Tips & Tricks: Email Campaigns to Make Your Customer's Inboxes Merry & Bright

Date Sent: October 20th, 2020

Hi there,

As we inch closer to the holidays, email communication plans for this year's holiday shopping season are becoming increasingly paramount for most marketing teams. With 60% of consumers stating that they've made purchases as a result of a marketing email that they've received1, it is clear that an effective email marketing strategy can be powerfully impactful for driving users back to the site.

This holiday, many shoppers will be moving away from purchasing experiences and buying more traditional, tangible gifts instead2. Guide users back to your site as they shop for gifts for their loved ones (and gifts for themselves) by personalizing the content that you send to them via-email with Dynamic Yield's Email capabilities.

Dynamic Content Email Campaign: Gift Guide Banners

If your team is adding a holiday shopping gift guide or gift-specific category pages to the site this season, promote this addition to the site in your marketing emails with a Dynamic Content Email campaign. Not only will this banner image ensure that users are aware of your site's gift-specific offerings, but it will also be a convenient inclusion for any of the marketing email communications that are sent out to users, regardless if those users have been identified within DY.

Campaign Setup Overview

Create a Dynamic Content Email campaign and leverage a holiday-specific banner image for the campaign's Default experience. Note: Dynamic Content Email campaigns will always have a Default experience that will be served to users that have not yet been identified by DY. Apply the URL link for the gift guide page or the main gift-specific category page of your site for each variation of the Default experience. Users that have not yet been identified by DY, or that do not meet the conditions to belong to one of the audiences that your other experiences of the campaign may be targeting, will be served with this Default experience.

Once you've finished creating the Default experience, you'll be able to create additional experiences to target to specific audiences. For example, if you have an audience of users that have browsed for and/or purchased products from the category for Women and you have a gift-specific subcategory page for "Gifts for Her," you could target your "Womens Browse & Buy" audience with an experience that has a banner similar to this:

Another idea could be to target based on brand purchase history. For instance, if your DY personalization plan constitutes audience segments of users that have previously purchased products from specific brands, you could create experiences with banner images that promote those brands and that will link users to a brand-specific category page when they click on the banner in the email. You could also target based on "bargain browsing behaviors." For example, if you have an audience of users that typically only browse or purchase from the Sale category of your site, you could create an experience targeted to that group of users with a banner that promotes seasonal sale items and links users to a holiday sale category page.

After creating as many audience-targeted experiences as you see fit, publish the Dynamic Content Email campaign and copy the code snippet that will pop up within the DY admin. Then, paste the code snippet into an email template within your ESP.

Email Recommendations Campaign: "Gifts to Give (& Get for Yourself)" Widget 

Including product recommendations in marketing emails can have a major impact on ROI. In fact, personalized product recommendations can lead to an increase in sales conversions of 30%, and boost CTR by 35%3. Impact conversion rates during the holidays by adding a recommendation widget to your marketing emails that promotes gifts to users that they could get for their loved ones, or even purchase for themselves.

Campaign Setup Overview

Create an Email Recommendation widget template that has a variable for title text and a variable for the background color of that title text. Then, create a new Email Recommendation widget campaign with the following configurations:

• Select the widget template that you created and then select Popularity for the Recommendation Strategy.

• If your product feed includes a category or keyword(s) for "Gifts," or if your team is planning to promote any specific items or brands for the holidays, add a Custom Filter Rule to ensure that the widget serves those items that will be relevant to holiday shoppers.

• You could also define additional Custom Filter Rules for audience targeting depending on your team's personalization goals. For example, if your team has built an audience for return customers that regularly purchase higher-priced items, you could add a Custom Filter to target items of a specific dollar value range to users that belong to that audience.

After you've saved the Email Recommendation widget and embedded the code snippet into your ESP, the widget will look similar to this:

Triggered Email Campaign: Cart Abandonment Email for In-Cart Gift Items

Most consumers have had the experience of browsing a site for the ideal gift to buy someone for the holidays, finding a product that they've liked enough to add to cart, but ultimately leaving the site without purchasing. Sending users a cart abandonment email can be a handy approach for nudging them to convert, especially during the holidays. In fact, 21% of users will click on a cart abandonment email that they receive, and 10.7% of those emails lead to a shopping cart recovery4. Leverage Dynamic Yield to send a Cart Abandonment Triggered Email when a user adds a potential gift item to their cart and leaves the site without completing a purchase. 

Campaign Setup Overview

If your team has not done so already, incorporate a category or keywords to the product feed for your site's 2020 winter/holiday collection, gift-specific items, or any products that would be relevant to promote for holiday gift-giving. Then, add a new Cart Abandonment campaign with the following configurations:

• Apply the Trigger condition for "product with property," and select the product property(s) that best corresponds with the gift-related elements of the product feed. 

• For the Cancel Send setting, we recommend that you use the default settings of 'purchase' or 'new session started,' or you may override the default settings and define your own. 

• We recommend defining the Delay Send setting as "1 day" after products are added to cart. However, you have the option to specify the number of minutes, hours, or days that you'd like the system to wait to send the email after the 'Add to Cart' trigger event has occurred. 

• For the Frequency Capping setting, we suggest that you specify sending "Up to 1 email per 1 week(s)." This way, if users revisit the site throughout the week to add items to their cart and leave the site before purchasing as they're trying to decide if they want to follow through with placing an order, they won't be unintentionally bombarded with several emails about the items they've left in their cart.

• For the variations of the Triggered Email campaign, select the out-of-the-box "Cart Abandonment" template and use the design variables of the template to incorporate messaging for the Subject Line, Email Header, and Cart details applicable to the user leaving a potential gift in their cart. 

The Cart Abandonment Triggered Email that the user receives could look something like this:

1"10 Email Marketing Statistics You Need to Know," Constant Contact, September 2020

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

3"50+ Email Marketing Statistics for 2020," 99firms, 2020

4"34 Shocking Shopping Cart Abandonment Statistics," TrueList, March 2020

Until next time,
Ashley

Ashley Berman
Sr. Customer Education Manager