How to prep your testing & personalization campaigns for the holiday shopping season

This post is for current Monetate customers or curious wanna-be Monetate customers. We’ll cover some highlights from the recently released Holiday Prep Guide, which is all about getting your Monetate personalization campaigns ready for the holiday rush.

Create custom user segments.

Create custom user segments. Do your personalization campaigns tend to target the same audiences again and again? Create a custom user segment so you can quickly and easily create experiences for the same audiences.

Some example segments: customers within close vicinity to nearby retail stores, recent cart abandoners, or shoppers who have a specific category affinity.

For more examples of effective customer segments this holiday season, check out this recent blog post: 5 ways to create segments that convert this holiday season.

Use the holiday shopping calendar to your advantage.

Shoppers need and expect different things from the online shopping experience in early November than they need on December 12.

Create relevant, helpful, and time-saving messages for the following marketing holidays:

• Black Friday (Nov. 27)
• Cyber Monday (Nov. 30)
• Green Monday (Dec. 14)
• Free Shipping Day (Dec. 18)

Plan for promotions by setting up and testing experiences in advance. Include shipping or service deadlines, including when stores have extended hours (i.e. “Last Day For…”).

Create a backup plan and check it twice.

• Use Monetate to quickly change out promotions on the fly via ContentBuilder and ActionBuilder
• Popular holiday gifts out of stock? Highlight similar products or inform customers when the product will be back in stock
• Test everything in advance

Bring offline data online.

Expand your targeting options within Monetate by creating datasets from your offline customer data. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Show high-value and VIP customers exclusive events and special promotions
• Offer loyalty program members shipping discounts
• Capture customer preferences from phone orders or purchases made at physical locations to provide relevant content during a later visit to your site

For more ideas about how to personalize your website using your customer data, join our upcoming webinar.

Put a badge on it.

Reinforce the message that now is the time to buy by highlighting promotions, order deadlines, or hot selling items with a badge. You can even create helpful per-item badges that indicate shipping deadlines to make it super-easy to shop on a deadline.

That’s all, for now…

Stay tuned to the blog (or better yet—sign up for our weekly blog email newsletter!) for more holiday shopping hints, advice, and predictions.

Then download these free holiday resources.