How to create a visit session ended campaign for Christmas

So, you’ve sent out your Pre-Christmas campaigns and your customers are all excited to get their Christmas shopping done on your site - what next? Now is the time to switch your focus to converting interest into sales.

There are two key campaigns you need to be running during Christmas:

1. A visit-session ended campaign - to bring back customers who browsed on your site but didn’t make a purchase
2. A payment failed campaign - to ensure you don’t lose any customers during this final hurdle

These campaigns will both run during the entire Christmas shopping period, so we’ll have them starting on the 9th of December and running until Christmas day.

So let’s get to it! The first campaign we’ll show you how to build is a Visit-Session Ended campaign. To find out more about the Payment failed campaign, click here.

Visit Session Ended Campaign

During the Christmas period, customers often browse many sites before selecting a product they want to purchase. By sending a ‘visit session ended’ campaign you’ll keep your brand in front of their mind and be more memorable than the competition.

A ‘visit session ended’ campaign should be sent to every customer who leaves your site without making a purchase and should remind customers of the product they looked at while also recommending similar or complementary products. You will send this campaign a list of all your contacts that you will create before you build the campaign.

Step 1:

The first thing you need to create is an email template to send to everyone who leaves your site without making a purchase. Note that a visit session ended campaign has a sense of urgency and needs to be sent as soon as the session ends to make sure your customer doesn’t forget your brand.

This email should include:

• A text box saying something like ‘hey <contactfirstname>, you left us so soon! Christmas is coming up fast so you’d better finish your purchase before time runs out!’
• A recommended products section. This will be based on what the customer was just browsing and will include both similar and complementary products.
• A shop now button to bring the customer right back to your site
• A ‘follow us on social media’ section

Step 2:

Next, create an SMS template. This aim of this SMS will also be to bring customers who browsed your site back to your store to complete a purchase. This SMS should include:

• A <siteURL> tag
• A <contactfirstname> tag
• Text telling the customer to return to your store quickly and finish their Christmas shopping

Step 3:

Now that you’ve created your two templates, head to the campaign page and fill in the following:

• Name the campaign
• Set the campaign goal as conversion and select stop the campaign when the goal is reached
• Select Action Trigger - as the campaign will begin when the customer performs the action of leaving your site without a purchase
• Input December 9th as the start date and 25th December as the end date
• Select visit session ended as your action
• Choose to never re-enroll contact so that you don’t send the one customer numerous visit session ended messages as they browse during the Christmas period

Step 4:

Now switch from ‘configure’ to ‘workflow’ and start building your customer journey! First, click the start block then follow these steps:

• Insert a condition to ensure that you don’t send your campaign to customers who made a purchase and then exited the site. This condition should be: last made purchase is older than 2 days
• Click true from this condition (to segment customers who haven’t made a purchase in the last two days), then select action and find the email template you created earlier
• From the email, select failure, then find the SMS template to be sent to those who didn’t receive an email.
• Now go back to the email, select success, and insert a trigger. Make the trigger here ‘last action opened within 1 day’.
• From this trigger select false to segment the audience members who received but didn’t read the initial email. Now select ‘action’ and input the same SMS template as before.

And that’s it! Your Visit Session Ended campaign is ready to send!