New Year’s Resolutions: Turn Holiday Insights into Action in 2022

Now that the holidays are coming to a close and the biggest shopping holiday of the season is over, you might feel ready to close the book on this holiday season.

But the work (and the opportunity) isn’t over. You can take all of the learnings you received from shoppers this year and turn these insights into action (and revenue) in 2022.

On Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Bluecore analyzed data from 5.9 billion shopper events, across 153 retail brands to understand shopper behavior.

Here’s what we learned about shoppers from the data—along with three New Year’s resolutions to take into 2022.

1. Make your first-time holiday shoppers loyal customers.

On Black Friday, 52% of shoppers were first-time buyers. Get those new shoppers to a second purchase and beyond. With a post-purchase flow designed to help each new shopper find their next great find, you can boost lifetime value (to the tune of 898k for every 100,000 shoppers). Set up a post-purchase campaign to nurture those first-time buyers with personalized recommendations and offers tailored to their category, product and channel preference. Include the opportunity to continue to engage by rating the product they bought on Black Friday.

2. Make every shopper's view count.

Shoppers are viewing items in some cases, many times. Particularly for apparel, shoppers viewed nine products more than 18 times. When a shopper hits your site, don’t waste the moment. Create more opportunities for on-site discovery and exploration with intelligent pop-up modals that include recommendations based on category or markdown preferences— whether that be dresses, denim or 20% off. If a shopper abandons your site without converting, don’t worry too much; take advantage of that browsing behavior and send them a browse abandonment email with those recommendations. Finally, sweeten the deal with extra flexibility like BNPL and BOPIS.

69% of shoppers viewed a brand’s site and encountered a product that was out of stock then abandoned that brand. This emphasizes the importance of creating seamless site experiences not only for in-stock products, but also for out-of-stock products. When a shopper visits your site, enable on-site popup recommendations based on unique shopper preferences to place the product each shopper is most likely to buy right at their fingertips. Alternatively, feature an incentive (like a first-time purchase coupon, exclusive offer, loyalty offer) to keep the user browsing.

3. Create every opportunity for shoppers to identify themselves.

This year, 43% of shoppers who added a product to a cart went unidentified—losing you all of that critical information from shoppers who were so close to conversion. Identifying anonymous visitors allows you to tie together their onsite engagement to understand more about their interests, power predictive recommendations and nurture them into conversions. To improve identification, every brand needs email sign-ups and email capture. Make the opt-in a little more tempting by using a discount offer for email sign-ups, like an easy loyalty program sign-in. You should also ensure your technology is capturing phone numbers as identifiers so you can tie that identifier to a profile and understand shopper behavior.

With a few New Year’s Resolutions, you can start capturing more of your shoppers, showing them what they love, and bringing them back to your brand all year long.

Want to get more insights? Check out What We Learned from Black Friday Cyber Monday 2021 and What You Can Do With It.

This is a guest blog post by Julia Michaelis, Content Marketing Manager, Bluecore.