Tips & Tricks: Pro Techniques to Revamp Recommendations for Black Friday

Date Sent: October 4th, 2021

Hi there,

Now that October is officially here, many eCommerce teams have shifted their focus to strategic plans for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As your team lays the groundwork for merchandising and site personalization during the Black Friday weekend, help them to identify ideal enhancements for Recommendations with our pro techniques. In collaboration with Yonatan Ido, one of DY's talented Sr. Customer Success Managers, these tips will provide you with techniques for driving optimal results and enriching end-user engagement with Recommendations.

#1: Leverage User Affinity Instead of Popularity for Sale Items

Each algorithm that can be defined for a Recommendation Strategy has a different approach to calculating the most optimal products to serve. Personalized for each individual user, the User Affinity algorithm scores items based on a user's interactions with them, and it also takes item popularity into account as part of its calculation. When serving users with a widget that leverages Affinity, the algorithm essentially recommends items that best match the user's preferences and that are popular across the site. Since popularity is included as part of the Affinity calculation, users will have a higher chance of finding products that are both relevant to them and that are likely popular among other site visitors. 

When to Use: Try leveraging User Affinity anywhere on your site that you would typically leverage the Popularity algorithm for Black Friday recommendations. If there is not enough data on a given user for DY to establish an affinity profile, such as a new user, the system will serve Popularity as the fallback algorithm. Affinity could be particularly useful to run on the Homepage, Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale Category pages, and sale PDPs:

#2. Serve Bouncy Traffic with Recommendations in an Exit Intent Overlay 

During Black Friday weekend, many users will be using shopping comparison sites and search engines to find the best deals possible. Users that find their way to your site from shopping comparison sites and/or from traffic sources such as Search, Paid Search or Referral traffic tend to bounce quickly if the product that they land on doesn't meet their purchasing needs. Keep those users on your site longer and help them find products that could fit their needs by serving an Overlay with Recommendations that is triggered by exit intent.

When to Use: Target an Experience of the Overlay campaign to users from Search, Paid Search, or Referral traffic. For users that trigger the Overlay on a PDP, consider using the Similarity algorithm or the Viewed with Recently Viewed algorithm. As part of the messaging for the Overlay campaign, consider including any additional discount codes or relevant promo details to entice the user to continue browsing on the site:

#3. Show Recently Viewed Recommendations for Easy Navigation

During seasonal or promotional sales such as Black Friday/Cyber Monday, users may view many products from several different categories. Help users keep track of products that they've viewed and may still be interested in purchasing by serving a Strategy that leverages the Recently Viewed algorithm. Showing Recently Viewed items will allow users to more easily navigate back to products that they've recently engaged with, enabling them to more conveniently revisit those products and add them to cart.

When to Use: Leverage Recently Viewed with widgets on any page that users may frequently visit during Black Friday weekend, such as the Homepage, Category pages, PDPs, empty cart pages, "no results" search pages, and so on. Consider adding these widgets further down on the page near the footer, and use targeting conditions to ensure that users have viewed enough PDPs to fill the number of item slots of any Recommendation template you choose to use:

Until next time,
Ashley

Ashley Berman
Sr. Customer Education Manager