Booking.com flash sale, with the abandoned-cart fix nobody asked for
Flash sales work by trading attention for urgency. The original Booking.com brief was a single hero email with a countdown clock. Easy enough to design. Harder to make convert.
I built the hero, then pitched a second piece. An abandoned-cart follow-up that surfaced the trip the user had already saved, with a softer push and the same countdown. The case for it was simple. Half the value of any flash sale is recovery. Designing the promotional email without a recovery sequence leaves money on the table.
The full system: a mobile-responsive hero with a personalized greeting, server-generated countdown, single CTA. Then a follow-up email triggered on cart abandonment, lower urgency, higher specificity.
CTR on the flash hero image jumped 20% over previous sends.
Flash sales work by trading attention for urgency. The original Booking.com brief was a single hero email with a countdown clock. Easy enough to design. Harder to make convert.
I built the hero, then pitched a second piece. An abandoned-cart follow-up that surfaced the trip the user had already saved, with a softer push and the same countdown. The case for it was simple. Half the value of any flash sale is recovery. Designing the promotional email without a recovery sequence leaves money on the table.
The full system: a mobile-responsive hero with a personalized greeting, server-generated countdown, single CTA. Then a follow-up email triggered on cart abandonment, lower urgency, higher specificity.
CTR on the flash hero image jumped 20% over previous sends.
Abandoned cart email:
