Black Friday cart abandonment campaign

Black Friday weekend is by far the most important time of the year for e-commerce businesses. In 2018, Cyber Monday generated the most online sales in e-commerce history and if the trend continues it will be even bigger this year!

This also makes the Black Friday weekend the most competitive time of year for e-commerce stores

In this article, we’ll show you how to plan and execute an amazing Black Friday campaign using your Carts Guru platform to create the first out of two key campaigns: the cart abandonment. You can find the second key campaign here: the order confirmation.

Black Friday Cart Abandonment Campaign

To begin, here's a checklist of what you need to run a successful Black Friday abandoned cart campaign:

• 1 Facebook Messenger template
• 1 SMS template
• 1 Email template
• 1 dynamic list with all contacts
• 1 Action trigger campaign

To create your Black Friday cart abandonment campaign, follow these steps:

Step 1

One of the most disappointing things for your online store is high levels of cart abandonment, especially during this time. To combat this, the first thing you’ll need to do when planning for Black Friday is to create a cart abandonment campaign.

If someone abandons a cart in your store during Black Friday weekend, the first action is to send them a Facebook message. To create it, head to ‘templates’ in your Carts Guru app.

This Facebook message should include:

• An opening message that lets the customer know what item(s) they left in their cart
• A products section showing the product that they abandoned and a ‘return to checkout’ button.
• A recommended product, based on their browsing history or to complement the item they abandoned in their cart. Carts Guru uses an algorithm to select the perfect recommended product, automatically!

Step 2

The next message to send is an SMS. Head to the ‘templates’ section in your Carts Guru app and create a new SMS template.The SMS itself should be short and sweet, saying something like:

“Hey <customerfirstname>! You left this item in your cart <recovercartURL>! Complete the purchase quickly as it’s Black Friday and things are selling out quickly!”

Step 3

Finally, you’ll need to create an email template.

You should drag-and-drop the following sections onto your template:

• An initial text box, explaining that the customer left an item in their cart. Use the fact that it’s Black Friday weekend to add a sense of urgency to the message, letting the customer know that the item they wanted may sell out soon!
• A call to action (CTA) button, so that in one click your customers are returned straight to the cart they abandoned.
• A recommended products section, which includes three products selected automatically by Carts Guru. We do this with help from an algorithm, which takes into account each customer’s browsing and purchasing history.
• A ‘follow us on social media’ section with linked icons to direct customers to each of your social media sites.

Step 4

The final step is to design the workflow. First, you need to configure the campaign on your Carts Guru app.

Head to the ‘campaigns’ page and create a campaign. The campaign type should be ‘action trigger’, as you want the campaign to kick off when a user commits an action (in this case, abandoning a cart).

Set the start date as the Black Friday date (in this case, 28th November 2019 at 12:00 AM) and the end date as the Cyber Monday date (in this case, 2nd December 2019 at 11:59 PM). In the re-enroll contact section, choose "after 1 day".

You also need to select your campaign goal. Select ‘conversion’ and choose your audience, which should be a list with all your contacts.

Once your campaign is configured, switch to the ‘workflows’ tab and start designing your workflow:

• First, click the ‘start’ block, then select ‘action’ and ‘Facebook Messenger’. In the pop-up window on the right, choose the Black Friday template you created earlier.
• From the Facebook Message select ‘continue’, then input a time delay of one hour.
• The next action to select is an SMS that includes the Black Friday abandoned cart SMS template.
• From the SMS block click ‘success’, then add a ‘trigger’. This ‘trigger’ should be ‘last action was clicked within 1 days’.
• If the trigger is true it means the contact has opened your cart abandonment message but hasn't converted. If the trigger is false it means that the contact opened the SMS but did not click and therefore did not convert.
• So, from the false branch, you can add another action as a last incentive to recover the abandoned cart. This time, select the Black Friday email template you created earlier.
• Now head back to the SMS block from before and this time click ‘failed’. This means that the SMS has failed to be delivered. So, from this failed branch you can add another action as the same abandoned cart email template used in the past step.

And that’s it! Your Black Friday abandoned cart campaign is ready to launch!

Now let’s move onto creating a Black Friday Order Confirmation campaign.