Tips & Tricks: Use Recommendations & Threshold Discounts to Increase AOV This Holiday Shopping Season

Date Sent: September 24th, 2020

Hi there,

The year of 2020 has led to an uncanny number of unprecedented circumstances for the eCommerce industry, and holiday shopping during Q4 will likely be no exception. Analysts are anticipating that holiday sales will begin earlier this year, with some retailers planning to roll out deals even before Halloween1. As your team is planning for upcoming seasonal offers and discounts, incentivize holiday shoppers and increase their Average Order Value (AOV) by offering a discount to users once they meet a specified in-cart dollar value threshold. 

Optimize your site's in-cart threshold discount offers this holiday season by leveraging our use case inspiration idea to serve a Recommendations Overlay to users as they shop to help them qualify for a holiday discount. Use a Recommendation Strategy for the widget within the Overlay to serve product recommendations to users that not only cost enough to get them closer to the discount threshold, but are also inexpensive enough to be considered a reasonable impulse purchase.

Add a Recommendation Strategy

Before you begin creating the Overlay Recommendations campaign, add a Recommendation Strategy that uses an algorithm like Popularity. Apply Custom Filters to the Strategy to ensure that the product recommendations that are served to users are within a reasonable price range to help them meet the threshold for the discount. For example, if the in-cart value threshold to qualify for a discount is $100, add Custom Filters to the Strategy so that the widget only displays items to users that are, say, at least $20 but are less than $50.

Set Up the Campaign

Once you have a relevant Recommendation Strategy in place, create an Overlay that will contain a Recommendation widget. Target the Overlay so that it is served to a user when they add an item to their cart on pages other than the cart page itself AND when the user has not already met the required minimum in-cart dollar value to receive the discount.

This use case will require using a Custom Evaluator as part of the targeting conditions to ensure that the campaign is served to users only when their in-cart value is below the necessary dollar threshold to qualify for the discount. Note: the setup for this campaign will work best for sites that do not automatically redirect users to the Cart Page when they click the Add to Cart button.

Start by creating an Overlay with the following campaign settings:

• Trigger - Define 2 Advanced Triggers:

1. Select Event, and then define the Event as Add to Cart
2. Ensure the Evaluator has enough time to load either by using Time on Page, with at least 3 sec. as the time interval or by using an alternative page load setting, such as External Component and defining that component as Dynamic Yield Data 

• Frequency - Define the Frequency as "Once per pageview"

Your campaign settings for the Overlay will look similar to this:

Define Targeting Conditions

Create an Experience targeted to the homepage, category pages, and product pages, and use a Custom Evaluator for the Cart Value to prevent serving the Overlay to users that have already reached the minimum in-cart threshold to qualify for the discount. Define the following Targeting Conditions for the Experience: 

• Page Types - Using the "Where?" condition dropdown, target the Experience to the homepage, category pages, and product pages
• Custom Evaluator - Add another "Where?" condition and select the Custom Evaluator for Cart Value. Select the operator for "is at most," and specify the numeric value corresponding to the minimum in-cart dollar value of the discount threshold.

Note: in order for DY to "evaluate" the Cart Value from one page to the next, the data for the Cart Value needs to exist on the client-side in either a data layer or in an element on the page so that the Evaluator can identify this value on the site.

Your Targeting Conditions for the Experience should look similar to this:

Variation Template & Recommendation Widget

For your Variation(s), consider using one of our out-of-the-box Overlay Recommendation templates that already contain a Recommendation widget, such as the "Top Bar Recommendations" template or the "Recommendation Message" template: 

After selecting the template for the Variation, define the variables for the design as needed for the look and feel of the Overlay and the widget. Include relevant messaging for the Overlay that tells the user that they are close to qualifying for the holiday discount.

1"From Black Friday to parking lot pop-ups: 5 ways holiday shopping will change," The Washington Post, August 2020

Until next time,
Ashley

Ashley Berman
Sr. Customer Education Manager