Many of the major promotions that you will offer on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (November 30^th) have undoubtedly been planned for some time, with the events just several months away. Now, it’s all about refinement—learning lessons from the previous year, ensuring systems and processes are able to cope during and after, safeguarding the right levels of stock to meet expected demand, and finalizing the marketing effort in readiness to attract and drive visitors to the site.

You may think that now is not the ideal time to be throwing new ideas in to the mix, but it really is. In fact, there are several Black Friday content marketing tactics that are relatively simple to deploy that could make a huge difference in how you feel on the first day of December when you look at the figures.

Counting Down in Real-Time

One technique that worked extremely well for retailers last year (in the run-up to and during flash-sales) was the use of real-time countdown timers, both on the website and in email messages.

Because these timers can be embedded in an email it means that whenever it is opened or reopened it displays, in real time, the amount of time left until the beginning or end of the event. This can be especially useful given that Black Friday and Cyber Monday fall on working days of the week for most people.  For example, sending an email at 11 AM with a one-hour countdown to a lunchtime promotion, or at 4 PM before rush hour, can be a great way to entice visitors to the website, especially if it’s accompanied by other fresh and relevant content.

A Customer Queue is a Sales Opportunity

Another popular occurrence last year was the implementation of queuing systems in an attempt control the flow of traffic to the site. Of course, it also works to create a sense of urgency in the mind of the visitor. If you have been queued for 15 minutes, you may have a higher predisposition to making a purchase, as well as making a quicker decision. After all, you don’t want to miss out, or go through the queuing process again, for that matter. One ‘trick’ that retailers using these systems miss out on is using this time when you have a captive audience to push information and sell to them.

This isn’t a new idea, but implementing it in this way is.  Organizations have been using this technique for many years to engage with telephone customers waiting on hold. Using the same technique online makes perfect sense. While they are waiting, present information to them that will not only pass the time, but also provide valuable information based on their personal preferences, popular items others are buying, new product lines, or stock updates to further entice or avoid disappointment. The list is exhaustive.

Don’t Forget Cart Abandonment

As I said earlier, a one-day sale on a work day can present a challenge for would-be customers.  Queuing to get access to the store and browsing can leave little room for getting through the checkout before the end of the lunch break. Cart abandonment rates are expected to be higher on these two days due to the increased traffic. So, it stands to reason that if you can get your cart abandonment strategy right, the recovered sales will also be greater.

The ideal email will arrive within the hour of abandonment and will display the content of the basket (product images work better than plain text), availability information (or alternatives if out-of-stock), a countdown timer to meet a specific delivery date, and a link directly to the checkout that circumvents or places the customer at the front of the queue.

All of this can be realistically implemented, tested and perfected well in advance of November 27^th. It is looking to be the biggest day of online spending we have ever seen, and one of the hardest fought.  Giving yourself even the smallest competitive edge could reap some of the biggest rewards.

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The post 3 Black Friday Content Marketing Tactics You Still Have Time to Implement appeared first on Relevance.

E-tailers, marketers and e-commerce professionals have long debated whether recovery incentives actually work. So, we were very interested when a client came to us who had employed cart recovery services from another provider. Part of their strategy included a 15 percent coupon in their recovery email. The campaign produced a lot of recoveries and generated a massive 26.2 percent sales uplift. Surely it was the coupon generating loads of extra sales, right?

With permission, we let the existing program run for several weeks to get a baseline (the “15% Incentive” line in the chart below). Then we removed the coupon and continued for a further period (the “No incentive” line). The sales uplift immediately plummeted from 26.2 percent to 6.4 percent. Had we made a horrific mistake? Well, here’s what happened:

The most obvious insight is that the recovery numbers were all much bigger originally. The sales uplift and recovered rate were both boosted by the 15 percent incentive, so they fell to six and four percent respectively when we removed it.

Interestingly, the value purchased hardly changed. It increased from $79,620 to $80,184 – a difference of just $564. Customers were still buying at the same rate.

Clearly, when we stopped the incentive, a lot of people were buying through the normal checkout process instead of getting diverted into abandonment recovery. This shows in two numbers:

• Immediate Purchase Rate (Purchased Value / Carted Value), which rose by 10 percent when we stopped the incentive
• Percent Abandoned (Number of Carts Abandoned / Number Carted), which fell by about 9 percent

Even better, our client had been allocating about $3,000 per month to the incentive, without increasing the value of sales at all.

What was happening? Here’s our theory:

• Price was never much of an issue with our client’s shoppers. But nobody likes to pay more than they have to, so when our client put a 15 percent coupon on the cart abandonment email, they changed the behavior of a lot of people. Shoppers who would have bought immediately were diverted (“cannibalized” in marketing jargon) into becoming delayed buyers.
• Instead of just putting products in the cart and buying, these shoppers left, waited until they got a cart abandonment email, then returned to the site and copied the coupon from the email – a much more complicated process!
• It’s well known that simplifying the checkout process improves sales (here are some great tips), so complicating it will reduce sales.
• Essentially, some of the would-be savers tried to save 15 percent, found it was all too much trouble, and dropped out. Maybe the recovery email went to the spam folder, or maybe the coupons expired before they got around to using them and they left in a huff. The precise reason doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the added complexity seems to have significantly reduced sales, cancelling out any beneficial effect from the offer.

The take away is to be careful with incentives. Whenever you introduce a powerful reason to buy in a particular way, some of your clients will switch to it. But if your new way is complicated, some of those clients will drop out, and you may actually lose some sales in the end.

The post Cart Abandonment Incentives: More Hindrance Than Help? appeared first on Relevance.