery strategy

There are multiple roads you can take to deal with cart abandonment: optimizing the web experience, using retargeting emails, sms or web push notifications. The way we see it, the real solution for this issue is to combine all of them in a well-planned retargeting strategy. 

FYI, we’re not saying that you should harass your users with messages while you follow and stalk them through every possible channel. What we’re saying is that you need design and execute a multichannel cart abandonment strategy in a way each channel complements the other.

Create a strategy thought out like a service you’re providing your customers. You want to bring them back to finish their purchases and recover lost carts in a way they feel they’re also gaining something. You can use each channel available in a different way, with different types of messages, different frequencies and segmenting by users by creating a flow of messages. 

Remember to always make the message as relevant as possible by using the dynamic fields available such as user name, product name, image, price or any information you see fit. The most important thing you need to keep in mind when designing your multichannel cart abandonment strategy is to use the frequency cap parameter so you can regulate the time periods your messages are delivered.

This is especially important if you work with different providers for each channel. You’ll have to coordinate the time frames in which you want each message to be delivered so they don’t clash with each other. For example, if the recovery cart email is sent after one hour, you’ll have to change the web push notification timing to be sent after two hours. If the user clicks on the email and completes a purchase, that event will be fulfilled, hence cancelling the web push notification automatically. 

If you work with the same provider for web push, emails and SMS, this won’t present a problem or extra work. Frizbit allows cross-platform event triggering coordination, meaning that if a user clicks on the cart abandonment recovery notification, the email and the SMS won’t be sent and so on.

Additional Tips to Reduce Cart Abandonment Rates

1. Optimize your site

When we talk about cart abandonment issues, we’re referring to the last step of the shopping funnel. So why are we even mentioning the quality of the site as an important element here? Simple: user experience from top to bottom. 

• Simplify navigation

Simplify the journey as much as you can. A lot of users abandon carts because of a confusing, complex navigation. The more clicks you put them through, the higher the chances that they leave before completing a purchase. The ideal number here is up to three clicks. To get there, make sure you organize your products in different, identifiable categories with names that clearly describe what’s in them.

• Create engaging informative product pages

Remember that before any user even thinks about adding a product to the basket, they browse through your site. They get a feeling from what they see, from the homepage to the product page. You want to focus on creating an engaging experience for them that also presents all the information they might need to know before making a decision.

Include product visuals that portray as best as possible the characteristics of the article: photos from different angles, videos, details. When shopping online, customers don’t get to touch, smell or experience the product in any physical way, and that can be a huge barrier to the shopping process. Reduce it by adding as much visual and descriptive information as you can.

• Reduce loading times

Long loading times can greatly affect cart abandonment rates. Keep in mind that people get easily bored and distracted when browsing online. If you make them wait too long to go through checkout after finally deciding to shop for a product on your site, you can very easily lose them. 

This risk is even bigger for mobile users who already present higher cart abandonment rates as they are. Bottom line, if your site is slow, users will abandon. The checkout page is the step where you want to boost your site’s loading time as much as possible. Making the shopping journey easy and fast in this stage is crucial for customers to complete their purchase and avoid cart abandonment. 

2. Increase site trust

As we mentioned before, one of the main reasons for cart abandonment is a lack of trust in the shopping process. Even though by now most of us are extremely used to shopping online and we do it all the time, there are still a lot of barriers regarding the level of trust on online transactions. 

You’re asking people that don’t know you from anything to trust you, not just with personal information, like email or phone number, but with very private and sensitive credit card and bank account details. It’s your job to increase the level of trust. You can do it by:

• Displaying logos of security companies your work with: One study done by Actual Insights found that, on average, 61% of people did not buy because a trust logo was no were to be found on the site, and over 75% said they didn’t buy because they didn’t recognize the logos used.

 

 

• Including social proof: If you also let users know that others have purchased products from you and had a great experience doing so, you might tilt the balance in your favor. It’s all about adding valuable information that reduces hesitation by increasing trust leves of your site. 

 

 

• Avoiding to request unnecessary information: nobody likes to share their personal details on the internet. Especially if you don’t know what they’re going to be used for, so refrain yourself from asking people to fill endless forms with personal data. If possible, create a “guest checkout” option that doesn’t require users to create a profile on your site.

3. Be honest about your prices!

Unexpected and hidden additional charges in the checkout page is the biggest reason customers leave without completing a purchase. 56% of shoppers claimed to have abandoned their cart because extra rates were not mentioned before. 

To lower this stat, be as transparent as possible from the get go. Make sure to display shipping rates and tax charges as clearly as you can so people can see it and don’t be surprised when they’re about to click that final “complete purchase” button. 

You can add a shipping calculator where customers can introduce their addresses and learn how much it will cost them. Another option is to offer free shipping when a certain basket price is met. This way, not only will the costs be clear, it will be an extra incentive for customers to maybe spend a little more on your site. 

You can reduce cart abandonment rates dramatically if you plan and execute a seamless retargeting strategy. If you want to request a one month demo period to try it out on your site, let us know by clicking here, we’ll be happy to help. 

These articles might also interest you!

• Bidcom reached a 37x ROAS with automated Emails and Web Push Notifications from Frizbit
• Web Push Notifications: A Complete Guide for all Levels
• How to Conduct Successful A/B Testing: Go from Beginner to Pro

Email marketing campaigns are going to play a crucial and special role in Holiday marketing strategies for 2020. Covid pandemic and the closure of many physical stores, has forced brands to step up their digital and e-commerce game with our first stay-at-home holidays. 

Customers are going to turn to online stores more than ever before to do their Christmas gifts and Holiday shopping. That’s why it’s crucial for e-commerce retailers to implement amazing holiday digital marketing campaigns this year, and emails are one of the preferred channels in the mix. 

Here are 5 Tips for an Engaging Holiday Email Marketing Campaign

1. Start early!

Plan your holiday email campaign with enough time ahead. Sending your first email with discounts, promotions or special offers mid-December is way too late. There are hundreds of other e-commerce sites that are probably sending theirs since the first week of November and have already tilted the decision making scale of users to their side. 

If you start communicating with your customers early November you’ll have the advantage of catching their attention first. You’ll reach more shoppers and you can build-up your campaign with the extra time you’ll have.

 

Early communication will open the door to designing a sequence of emails that increases users’ interest. For example, you can create a 12 days of offers specials and peek their attention with a flow of emails or even an advent calendar!

2. It’s all about segmentation

Yes, we know we have talked a lot about segmenting your audience and how important it is for any digital marketing action. But we have to emphasize that when it comes to holiday email marketing campaigns.

Sending bulk email marketing campaigns to all your databases won’t offer any good result. Optimize your subscribers list and segment as much as you can when you ask them to opt-in. You can do so by grouping users according to their interest in different holiday categories or products and sending them offers relevant to their interests.

Having a segmented email subscriber list allows you to target and communicate with your customers much more efficiently. They will appreciate the fact that you send them information they have expressed an interest for and it will increase your CTR and conversion rate, also you will decrease the opt-out rates.

3. Use holiday-theme designs

It’s a special and unique time of the year and your email marketing campaign should show that. Evoke a festive spirit with the designs you use for your opt-in form and your email! Cheer up your customers with the design of your campaign, have it look and feel happy.

4. Offer valuable content

Holidays are a hectic time of the year for everyone. Gift shopping can be an overwhelming task for a lot of people. Make it easier for your subscribers by sending them valuable content. Prepare a Holiday Gift Guide for them that includes items they have expressed interest for. 

You can even set up “gift packs” with several products that compliment each other. Let’s say a customer showed interest in a moisturizing cream. You can prepare a gift pack that includes said cream and a couple of other products, like a lotion and night cream and offer it to your email subscriber as a ready-to-buy present. 

Design a beautiful email that showcases the products in a holiday-themed collage and surprise your users with a festive, personalized holiday email marketing campaign. 

5. Create a referral program

What better time of the year to share than the holidays? Referral programs are an amazing strategy to grow your customer and subscriber base. You can implement a system where existing customers receive a gift for bringing a friend.

Create an specific email marketing campaign that targets current subscribers to offer them a special holiday benefit if they refer a friend to sign up to your emailing list. You can even offer both parts a special gift if you want to!

New and existing users will be happy to do so and it will be a win-win situation.

Final Email Marketing Tips

Remember your customers even after the holiday sales are over. Send post-holiday email campaigns to your subscribers offering them deals to exchange gift-cards, or seize some special discounts on products they didn’t get a chance to purchase and end the season on a good note. 

Don’t concentrate your efforts only on Christmas Holidays. Remember there are many festivities year round that you can use for your holiday email marketing campaigns. We advise you to create a calendar with the most important dates that your audience finds appealing and designing a strategy for each one of them. 

Happy holiday email marketing planning!

You might find these reads interesting:

• Ecommerce Holiday Marketing Calendar & Campaign Ideas
• How to Orchestrate your Marketing Strategy on Multi-Channel?

A multi-channel marketing strategy is key to success for any digital business nowadays. Many companies opt for managing their communication with their customers over multiple channels, using different teams, third-parties or providers. This can result in customers receiving messages through a variety of channels that can easily overlap each other with repeated, irrelevant information and end up wearing users out. 

Companies should focus on personalisation and start to cater to their customers as individuals with personalised needs and interests, while managing their communications centrally. If you’re not engaging to your user’s preferences, they’re more likely to opt-out from all the channels you use trying to connect with them, due to finding your communication irrelevant and annoying.

In today’s day in age, customers have a lot of power over what type of communications they receive from brands by refusing to subscribe, refusing to share personal information and installing browser extensions such as ad blockers.  This leaves sellers constantly trying to find new and effective ways to get the end result necessary, which of course is to bring that customer back to complete a conversion. 

To adapt to this reality, businesses must strive to make it as easy as possible for customers to gain access to their site. This is made possible by the sheer orchestration of an automated, engaging, attractive and relevant communication strategy through different channels. This will allow you to interact with your users in the most effective way possible. 

Why should you use automated multi-channel marketing campaigns?

Value has more to do with being there for people, rather than selling the industry’s best. having this kind of mindset will result in an increase of customer retention. This is vital, because even a five percent increase in customer retention can raise profits by 25-95 percent. If you are not already sold by this statistic, imagine this: It costs from 5 to 25 times more to get a new customer, than it does to keep the one you already have. Therefore, it’s important to keep that user engaged by communicating through multi-channel marketing and a sequence of messages that’s relevant, useful and attractive.

The Performance Comparison of Each Channel (Email, SMS, Web Push, Ads)

Channel	Opt-in Rate	Deliverability	Average CTR
Email	1-3%	98.2%	17.2%
SMS	0.5-1.5%	>99%	35.4%
Web Push Notifications	5-10%	>98%	10.7%
Retargeting Ads	N/A	Depends on CPC	0.7%

Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy: Benefits of SMS, Email and Web Push Notifications combined 

• Reach more customers by offering multiple options for them to choose their preferred channel
• Engage customers through the channel of their preference
• Drive more traffic to your website/app, therefore generating more revenue
• Connect with anonymous users who prefer not to share their personal info, via push notifications
• Create a customer engagement journey through scenarios and templates designed for each channel to be sent at the best time
• Track performance of your campaigns on each channel through Frizbit user and campaign reports
• Optimize your communication and discover how to connect better with your customers on a more personal level with A/B testing and machine learning

Multi-Channel Marketing Strategies

1. Email Marketing

 

Email marketing has always been one of the most common and preferred channels for online businesses to get in touch with their customers. It’s a tool that offers many possibilities, especially if you use the correct provider platform to plan and send your campaigns:

• Ongoing communication: Frizbit is able to strategically build a sequence of emails that will grasp your user’s attention, bringing them back to visit your website once again. You can design messages series for cart abandonment recovery, product suggestions based on behaviour and much more to keep in touch with your customers during periods of time you can define yourself.  

• More leads: when a user decides to share their email address with you, you can easily start building a new leads database through email communication. With this information you have the possibility to get in touch with your customers on a more personal level. You can nurture those leads with inbound and content marketing campaigns that will create a more long-lasting relationship with your clients. 

• Hyper-personalisation: Customers appreciate and want to learn more about what you have to offer. Especially if you send a message with specific information that’s relevant and useful for them, helping you increase engagement. You can include their names, product name, image, price and more to make the email as personalised as you can, which will highly increase CTRs. ç

• Automation: Frizbit allows complete automation of the email sequences you create. this means you won’t have to invest lots of time to configure and send a campaign whenever you want, you’ll just have to do it once.

2. SMS Marketing

SMS marketing strategies have been around for a while, just like in the case of email marketing. There are many similar benefits of both channels, however SMS offer some additional ones worth revising that will help you take your multi-channel marketing strategy to the next level: 

• Immediate communication: SMS marketing provides an immediate channel of communication with your customers. If we keep in mind that most of us don’t separate from our phones for nearly 5 minutes a day, SMS is a great option if you want an almost immediate response from your customers. SMS also highly guarantees the delivery of the message, since you don’t have to wait for users to go online and check their inboxes like in the case of emails. 

• Closeness: Texts messages are an intimate channel of communication. They relate to close relationships which gives customers a feeling of a more personal and less commercial communication.

• Automation: As it does in the case of email marketing, Frizbit is able to send out automated and personalized text messages to each customer based on their actions on the site. The SMS can be scheduled to be sent after an exact amount of time after being triggered by an event on the web without adding additional work to your planning and execution.

 3. Web Push Notifications

Web push notifications allow a one click process to redirect customers back to your site. They’re short, direct messages based on users’ behaviour and delivered through their browsers when they go online. This is a very new channel, so its benefits are not so well known like in the case of email and SMS marketing:

• Reachability: web push notifications are delivered to the subscriber on both desktops and mobile devices, even if they’re not browsing your website. 

• Connect with anonymous users: in order to send web push notifications, you don’t need to request users to share any type of personal information like email address or phone number. Visitors only need to Allow them via  the opt-in prompt shown when they enter the website for the first time and, with just one click, they become subscribers. This allows you to connect with visitors, giving you the chance to turn them into customers. 

• Immediate traffic generation: with manual or bulk web push notifications sent to all subscribers, you can send flash sales alerts, out of stock availability, price drop alerts or special offer messages that can generate a lot of traffic to your site very quickly. 

• Full funnel communication: web push notifications messages can be completely automated and triggered by events for every single step of funnel. They offer a channel through which you can communicate with your subscribers with a specific message throughout the entire shopping process: first visit to the page, category viewed, product viewed and product added to cart. 

• Deliverability: web push notifications offer guaranteed deliverability. This channel is browser based, meaning that as soon as a subscriber opens up its browser, the message will be delivered.

4. Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads are one of the main channels used by online advertisers to try to reconnect and bring back users to their site. By using retargeting ads, brands “follow” users that didn’t convert to show them images and messages inviting them to come back and finish a transaction. The benefits of including them in your digital marketing mix are:

• Branding: usually, retargeting ads are shown multiple times to the same person. This contributes to increasing brand awareness by displaying the image of the brand, its logo and, maybe the slogan during a period of time making it stick in the users’ mind. 

• Reach: retargeting ads have great reach, since they allow you to get to almost every user that accepted cookies. This channel allows you to reach people practically anywhere on the internet after they have visited your site only one time. 

Integrating multi-Channel marketing strategies

It can take up to twenty impressions across multiple marketing channels to convince a potential customer to take action. Keep in mind that people are usually not ready to make the purchase the first time they visit a web. Users need to see the message you are trying to convey multiple times before they actually begin paying attention and more so, before converting. You can greatly increase the possibility of that happening by consistent messaging across multiple channels with a well-though digital marketing strategy. 

It’s predicted that people will likely interact with at least two marketing channels out of the many offered. Platforms such as Frizbit ensure that you’re consistent with the information you send across all marketing channels in order to create a great experience for your customers. 

Start marketing your brand with a  multi-channel marketing strategy by signing up for a Frizbit demo! 

Meanwhile you can also read, 

• Cart Abandonment Recovery Strategies for E-commerce – Recover Lost Sales
• The Future of Digital Marketing Without 3rd Party Cookies
• Are Web Push Notifications GDPR Compliant?