Is your marketing strategy ready to seize as much of the holiday revenue pie as possible — while also driving future conversion and retention? Download our Holiday Marketing Playbook to find mission critical tactics and strategies to drive success during primary shopping days and essential program components for turning newly acquired customers into retained customers!

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With Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the rear-view mirror, retailers are enjoying another record breaking year of Cyber Monday sales, totalling $3 billion, and total weekend sales of $11 billion. But before you hang up your holiday marketing hat, remember that there is still plenty of revenue up for grabs before the New Year.

The rest of the holiday season offers a tremendous opportunity to convert newly acquired Cyber Weekend browsers who never took the purchase plunge. Most online retailers likely acquired thousands of new shoppers this season, but without taking the proper steps to convert and retain them, many of those could-be customers will be lost.

To help you make the rest of the holiday season count, our marketing experts have put together six proven effective tactics for conversion activation (that also work well beyond the first purchase).

1. Deliver Abandonment Streams

Rather than relying on retargeting or a single email, deploy a messaging stream that includes multiple touches for each consumer at the point of abandonment.

Browsing, searching or abandoning a cart each show differing levels of intent and your messaging streams should be customized and optimized to convert consumers based on this specific behavior.

During the holiday season, keep discounts up front, but make sure to update these streams by testing when and where to deploy a discount (and test what kind of discount!)

2. Target Customers with Highest Purchase Propensity

If you have access to predictive analytics like Sailthru Sightlines, you can easily identify the holiday browsers with the highest propensity to actually purchase, as well as the ones who are most likely to opt-out.

This gives you the ability to create a segment for and target those “on the cusp” customers who have the potential to become loyal ones, and consider communicating less with those you’re likely to lose forever.

For customers who did or didn’t purchase over the weekend (you could test both), have a high propensity to buy, but low propensity in opening an email in the next 7 days, consider targeting them via Facebook Custom Audiences. Further, for customers with high propensity to buy, and medium to high propensity to open an email, target them in email with special messaging and incentives since they are likely to engage with this channel.

This ensures you’re not targeting consumers with no intent to buy, and only messaging to those who actually want to hear from you.

3. Extend Discounts

If your margin allows, extend discounts for this specific user segment and let them know that it’s an offer “exclusively for them.”

This will increase likelihood of conversion in the days leading up to the end of the holiday shopping season. For those retailers who can automate personalization, ensure that you take recent browsing behaviors and interests as well as acquisition source data to personalize your discount messages with creative and content that is relevant for each user.

When using this tactic, always add an expiration date to increase urgency.

4. Highlight Most Popular Products

Late-in-season gift buyers rely on “hot buys” to make quick decisions. By bringing the products that have sold the most to the front of your newsletters and onsite experience, even going so far as to brand them as Hot Holiday Buys, will draw attention and can increase conversion.

Again, use urgency as a tactic by clearly marking remaining inventory.

5. Showcase New Inventory

Have new items ready to go? Restocked on hot sellers? Make this message clear across email, website and app and take it a step further to target users who have specifically shown interest in similar products.

Consider sizes, colors, price points and other interest-based data that will allow you to entice consumers with something that fits one of their specific gift-giving needs.

6. Don’t Just Use Urgency – Scream Urgency

It may sound like I’m just repeating myself, but urgency is key for conversion during the holiday season. From shipping cut-off days to low inventory alerts, urgency drives consumers to buy. Rather than broad, blanket messages, like “Only 5 Days Left!” work to make your messages unique.

“Only 24 Hours Left to Save XX% on XYZ Brand!” is a base message that you can use to personalize at scale. Offer incentives based on predicted behaviors and feature brands based on previous browsing data.

This form of urgency will cut through the clutter of all other brands working to convert.

How to Handle the Post-Holidays

Let’s face it, regardless of the tactics you deploy, there will still be a good portion of browsers and subscribers that did not convert, and that’s normal! When the dust settles, every brand should consider digging into their data and finding all of their non-buyers to find out what went wrong.

Many brands use “non-buyer surveys” to find out what they missed: Were discounts not a bargain compared to other brands? Was the inventory not what they were expecting? Did items they wanted sell out too fast?

This type of feedback isn’t just useful for going into the next holiday season, it’s valuable intel that can be used for your future testing strategies.

Want to learn more about increasing purchase conversion? Download our free ebook now.

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–Marielle Habbel, Sr. Manager of Analytics and Optimization