While the holiday season, and all of the sales the come along with it, are in the rearview, that doesn’t mean your e-commerce business needs to feel the freeze. From shopping rewards to determining new products, we cover six things you should be doing during the winter to ensure you keep that momentum going and how Samba can help you do it.

Reward your Holiday Customers

Now is the perfect time to engage with all those holiday shoppers, rewarding them for their purchase and getting them to shop again. Remember, out of all of the businesses out there, they chose you and those rewards work both ways.

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One easy, cost-controlled reward is to offer them free delivery for their next purchase or even for a certain period of time. Using Samba’s filter, Recently Purchased Products, you can identify an entire audience and then execute a campaign all automatically. You can also use more specific filtering on top of that, like those based on a particular product category or a minimum purchase amount. How creative you can get with your campaigns is entirely up to you.

You Simply Cannot Lose These Customers 

Have you tried Samba’s RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary) segmentation? With it, your customers are broken down into 11 different categories based on those 3 factors and you can work with each group independently. For instance, based on your data Samba knows which customers you can't lose. We call this the “Cannot lose them” segment and these customers shop often and have spent a lot, but they haven’t purchased anything for a while. 

Like the “At risk” segment, these are the customers you don’t want to lose to a competitor because of how valuable (i.e. high CLV) they are. So what can you do to help keep them around? 
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• Offer them discounted products
• Try to identify and introduce new products based on what they’ve purchased before or shown an interest in
• Execute custom campaigns on a regular basis, complete with new products and utilizing an omnichannel approach via a variety of channels (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, SMS, advertisement network, push notifications, etc.)
• Introduce them to the more premium aspects of your business, which may include a VIP club, exclusive prices, and/or additional services
• Create special offers that are just for them and communicate that fact accordingly
• If they’ve been reactivated successfully, work at making them “Champions” again

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In Samba, you can easily prepare a campaign for them using our flow campaigns. 

Here’s an example of a “Cannot lose them” flow campaign:

Work with your Best Customers

Do you know what’s a profitable new year's resolution? Acknowledging and rewarding your best, most profitable customers! Using Samba’s customer filters and flow campaigns, you actually have a few ways of going about this. 

A great place to start is with the customer filter, Spending (Last 365 days), and setting it to “More than or equal” to an amount you feel is appropriate. Remember, Samba will show you how many customers are filtered out, meaning you can always alter the value if you want to target more people. 

Going a step further, you can add more filters on top of that, including Recently Purchased Products, adding a category you want to specifically target or that's important to your business, and build the campaign around that. This is a great way to potentially Introduce new, upcoming products within that category and start building up some excitement.

What’s Coming Around the Corner?

It’s a new year! That means a fresh start with fresh and new products for your customers to get excited about. So why not let them know about those new products or potentially that entirely new line or category of products launching in 2020?

For example, if you sell pet foods, we bet you have a host of new toys, treats, or food flavors on the horizon. Why not let your customers know that a new flavor of their pet’s beloved treat or food is just about to launch? Or better yet, a new brand of food, which is healthier and more nutritious, can provide you with an ideal upselling opportunity. Best of all, Samba makes it easy to identify and communicate with them.

Since we’re upselling to a higher-priced brand, we want to find customers who paid at least a certain amount and purchased within our targeted category:

Once those parameters are set, continue onto your email template editor and add new products to the email.

Select which new products you want to include:

Time for a Winter Sale!

It’s natural that after the rush of December that there may be some products that need to move out of your inventory. That's why this is the perfect time for a winter sale and Samba can help you not only set it up, but do so in optimal fashion. There are two ways you can go about it:

1. Manually apply a discount to your prices within your product data feed
2. Prepare a discount coupon, which will provide a blanket discount or only on certain products 
   

If you’re choosing the first option, after you prepare your discounts, you can filter these products out by using the Sale (%) product filter, as shown below.

Using that, you can prepare campaigns that feature these discounted items, complete with custom visuals and communications and, of course, Samba’s advanced personalization capabilities, which will show each customer those products that are most relevant.

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What About the Other Winter Holiday Season?

According to the National Retail Federation, in 2018 US shoppers spent almost $20 billion for Valentine’s Day. That’s a lot of flowers and chocolate! 

Jokes aside, Valentine’s Day isn't just about those “traditional” purchases and represents an amazing sales opportunity no matter your business. The only thing required is a bit of creativity. 

With that in mind, here are some ideas that go beyond those traditional Valentine’s Day strategies and will help you get a little love come February 14th:

• Whether you sell pet products or not, your customers will want to express their love for their special little loved one(s) and you’ll want to focus on fulfilling that need either through product selection or marketing, crafting a communication about the love of pets. 
• If you don’t feel you can truly offer Valentine’s Day products, how about meeting the needs of your Galentine’s Day shoppers, who may be looking for a good excuse to splurge for themselves or their friends.
• Don’t forget that sometimes the best Valentine's gift is the one you give yourself. Make sure you consider utilizing communications and personalized offers that target single people, using messages of humor, empowerment, and/or being indulgent.
• What worked last year? Look at your trends from around the previous Valentine’s Day and create offers around what were your more popular products and/or categories.
• If all else fails, show your love for your customers with a limited-time coupon and or special offer (free shipping never fails).