Tips & Tricks: Send Price Drop Emails & Clear Out Last Season's Stock

Date Sent: February 9th, 2021

Hi there,

Though it may still seem like the new year started just yesterday, we are nearly halfway through the first quarter of 2021. Spring is practically around the corner, and with a new season comes new collections, promotions, and clearance sales to sell the surplus stock of products from the previous season. Due to a higher number of returns from the 2020 holiday, surplus stock of winter and holiday seasonal products is likely to be much higher this year. An estimated $330B of online purchases, or 30% of all purchases made, have been returned globally as a result of the 2020 holiday eCommerce spike1.

Help your team clear out any surplus stock of winter and holiday 2020 items by deploying a Price Drop Triggered Email campaign - DY's newest Triggered Email feature. Leverage our use case example to automatically notify customers once a product they've engaged with from the winter seasonal collection has dropped in price.

Campaign Setup Overview

Create a new Price Drop campaign so that if customers add products from the holiday/winter 2020 collections to their cart but do not purchase those products, they will be notified when those items are reduced in price by, say, 15% or more. Start by creating a new Price Drop campaign and define the campaign-level settings for the Trigger, the Schedule, and Frequency Capping.

The Trigger

The Trigger of a Price Drop email campaign has (4) key elements: 1.) product details, 2.) minimum drop in price threshold, 3.) user-product engagement, and 4.) "did not purchase" timeframe:

1.) Product Details - If your team has not done so already, incorporate a Category or Keyword(s) to the Product Feed to denote seasonal products specifically for the most recent winter/holiday products and collections. Then, when setting up your Price Drop email campaign, apply the Trigger condition for "product with property," and select the product property(s) that best corresponds with the seasonally-specific characteristics of the product feed. For example, if your product feed uses terms in the Keywords column such as Winter2020, the product details setting for your trigger could look similar to this:

Note: Consider adding a +and condition to your Trigger to only notify users of a Price Drop for in stock products.

2.) Minimum Drop in Price Threshold - In the numeric value field, enter in the value of "15" and then select the option of "%" for the minimum threshold measurement. If a user interacted with a product relevant to this campaign that drops in price by 15% of more, they will receive a Price Drop email from this campaign. 

3.) User-Product Engagement - Select "add to cart" for the type of engagement or interaction that customers will need to have had with a product from the relevant seasonal collection in order to receive this Price Drop email notification.

4.) "Did Not Purchase" Timeframe - For this last setting, select to only send the Price Drop email to users that did not purchase an item relevant to this campaign in the last "30 days." This setting serves a similar purpose as the Cancel Send setting for other types of Triggered Email campaigns that your team can deploy.

Schedule & Frequency Capping

For the Schedule setting, you can define whether the emails from your Price Drop campaign may be sent out "any weekday" (i.e., Monday-Friday), or on "any day" if you'd like the system to be able to send out relevant notifications from this campaign on Saturdays and/or Sundays. You can also specify the time of day after which emails from the campaign should be sent out. For this use case example, choose to send the email on "any day" and select the time of day that you'd prefer. Finally, for the Frequency Capping setting, we suggest that you select sending "Up to 1 email per 1 week(s)."

After you define the settings for the trigger, schedule, and frequency capping, your campaign-level settings should look similar to this:

Experience Targeting & Variations

After you've finished defining the campaign-level settings, create Experiences and add Variations to your campaign. Use the Targeting tab within each Experience to define Audiences you'd like to target. For instance, you could choose to target an Experience from your Price Drop campaign to only send the email notification(s) to customers that belong to an Audience of users that have not purchased items from the relevant seasonal collection within the past 3 months. 

Once you've defined any relevant Targeting conditions, add Variations to the Experiences of the campaign. You can either write your own code from scratch for the Variation design template, or choose an out of the box template to structure the Variation design. Use relevant messaging for the text elements of your Variations so that users understand the purpose of the Price Drop email. As a best practice, consider adding a Recommendation widget within the email to recommend other items in the email body that are relevant to the item that triggered the Price Drop email.

1"SalesForce Reveals 2020 Was the Biggest Holiday Season Ever for Digital Sales, Up 50% Year-over-Year to $1.1 Trillion Globally," SalesForce, January 2021

Until next time,
Ashley

Ashley Berman
Sr. Customer Education Manager